Robin Sloan on AI: manton.org
@manton Thanks for sharing the article. Not being a coder/programmer, it will probably take one or two more reads for me to translate it. First impressions: it seems to make very benign assumptions about human nature. And it throws artists right under the bus, waving away any concerns with the cliché “they’ll adapt. They always do.” That’s both irritating and condescending.
@apoorplayer I should have added some context in my post that Robin is an author (I just read his novel Sourdough) and I think that’s why the post works for me. I’m sure he doesn’t really want books to be churned out by AI!
@manton To be clear, I did not get that impression either concerning books. He was not clear about who an “artist” is, but as a lifelong theatre artist, the greatest frustration we have is that our concerns are always considered secondary. Sloan makes it clear that super-science comes first, while artists can just fend for themselves.
@manton for the coding part the article is assuming that "it just works"? Because as a programmer myself I can say that the code creation part of "ai" is still really bad. Context is too small so it will inevitably make up APIs and components. All it can do reliably is veeeery basic stuff and "better" autocomplete.
Use it as a learning tool for newcomers? Maybe - but if the newcomers dont learn the basic stuff, how will they be able to debug? Also, letting ai code = so much code review!