it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.

And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.

Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.

On the first point:

I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.

But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.

And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?

I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?

  • Iconoclast@feddit.uk
    152·
    3 days ago

    I tend to have a vivid imagination, and all I am thinking of when seeing people use AI is, “ok but could you have accomplished the same thing without AI?”

    Sure. Protein structure is the clean example. For decades the same thing was done without AI: crystallise the protein, collect diffraction or NMR data, solve the fold. That works. It also costs years and a specialist lab per structure. AlphaFold did not invent a new kind of knowledge. It made the existing problem cheap enough that we now have predicted structures for hundreds of millions of proteins instead of a few hundred thousand experimentally solved ones.

    “Could you have done it without AI?” is the wrong test. The test is whether the extra cost of doing it the old way is worth paying every time. Sometimes it is. Often it is not.

    • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
      81·
      2 days ago

      People aren’t talking about alphafold when they’re talking about “AI” in 2026. They’re talking about chatgpt, claude and copilot.

      “Could you have done it without AI?” is the wrong test. The test is whether the extra cost of doing it the old way is worth paying every time. Sometimes it is. Often it is not

      I would hard disagree. It absolutely applies for super narrow applications like alphafold, but in general, LLMs aren’t remotely close to being worth it. You don’t need to look beyond how hugely unprofitable AI companies are. The only companies who aren’t completely shoveling money into the furnace are the ones selling hardware to the companies that do.

      We also see that the consequences of AI use are pretty harsh. Students who use a lot of AI are a full year behind their counterparts that don’t, according the the latest PISA data.

      So what we have is something that is unaffordably expensive, with dubious benefit and immense second order effects.