I often wonder if AI generated programming is ethically positive, whereas AI generated media is problematic.
I don't have the answer yet, but it is fairly clear that the lowered barrier to making software is helping to untangle us from software monopolies, as people keep spinning up alternatives super quickly!
It's not problematic to 99% of the population that's not part of a very vocal minority on Twitter and Bluesky. Everyone else is enjoying AI art and making funny family pictures and memes together.
FWIW, neither I nor most of the people I interact with are on Twitter or Bluesky. Pretty much all of us dislike AI generated art and go out of our way to avoid it.
"making funny family pictures and memes together" isn't worth the assorted negative externalities of AI to most if not all of us.
It also wore out really quickly. I no longer make memes with AI for my friends and family because it’s just not funny anymore. It really was only fun the first one or two times.
I think there has always been a spectrum between utility and art, with most things falling obviously into one camp or the other. Assuming all else being equal (climate impact, etc), the ability to provide a utility for cheaper is nearly always good.
99.99% of software is a utility. It being cheaper to produce is a net win for society. The LLM-solution isn't an "all else being equal" scenario, there are other obvious downsides. But the part where an in-demand utility got cheaper is very good.
My take is that there is no point in reinventing the wheel. AI "coding" is just rehashing the code that other people already did, it's not doing anything new or innovative.
I think we're approaching the inverse of Thomas Edison's "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". Soon genius will be 99% inspiration and 1% perspiration.
Exactly - e.g. I've drawn from 15 years of making music manually, and then used GenAI to implement deterministic music generation tools that I've designed.
Tbh, I am not sure if I will continue, because I feel that it is the feeling of process that inspires people, and this lacks some of that..
Same here with visuals. So what - is this AI then or not? We can induce this kind of thinking further on… my point is that such discussions are futile.
I don't have the answer yet, but it is fairly clear that the lowered barrier to making software is helping to untangle us from software monopolies, as people keep spinning up alternatives super quickly!