Sure, nobody knows the exact future. But you still plan for what's probably going to happen. I don't know if social security is going to be around when I retire, and all the experts are saying it's probably not going to be. So, I'm planning a retirement without. Similarly, all the experts are saying AI (<- that word is not "LLM") is probably going to improve. I personally think it's irrational to ignore experts.
They are doing that because they are entities without principles or ethics.
The solution is to create controls around them. Many, many controls.
The Sarbanes-Oxley era already solved this problem for untrustworthy humans. It's directly applicable. I created a concept I call MFIC ("Mechanically-Falsifiable Independent Control") to encapsulate this principle.
I know a local bar where there are 4 bartenders who have all been there over 25 years.
Recently I started asking them "How many pregnancies do you suppose you have caused throughout your career?". The most common response was to laugh but all of them also said "I know of a few at least".
> surprise, it’s generative AI. The ongoing devaluation of the work of artists and makers
Who themselves can use AI to make even more radical art with far less effort, but refuse to do so because of some kind of... I don't know, a mental block? Perhaps we need better AI-accelerated artist tooling instead of one-shot garbage.
> Every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years
Meanwhile, I feel more enabled than in my entire 35+ year career programming. But I also never got pushed into it, and don't have to deal with coworkers who use it badly because I'm solo currently. I do feel bad for people on teams for whom AI has caused much consternation.
> peer pressure is very real
Caving into peer pressure as a coder? Not something I have ever done, unfortunately. If you want to entirely reject AI assistance, then just own it and don't whine about it.
> even disregarding all the environmental
The environmental arguments are non-evidence-backed nonsense. Meanwhile, there's plenty of evidence that this whole idea comes from Chinese bot influence campaigns trying to politically polarize AI in the United States in order to slow us down so that they can surge ahead and economically win. And unfortunately, it's working. Case in point.
> It isn’t fun for me
I STILL don't understand this POV. Prior to AI, I had a massive backlog of ideas that I simply did not have the time or energy to work on. I now can, and have now built out a lot of those ideas (see my github). I'm chewing through that backlog like a chainsaw. Is all of the produced code perfect? No. Do I insist on lots more tests and controls to ensure it is as close to that as controls can get it? Yes. Has it yet to produce unfixable bugs? No.
> I use my interactive git branch switcher every single day
I love making those little tools too! And now I can make 10 of them in the time it used to take me to make 1 of them myself! Your tool is a neat idea! You still own that idea! And I can also rewrite it in Rust or Zig now with AI since I hate Go, and I don't think that's a bad thing!
> I’ve spent years learning how to make games, and it’s been hard, and now it feels like that might have been a waste of time
Your understanding and experience is not going away. In fact, it's needed to steer your AI accelerator.
> It also happens to be developed entirely without generative AI
That is a conscious choice made flying in the face of the evidence that it could have been built a lot faster with AI assistance and YOUR guidance. What's wrong with delivery speed, again?
> there are only really three paths open to me
This is a fallacy. Let's call it the false trichotomy fallacy. You have already resigned yourself to be unhappy about this since none of your options include "joy", so your brain automatically gathers evidence to support that belief... and you need to realize this, because it is dangerous. You now literally won't be able to perceive evidence TO ACTUALLY be happy about it- I call this "epistemic blindness", or we could just call it "doom framing". The key thing to understand is that you control the framing by choosing it, and that your chosen framings automatically and artificially limit your perceived options.
I can prove this to you- Think back to the first time you encountered AI work assistance. Was your feeling good, or bad? Has it ever switched? I'm going to guess that it started early and never switched. Why is that? Because you (or your brain, via its confirmation-bias-seeking) immediately decided to remember evidence supporting your initial feeling, and forget or ignore evidence against it!
But yes. If you must completely ignore AI to keep your sanity based on your own self-limited set of possible options (none of which result in happiness), then please, just go ahead and do so and just own it. Just don't whine about it, because that attitude (victimization via false self-perceived lack of agency and putting all blame on externalities) is toxic.
One side effect of extremely-accessible, high-quality English translation and, more importantly, English-grammar-and-idiosyncrasy-obeying AI, is that there will be more and more text that looks like this which comes from foreign, non-native-English countries.
Just FYI.
This will be especially true from non-English cultures where "avoiding shame" is high on the list of motivations.
Consider the upside, though: A much broader range of written perspectives written in high-quality, if slightly annoying, English.
I'm already seeing the benefit of this on X thanks to its autotranslation btw: I follow a few Chinese-language accounts now that I would have never been able to digest otherwise.
I am FAR more afraid of violent AI doomers and malevolent people powered by unaligned AI, than I am of violent (or even just extremely disruptive) AI. Remember Joseph from the movie "Contact"?
I still think that aligning AI is a fool's errand though.
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