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Comment by simmanian | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't intelligent AI agents enable average people to build amazing things?

No. Thus far no AI agent has shown itself to be capable of building amazing things. AI agents generate, at best, mediocre and derivative content and at worst, soulless nightmares out of the uncanny valley. None of it has any sense of originality or a specific creative touch or vision, nor can it given the way LLMs work. All this despite the consistent refrain from people that LLMs work exactly the same way that human beings do, with equivalent creative processes. Thus far, such claims only demonstrate a quasi-religious belief not backed up by evidence, or equivalent results.

And if it were somehow to be the case that AI was capable of building amazing things, it would be the AI doing so, not people. You can go to a Michelin starred restaurant and order a world-class meal, but describing your order doesn't make you a chef. In the same way, describing what you want to an AI that simulates the work of countless artists doesn't make you an artist.

And no, this isn't equivalent to an artist using tools and filters in Photoshop (although Photoshop is now moving to integrating AI so it kind of is.) Those are tools that still require the skill and talent of an artist and allow a degree of direct control over the end result that AI doesn't.

While no AI agent has shown itself to be capable of building amazing things and I agree with your food and artwork analogies, AI agents can work as fantastic teachers, lowering the technical barriers of entry for fields like programming.

ChatGPT can’t retain decent context to save its life but if you have the time, patience, and motivation to widdle away at a goal or a project you, yourself, can come out on the other side far more capable of building amazing things, thanks to AI. These are things you could have learned through other mediums, sure, but for a lot of people it is a far more natural experience akin to talking with a teacher, especially if you structure your prompts to feels as such.

I’m not ride-or-die AI over here but it has taken me from a painfully non-technical person, to someone who now has a vast interest and a growing, albeit slowly, skill set in a new hobby. It will be a long long time before I create something that isn’t derivative but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been valuable along the way.

I'm happy it works for you, but given the general consensus about the quality of AI generated code (not great beyond trivial tasks and full of bugs) and AI's tendency to confabulate, I think tutorials by human beings are still the better option in general.

Right, no AI agent has shown itself to be capable of building amazing things. I just thought if current trends hold and big corps keep gobbling up everything to create bigger and better AI models, then even average people will have a lot to gain from it if big corps actually successfully build intelligent AI. Because then the playground would be leveled.

The playground is already more level than it would be if the primary tools for creativity were driven by corporate controlled AI, because those corporations have no intention of allowing the playground to be level. It's never going to be legal for you to make the next Star Wars, or possible for the average person to make something that can compete with the big media companies, without paying a lot of money and giving up a lot of rights.

Meanwhile the tools to create in just about any medium are almost entirely freely available to anyone, and plenty of people are already creating tons of amazing things. AI isn't necessary for that, it's just a means for corporations to commoditize human creativity.

You mean like what JavaScript and PHP did for websites. :D

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