I've never placed in the top 100 of AOC and I never will. But the folks who attempt it would be rightly miffed that someone cheated to get to the top.
And please, don't talk about the effort needed to set up the cheating device. It took a lot of effort to (allegedly) cheat in chess with anal beads, but no one is praising that person.
It isn't cheating to dig a ditch with a backhoe any more that it is to use gpt-3 to solve the Advent of Code problems.
It feels like cheating because of asymmetry, it didn't exist before and now it does. They feel like they didn't get a chance to try out the new tool.
Funny thing, I have been accused of "cheating" a couple times in programming. One was in using a Python script to refactor over 4k php pages that had grown by copy pasta over 5 years. Think all code in the company started from the same script, just copied from the previous unrelated task. One week of coding, 15 seconds of runtime and it replaced 6 person-months worth of work.
The other one was when I introduced a bunch of junior programmers to IntelliJ, in how you could navigate the code, rename, refactor, introduce-method. They all understood the new power, half were stoked (because they had access the license) and the other half were pissed, because it was cheating, because a previously 4 hr task, would now be expected to take 45 minutes. The person without the high tech ide is pissed,
First down hill suspension bike vs non, first use of a hydrofoil in competitive sailing. Almost every human endeavor has a before this point and after this point. Maybe this is ours.
Point is, I don't think it cheating until we specifically have human only competitions.
Doesn't that exactly apply to your critisism of other peoples motives to compete with each other? specifically their desire to compete with other humans for fun, as opposed to humans copy and pasting machine output.
It's not new, but this, right here, is the thing that's broken in humans.
Public things aren't exclusively for you. Public things are for everyone who uses them.
Geez.
If GPT-3 was a compiled executable you could run on your laptop, like Python, would it be fine?
Yeah. Just like how 'ethics' went out of the window as soon as Stable Diffusion destroyed and cheapened the digital artist straight to zero.
Now it is happening to some extent to parts of programming contests and challenges, ruining the concept as no-one can tell if the code was written by ChatGPT.