Maybe. But man, is it blackpilling as an activity. Think about it: you're basically a sorcerer. You're trained in the arcane -- even to you -- art of conjuring spells. Nobody, even the savviest practicioners, know or can know how the words produce the magical effects. They just know the words that (probably) do.
It's medieval anti-enlightenment black magic. The genies are black box tangled confections of brute force computing power in reach of only nation states or megacorps, which also don't know how they work but try to weave them along their agendas.
Programming was supposed to be a conquest of reason over the darkness of ignorance, and this is the exact opposite. :D We're back to wizard whispering to spirits. "Prompt engineer" a circle of salt and a burnt white rabbit to invoke Eschmoûn for a good harvest.
I think it's cool I can understand an algorithm and what it does, but, once it becomes machine code, my understanding utterly ends. What's the CPU doing with it? Have I even delidded my CPU to make sure there's actually silicon in there and not pixie dust? Forget the computer; how does my own brain work? Nobody even knows how brains store memories. A neurologist might know a lot more than I do, but maybe this is all a solipsistic simulation where I'm a brain in a jar and the neurologist is just an NPC controlled by a fancy AI.
Perhaps, in reality, the feeling that you know what's going on was always a foolish conceit. It's magic all the way down. Astronaut with gun: always has been.
I guess I have to find comfort in degrees because otherwise I feel very helpless and stupefied by that way to view the world.
I had a discussion on HN with someone extolling the virtues of ChatGPT extracting data from PDF's. It took me forever to get them to start acknowledging the infamous 3rd step (correct prompting). And apparently I'm just unskilled for saying it wasn't magic but required correct input.
Not that ChatGPT can't do it, just that a lot of people seem to think it's going to be like talking to the star trek computer.
Probably not the point you were making but OpenAI is paying (a small group of) people pretty high hourly rates (like 70-100$/hr) through their “redteam” program
This is vastly different from other, non-AI companies hiring people to prompt AIs for them. And a quick google shows that it's not a full-time job at all.
Anything can be described dismissively. I do think prompt engineering was overhyped but I don't think that it's that obvious or that something of that nature couldn't have been a valuable skill in the future.
So many desk jobs that the professional managerial class does today can probably be described similarly. That doesn't mean that they can't still be high-paying.
