Alessandra Sierra

Likewise for code. I’ve written a lot of code in my life, including plenty of bad code. Merely generating code that does *something* doesn’t strike me as much of an achievement. I did that when I was a kid. But the average person has no idea what programming is like. Their only frame of reference is what they’ve seen in movies, where it looks a lot like magic. So if a computer can do that, then the computer must be doing something magical. So they’re impressed. But when I look at AI-generated code, I see flaws. I see mistakes. I know, because I’ve made those same mistakes! While the AI is unquestionably faster than I am, it’s not necessarily better. And I know that the *real work* of programming is not writing code but rather planning, debugging, and maintaining a project over time.

In other words, when I write code (or prose) most of my effort is spent *choosing* what to write, just like an artist choosing what to draw. The mechanical skills we use along the way are just table stakes to get to that point. #GenAI reproduces the mechanical output. If you’re impressed by that, you might not think as deeply or critically about the “choices” it made.

Why doomscroll when you can play DOOMscroll — The Game? https://gisnep.com/doomscroll/

Likewise for AI-generated art. For example, I can’t draw. I struggle with the most trivial sketch and the best I can produce is an incoherent mess. I’m impressed just watching an artist wiggle pencil over paper and seeing a recognizable image emerge. But for a working artist, that’s just a mechanical skill they had to learn on the way to creating the art they want to create. It’s the first year of art school, or even earlier. I don’t like AI-generated art any more than I like AI-generated text, but to me, art “feels” like a more significant accomplishment for a computer, because I have no personal frame of reference for the human skills involved.

@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange I wonder about this a lot myself, since I transitioned late, after I had already hit Principal Engineer. I still don't have any concrete evidence either way.