I think I can, at a base level, understand the appeal of using AI, especially for coding. "Let me have the super-smart AI do my programming for me so I don't have to! It will give me so much more time to..." To do what, exactly? AI is already coming for our creative fields: writing, art, video, etc. Do we want it to take coding away too?
To be perfectly candid, i have used AI before at work. A few times I would pass in a fairly confusing and un-structured email from a coworker to try and make some sense of it, or attempted to use it to re-organize some weirdly formatted code. And you know what was so interesting about it?
It was always terrible!
It always gives impressive sounding wrong information. Confidently. As if it can do no wrong. Because it isn't anything. That's what has so many people suckered in, they believe that the AI knows anything at all. It doesn't. It's an incredibly impressive auto-complete. It is using tokens to predict the next most likely character based on everything that has come before it, and every piece of training data it has. That doesn't mean it knows something, just that it can regurgitate it occasionally.
Or it can just hallucinate something.
So here's the thing. OpenAI just released GPT-5 yesterday. Is it impressive? Sure. You can ask it to code Minesweeper and it will code Minesweeper. Cool. Amazing. You know how it can do that? Because somewhere in it's training data is a human build Minesweeper application it found somewhere on GitHub or Sourceforge or some other place, and it is regurgitating it, maybe with some small changes here and there. And really, honestly, how useful is it to have a large language model bot spit Minesweeper out at me? It will only be useful if it can start making something new instead of just spitting up pre-existing applications!
Some people may call me a Luddite for not being excited about AI, and there are definitely elements I could be excited about... but this isn't it. ChatGPT and other LLMs are doing so much damage to society; doing to people's self-reliance what TikTok has done to people's attention spans, and it will take real concentrated effort to reverse it. There are times where I even feel the draw to just have an LLM do my work for me. But at that point, where's the joy in creating? Where's the fun of encountering a problem and solving it yourself? Do you learn anything by having the answer spoon-fed to you?
Or do we really just want to hand everything over to the bots?