More broadly speaking, AI applications like chatGPT can save you a ton of time looking up a bunch of tools just to accomplish an incredibly boring task. This can help to keep you focused on the far more interesting and challenging aspects of work. Often, the solutions yielded from these interactions end up revealing to me a built in bash tool or python lib that I had no idea even existed. To me it’s like stackoverflow on steroids if you know how to use it
Also, AI chat bots can be extremely effective learning resources. A few weeks ago, I wanted to implement a digital low pass audio filter and didn’t know more than a few basic concepts. I asked chatGPT to explain the concepts with code examples. What followed was several late nights of just asking it follow up questions and very detailed discussions on the various aspects of filters. I got a primer on digital signal processing, bilinear transforms and filter design. I fed it snippets from free text university textbooks asking it to walk me through concepts and explain the things that would have been completely over my head. This was extremely useful since many books will assume you have a strong background in topics that can takes weeks to get a grip of assuming you even have a teacher.
All in all, I see AI as a tool as disruptive and empowering as the Gutenberg printing press, radio or internet was for humans. I highly recommend trying some of this stuff out and seeing how you can use it to enhance your workflow and learning process.
Personally, I really don't mind doing this. And each time I get a little better at it. I much prefer this to having an AI agent write code for me that I then have to audit and verify it does what it's supposed to do. I highly doubt this will reduce work.
I have seen it multiple times that people were using ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot to, without thinking about it, paste some code into their application and then mindlessly removing and adding code based on the AIs responses until it finally worked. In the end the devs didn’t know why it worked and the implementation was rather bad.
Of course it lets you generate boilerplate code and I use Copilot for this purpose all the time. But you have to pay extra attention and recognize it when the AI is NOT generating boilerplate code.
I also don’t mind writing this sort of code and I’m actually quite fast at writing it but AI is just on another level. Simple stuff like this it gets right almost every time and even does well on slightly more complicated stuff.
Not in my experience, especially not reading code someone else wrote.
I'm not sure I believe that. Is human-like intelligence not valuable to you?
In the game of go, the machine routinely enlightens and surprises all the top players. It creates new knowledge in the form of inventing new joseki which turn out to be better than the established ones.
Intelligence is good for problem solving. You have a problem you need solved. Do you prefer a human do it rather than a machine? Why?
In this case there is a tool that can make human more efficient. But there are other tools as well, which I think are more interesting.
Imagine if human intelligence is like physical ability to move. AI tools are like personal mobility chairs. Over time the ability to move only atrophies. But other tools are like bicycles and skateboards. They help move faster while still requiring exercise.
What does free will have to do with any of this? If I ask a machine what is 7 + 6 and it tells me 13, does that mean it has free will?
In my point of view, intelligence and consciousness are orthogonal concepts. I'm not even sure what "free will" means.
You say in your original comment "do you want a machine to solve a problem?" but this is attribution error. A tool never solves the problem. It can only help you, an intelligent being, solve the problem.
Whoever puts forward the problem can be credited with solving it, so we can come back to this when machine can proactively put forward problems. (Aka have free will, agency and all that.)
> If I ask a machine what is 7 + 6 and it tells me 13, does that mean it has free will?
No, but machine did not solve the problem. It only calculated 6 + 7.
If you have 13 dollars and want to buy two things for 7 and 6 dollars, that is a problem you can solve. Machine can tell you 7 + 6, but it is you who solves the problem. Choosing to use some machine or another is part of your solution.
> In my point of view, intelligence and consciousness are orthogonal concepts.
Then what is "intelligence". I think it's one of the least understood word thrown around today. If there is a principal difference between "AI" and a calculator I want to know what it is.
This does not compute, saying the person who poses the problem is credited for the solution is not how things work. Well, outside of politics that is.
I think it’s been fairly well proven that the robots can problem solve.
If I were to instruct the robots to mathematically solve this for some value humans have been unable to do so far who do you believe is responsible for the solution, the human asking the question or the AI coming up with the solution?
Remove the human who asked the question and there is no question and therefore there is no possibility of answer.
Same reason why if you write a random number and find 5 years later that it is also the solution for some difficult math problem it does not make you first to solve it. Same reason why a million monkeys with typewriters who in a million years wrote a letter for letter copy of Snow Crash did not actually write Snow Crash.
Previously you mentioned that a tool never solves a problem. Also you said that "whoever puts forward the problem can be credited with solving it". So it would indeed be the "AI artists" "creating" the images that deserve all the praise...
Sure why not? But all original artwork is copyrighted by default. So dall-e operator would have to negotiate paid deals with every artist. artist will get a fair compensation or understandably tell them to f^^^k off.
> Also you said that "whoever puts forward the problem can be credited with solving it". So it would indeed be the "AI artists" "creating" the images that deserve all the praise
They are using a tool that is literally powered by copyrighted work of other artists though, right?
If you have a problem and you come up with solution that breaks the law, sure you still solved the problem but you still broke the law.
If you have a problem of delivering a product on time and you have to run a red light because you are late you have solved a problem but not in an acceptable way. Same here.
If you just haven't yet found how you can make use of the current stuff, keep in mind this discussion is always extrapolating what happens if the technology gets much better.
Why does it need a point?
There’s not much of a point to anything I do that doesn’t involve basic survival but I don’t let that stop me from doing things I find interesting.