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Comment by pluc | Hacker News Reader

To all the AI apologists here I'd like to submit a simple scenario to you and hear your answer: you use AI to create a keynote speech on a topic you needed to use AI to write. At the end of your speech, people ask you questions about the contents of your speech. What do you say?

This is the same.

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Hi, AI apologist here. This scenario is a problem with or without AI. You can’t drop a 13k line PR you don’t understand without prior discussion. There are many ways to use AI. Your scenario (keynote speech) is a bad way to use it. Instead, a PR where you understand every line, whether you or an AI wrote it, should be fine. It would be indistinguishable from human generated code.

AI is a tool like any other. I hire a carpenter who knows how to build furniture. Whether he uses a Japanese pullsaw or a CNC machine is irrelevant to me.

That's a fair answer. How do you stop people from doing it though? How do you stop it from becoming every lazy person's first reflex instead of every smart person's third?

I don’t know. But at least you’ve identified the real problem: lazy people generating trash code. AI isn’t bad, people are.

We have historically intervened socially (via state regulation, taboo, or censure) in areas where the likelihood of misbehavior was high or the result of misbehavior was severe enough.

For example: nuclear material possession or refinement; slavery; consumer-available systemic antibiotics; ozone-damaging coolants; dowries.

Proscriptions on those are imperfect and inconsistent worldwide, but still prevalent. Each of them is a thing which benefited many people but whose practice enabled massive harm due to human failures (like laziness).

I suppose the issue is that it's a multiplier for bad actors. It has become so much easier to generate plausible-looking code (or any number of things that would've previously required a knowledgeable human to make something that at least passes the sniff test, let's say legal documents as another example) and just overwhelm the limited bandwidth of good actors.

>You can’t drop a 13k line PR you don’t understand without prior discussion.

How common was that before AI coding?

Enough that stacked PRs are a thing. At my job people sometimes build large features on a branch for 6 months. Then it’s a massive PR and no one can review it.

You seem to have answered the question "How common is a 13k line PR?" but that's not what the parent comment asked.

"Beats me. AI decided to do so and I didn't question it."

"I lack funding to answer. Pay me and I'll ask AI to answer your question."

"The AI has a complete understanding of your question, prove me wrong"

What have politicians been doing forever?

Depends on the politician, yes? Some politicians will eagerly go into any level of detail on policy that you let them. Some seem to have no idea where their opinions come from.

And are we fans of that approach or does it feel disingenuous and, in politicians cases, dangerously corrupt?

"hey bixby, answer the next question you hear"

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