Fuck AI

I’m a senior full-stack developer of 15 years, and more recently, a new tech lead (specifically a Systems Architect) at an AI startup. I’m definitely not attacking AI as a concept in general.

I, too, am a developer of closer to 15 years than I'd like to admit to myself, though mostly embedded and/or back-end. And while I have no problem with AI in its broad sense (obviously machine learning/spicy statistics, computer vision, and natural language processing and whatnot have potential to be enormously useful), I am generally hostile to generative AI. I thinking using copyrighted material as training data without the copyright holders' permission should be banned. And while I would have no objection to ethically-trained models in a hypothetical future where we have abundant clean energy to run the data centres and also all the new desalination plants we would need, that also remains a problem, and so I have resisted using such tools at work, too.

Now to generative AI (for the multimedia substrate)...

I agree with everything you've said after this point.

No. What I’m judging them for is delegating their critical thinking capacity to an external entity, and stunting their own cognitive growth (their literal reason for existing in the first place, their continuity mechanism to stay in the gene pool, and their sole means of improving at being long-term lazy) by being short-term lazy. Makes sense?

This is the crux of my problem. I find it to be overly judgemental. If you're self-employed and you need a website for your business or whatever, then you could pay someone to do it for you, but then you only have so much money in the budget. You could also learn how to code and/or graphic design and do it yourself, but then you only have so many hours in the day. If vibe coding produced something viable for you in the quickest, cheapest way, then that is obviously the rational and sensible thing to do. You might even spend the time learning something else instead that is more relevant to your interests.

Using generative AI to do something doesn't (necessarily) mean that you don't value the knowledge or skills required to do it the hard way, it only means that you value it less than something else that you might otherwise be doing with your time, and I don't think that is a moral failing.

As an example, I occasionally like to a bit of shitposting. Were it not for all those other things that I don't like about generative AI, I would probably be generating AI slop memes with the best of the them. As it is I mostly just stick to text-based comments with bad puns and references to song lyrics no-one will remember. I could put in the hours to learn how to use GIMP so I could do it without AI, but quite frankly I have books on the go, I've got a couple of musical instruments to learn/practise, and I spent all day at my software job, where I think critically (or so I claim), so I'd rather being doing those things instead. I don't think I have neglected my cognitive growth; I've just chosen to focus it on something different to what you might have.