Everyone is talking about AI right now. Everyone has an opinion and it seems like everyone is trying to LARP as a philosopher about “what AI means” for us as a species or what it means for the economy. People see a new shiny toy, develop an opinion on it, and then they pretend that their opinions are unique an interesting.
I’m no better, I’ve written about my opinions of AI, but I do wish people would at least acknowledge that their opinions probably aren’t very unique or interesting. At least when I have my perspective on AI it’s mostly contained on a blog with near-zero viewership.
Showing an example of what I’m talking about: I have very little self respect, and despite LinkedIn being the closet analog that a human can have to being in Hell, I was scrolling through LinkedIn today.
This person is an idiot but this isn’t a unique take. I’ve seen this kind of perspective popping up all over LinkedIn, and even my beloved Hacker News.
This is pretty trivial to debunk. AI tools also play this game of “whac-a-mole”, this is why you generally have to constantly provide prompts to correct stuff and why the tools only really work if you have some objective testing criteria, because it will just keep guessing at how to solve the problem. Sometimes it will literally just hard-code the answers for the tests to pass them, so it’s not even doing the “whac-a-mole” they’re describing.
What they’re labeling as “whac-a-mole” has a more common name: “understanding”. Human or robot, you cannot realistically understand how or why things break until you have to break and fix them. Over and over again.
I have dozens of personal projects, some of which I post here, most I don’t. The projects themselves aren’t that interesting, and are generally just learning experiences. In the process of building them, I break them, string together a new tapestry different combinations of curse words, fix the bugs, and alternate between feeling like a badass and a moron about twenty times.
Some may call this “whac-a-mole”, but in the process of doing this, I actually understand what the code is doing. I know about every function, every line of code, and how everything affects everything else. I know how to break it, I know how to fix it, and because of this I know how to extend it.
Ugh, see what I mean? In the process of responding to this idiotic meme on LinkedIn, here I am pretending I have an opinion worth listening to with AI, even though I’m basically a nobody with no expertise or unique perspectives on it.
I’m not entirely sure what criteria should be used to determine whose opinions are worth listening to, but I am extremely confident that I do not meet it. In fact, I’m confident that nearly everyone trying to inject their own idiotic opinions into the “AI discussion” also doesn’t meet that criteria.
Posting your opinion into a public forum is inherently a narcissistic thing to do. I have a blog, I have a domain name, it’s indexed by Google and at some level, despite my feigned nihilism, I must at some level believe that my opinions are worth being read. If I didn’t want people to read my opinions, it seems pretty silly to waste all this time writing down and publishing them.
Maybe, collectively, as a species, we should stop taking ourselves so seriously.