it's getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.

And for clarity I'm not in research or anything, so these people just mean 'LLM/image gen', not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.

Some have argued it's just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you're actively hindering your intelligence somehow.

On the first point:

I've tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it's always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other 'public' (but not libre) works, and often isn't the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.

But for the second... isn't this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren't experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.

And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn't you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?

I guess I'm trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be 'falling behind' in that affects them more than those who use AI?

From what I've experienced it's mostly managers saying this. They're afraid of competitors taking over the market because they can be more efficient with AI. They say this without any idea of how exactly that would work.

The people who espouse such nonsense as "if you don't use AI you'll fall behind" believe that using AI will become an absolute necessity in the future, and that those who use AI now will have more expertise in using AI than those who don't, giving them better prospects. Those same people end up saying "you're just not prompting it right" when you point out flaws in the LLM's responses.

Yes to everything you said. It's basic FOMO, the same behavior with people who were selling bitcoins.

If it was good, we would use it. And any way, it's like learning how to use Google, it doesn't take weeks to understand how to write a basic sentence. It's a skill that you could acquire in 24 hours at most if you speak English.

AI is the first major technology that I have have actively worked against.

I am a person who strongly believe that technology should make us better, and I can only see AI/LLMs making us weaker.

I tend to have a vivid imagination, and all I am thinking of when seeing people use AI is, "ok but could you have accomplished the same thing without AI?"

When the AI bubble pops like the overstuffed bubble it is, and prices are going up, will you remember how to do your job without it?

Or, even simpler, what about if the AI service goes down, will you still be able to do your tasks?

For many, I suspect the answer is no.

Seems like some people are looking at the AI chatbot and thinking "this thing is smarter than me."

AI's extremely flawed still, but it's improving. There might actually be a day when it can do many of the things they promise. Supposedly it's helping disease research. That seems undeniably good. Right now it's useful in a few ways, in the future it will be helpful in more ways.

My biggest concern is that AI chatbots will soon start giving alternate versions of history. Becoming a huge propaganda tool. Even more than currently. I am afraid for the day when 99% trust it blindly. And that day is already almost here.

I translate this to: “if I’m making a horrible mistake, I want you right there with me when it blows up in my face.”

If they actually felt it gave them an advantage they wouldn’t be trying to convince everyone else to do it too.

You can resist as much as you want but technology and big business are going to keep moving whether we like it or not. Unless we all decide to boycott, which we are too comfortable to do, there is no stopping capitalism. So yes, in much of the business world, if you don’t get comfortable with AI, you will fall behind.

That doesn’t mean you have to do anything with AI, tho. If you never learned to use a computer, or Excel, you fell behind in many business settings. Doesn’t mean you have to learn computers.

LLM’s are not the end all be all. There will be another big AI boom at some point in the future and if it’s derivative of LLM’s you may not have the experience to use the new tech as well as others who are well versed with AI. Isn’t good or bad. It’s just how you wanna live your life. Make a living in spaces that don’t require AI.

Prompting is obviously a skill that you can improve, but if you compare it with the skills they are trying to replace it's a very basic skill. Going through a computer science program and a few years of work experience vs figuring out what prompts it tends to fuck up and learn to safe guard against that (as much as you can) are different leagues, different sports, different everything.

It's like saying that if you don't start using lemmy now, you'll fall behind when the year off the fediverse is upon us, when you'll just pick it up as well if need be.

No. There’s no way I could build a full web app on my own in under a day. AI enables me to do that. You’re basing your whole opinion about AI solely on how capitalism is leveraging it. There is a lot of great potential with AI. Medical fields. Non-profit space. The list goes on.

You seem to confuse speed with ability.

Ok, so you can't do the task in the same amount of time, that is not what I meant, I am talking about being able to do the task at all.

Could you make a full web app without AI at all?

Do you have that skill?

I mean you could say the same thing about the power loom. Labor-saving technology does matter.

The issue with this comparison is that a power loom is like a computer script, a person built the logic, it just replaces physical labour.

AI/LLMs replace cognitive work while the outcome is not guaranteed.

There's a lot clearly unemployed/in industry that doesn't spin around AI in here.

In dev, AI saves fuck tons of time. But there's no nuance on the Internet so everyone assumes I'm advocating for vibe coding. I'm not.

What the "fall behind" is referring to is the simplest fact, if you're in a team and you're not using AI? You are very likely outputting at a much slower speed.

Now more caveats, you're not a lead dev or principle architect, your code isn't second coming of Jesus, you need to get a task done. Like it or not, the pace rest of the team sets? Is the new floor.

I manage a team and while I give them a lot of time to get work done well, the world around us is shrinking in resources. Business cares not that a job takes 4 weeks, they need it done in 2, ideally in 1 week.

Hopefully this sheds some light on this. I'm getting downvoted regardless. I'd probably have more popular opinion praising trump than daring say anything positive about AI here.

Prompting reminds me that most people around me don't know how to use Google. If I want a recipe for an apple pie, I type "apple pie recipe" (3 words). Other people would type "i want to make an apple pie and I need a recipe or something."

And now it's worse with chatbots because they would say "dear ChatGPT, I have been thinking of my grandma and I would loooove to make an apple pie like the one she did, it would mean a lot to me, and also the sun is shining, thanks, kiss, goodbye, have a nice day." It's horribly inefficient and shows that most people cannot use computers properly, and don't understand that they are fast calculators and not magical brains.

I see it with ADAS.

It appears that the more Advanced Driver Assistance Systems a vehicle has, the less competent the driver is and the more likely it is that they will not react correctly (or at all) in an emergency situation.

ANCAP and ENCAP are realising this now and their ratings are no longer weighted so heavily on ADAS.

I am reading this book https://thecon.ai/ that, among other things, explains the hype behind the set of tools we call AI.
Check it, it might help you answering your question or at least having a different pov compared to the "if you don't use it you'll fall behind".

And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.

That still is extremely unspecific and doesn't say much about what the idea is to use it for

it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets.

Writing maybe? I can't tell what this is about

I absolutely could not build a web app on my own from scratch and at this point in my life I do not have the time to learn how.

There’s absolutely no doubt that AI democratizes many capabilities that people otherwise would not possess, whether the output is “slop” or not. Sometimes you just want to quickly prototype something. Doesn’t have to be perfect. You can do that in minutes to hours. If you like it, pay somebody to do it right, or AI may even be able to do it right depending on the task.

No, LLM’s CAN replace cognitive work. You don’t have to give up all your thinking to an LLM. Think about what you want. Create very specific instructions. Review the output. Challenge it. Refine. Ask questions. Make decisions. Teach it something. It’s a tool. It doesn’t have to replace your brain.

Calculators replace cognitive work. Are you anti-calculator?

I've got some bad news for you. Even with AI you still can't make a full web app in under a day.

You can make a fun little demo for sure, but that's a long way away from a full web app. Even without doing any coding or using the computer, simply describing a full web app using pen and paper would actually take more than a day. And when it comes to actually making such a thing, there's so many things besides the coding and even with regards to the coding you haven't considered.

This is a big issue with AI. It provides a shortcut to some sort of end result. Since people get a result, they tend to think they have actually achieved the desired result. But in reality most things are much more complicated and people often have entire careers specializing in one aspect or the other. There's so much that goes on, without people not in the know realizing. Without being an expert yourself, you wouldn't even consider those things to be important.

Let me explain using an example. I can write words on a page. I could even think of a story and give it some structure. Does that mean I can write a book? Technically yes. Would that book be any good and people want to read that book? Probably no. That's because I know enough about writing books, that I know I don't know shit about writing books and would not be able to without years of learning and failing.
Now AI could help me vomit out words faster. More words more quickly means I can get a whole book worth of words out in no time at all. But does that mean I somehow gained the knowledge of how to write a good book? No, because I didn't learn anything. In fact I would learn less from using the AI than I would have simply writing down the words myself. Using a tool doesn't magically grant skills that weren't there before.

A lot of people don't understand this and shit out shitty AI books anyways, which then nobody likes. They shit out apps, which then nobody likes and they get abandoned almost immediately. They shit out "art", which then nobody likes. And since they got to some kind of a result, they glaze the AI tools and say it's amazing, even though the results were shit.

No bad news for me because it doesn’t pertain to me. Sorry you can’t get AI to work for you. Keep trying! I’ve used AI to build things for me that are totally useful. I’m not selling anything. It’s a tool. It can build full web apps. I’m not talking SaaS. Just simple things. And I’ve learned along the way as well. It’s all about how you use it.

I mean you probably could do a decent range of web apps in a day as a minimum viable product, if you already have a solid plan ready. But that's kind of the thing with AI.

AI... really seems to just make derivative stuff. I tried asking it to replicate one of my terminal text editors (via a description of it), and it ended up making... essentially a 1:1 rip off of different editor but with more comments. I have a feeling that the massive amount of training data is what makes it seem like it can write lots of applicable code, while it's still suffering from quite literally being just a larger version of this half-decade old Google Translate update under the hood.

That's one thing it can do, but there are other, actually useful things you can have it do. For example I've used it as a pseudo-search engine when Google refused to cooperate/when the thing I was looking up was too complex before.

Of course it’s derivative, but just like any tool, the user plays a huge role in the output. You just work with it. It can do lots of things and it can’t do lots of things. Am I gonna sell anything I make with it? Probably not. I use it to help myself and to prototype things really fast.

llms are able to do a lot of things many people simply can't (at least without spending a long time learning), although the result can be mediocre. it's being misused widely, but doesn't mean it's entirely incapable of anything useful.

recently i've seen it being used for reverse engineering, seemed like a pretty good usecase.

There is no there there. AI has yet to prove itself useful for more than support at the general public level. Right now AI's most compelling use for the public is as a mediocre assistant not good enough to be irreplaceable but not bad enough to fire. There are scientific applications where the technology is allowing researchers to do things that would have taken years in a few weeks, but general purpose use is still years away from being what people actually need or even want.

People who claim that if you don't use it you'll miss out are like beleaguered parents telling thier childless friends how great having kids is. It's the most basic human instinct, confirmation bias. I made this choice and therefor it must be the right choice so everyone else should make that choice too.

AI/LLMs replace cognitive work while the outcome is not guaranteed.

Calculators... are devices designed to produce deterministic results that can be proven (and yes, with a seed AI is technically deterministic, but that doesn't make it easily provable) as accurate very easily. If you removed calculators from a task, either the result would be completely the same, or it would be worse due to error introduced by something unpredictable.

past like really, really early education, I don't really see a point to go without a calculator since it uses up so much time for little gain.

There are teams whose whole job is just to describe web apps. They are product managers and UX.

That's what "ai" (actually called machine learning) was actually first created for; researching disease. Trawling through large data sets and finding correlations.

Then the venture capitalists attacked and everything changed.

You are selling something, you are trying to sell it to yourself.

Computer science, and quite scarily, a bit of medicine?

Pharmacists are gonna have to review even more slop now with this scope creep smh /j

It really cannot. But people who have no knowledge in a field absolutely think LLMs are proficient in that field. As soon as an expert in that field look at what the LLM is doing in their field, that illusion quickly vanishes.

Unfortunately, that’s not true. LLMs have proven new results in mathematics, at extremely high levels, conjectures open since decades.

I am personally very against this use of AI, but let’s be clear on its capacities.

Indeed. Moreover, a lot of people seem to believe that if they really buy into the technology, they'll be protected from its inevitable economic outfall. They won't.

I can understand this viewpoint (and it's similar to the first point), and I do agree that there is a push to defer things to AI. But from my limited experience, it's like a crutch for other issues that force it to be used by very talented people who otherwise want to get things done properly to save headaches later.

My experience was in the kind of place you would really not want AI to screw you over in, but there was also a very tight timeline to get things done, so I think they ended up just trusting AI to a pretty frightening extent with (iirc) some buildroot stuff that got some people a bit vocal. I think even I used an AI overview once because I just really wanted to be done with a demo.

It was over a year ago though so I don't really remember what ultimately came of the AI use, but there are 100% situations where this becomes the only option, although I personally will avoid AI unless I'm realistically out of any other option not to. And for that reason I've fallen more out of favour with CS since I enjoy the journey and all the little judgements you make more than the outcome.

There are people in all kinds of industries claiming AI is helping them do their job 30% faster or whatever, so presumably you’ll be “left behind” if you don’t catch up to their pace. In reality, those “30% faster” people are often producing at least 50% worse quality work. So it may come down to whether you can persuade your potentially AI-obsessed boss that maintaining quality matters enough to not adopt a faster but far more problematic process. You might not actually be left behind in terms of producing valuable work, but your boss might decide your team is being “left behind” if you don’t use AI to generate workslop or meet increasingly unrealistic deadlines.

Try throwing AI at boring repetitive work.
I argued with an LLM for about 15 minutes and got a list of IPs and the name of the systems that used them.
I could have done it manually in about an hour.

Also I'd argue that it's the opposite. It's for people that are experienced. If you can't check the output for correctness it's most likely wrong. I've never had the right answer the first time I asked.

The issue is that most people seem to enjoy offloading their cognitive work to LLMs and take their results at face value, that is what I dislike.

Show us what it built...

Spot on. Juniors or business using AI to write code is terrifying. A senior using it can help with some of the boilerplate bullshit. That's what they mean by use it as a tool.

Asfor left behind, its because companies are mandating it, and if you refuse to use it, they'll happily hire the next person who will.

As a senior software engineer applying for jobs, over half REQUIRE experience with AI just for an interview. Some require that you interview with AI as well. Still more encourage using, evaluating, and advocating for it in the workplace.

I think you look at a web app too narrowly, a web app could be any page that loads content from an external source.

I am not a web developer, and I built a system that logs the water temp to a database and a webpage displays it to help people know if they want to go for a swim or not.

It took a few weeks of free time to get everything to work, but it has been running for about 5-6 years continuously.

That is a web app, an application solving a need running on the web.

It was developed by me without any AI, and I have only limited experience with web development.

I think you can do more than you give yourself credit for without AI.

Yeah, this has been a long problem in government agencies here.

There was a political decision made years and years ago, that in-house expertise was too expensive and that they would hire consultants when they needed specific skills.

That works only as long as you have the in-house skills to determine what external skills are needed.

Same here, without the skills to do the work, you don't have the skills to correctly evaluate the work of an LLM.

I don't know what they mean, but,

In my experience, it's an accelerant towards burnout.

And it even entices you in deeper, with the continuing illusion of ease of productivity, deeper, into burnout.

Burnout is no fun. [Note: To be clear, that's "no fun", not merely "not fun". As in, it saps, eliminates and prevents all fun from your life while in burnout. And it takes twice as long to recover as it seems, ~ so the moment you think you've recovered, you're only half way there, and need to keep on having no fun for as long again, despite feeling like you can have fun, and every bit of energy expended on fun can still more readily send you back into burnout and extends the recovery time, tormenting you further. Seriously, burnout, is no fun. ~ Speaking as someone with (at last count) 65 ailments (some of which reduce some people to tears when they hear about), and I remain chipper, mocking the harrowing symptoms of it all, by calling it "fun" (e.g. "oh my flesh is rupturing again, what fun"), but burnout... that's no fun.]

So, I suspect we may see an increase in burnout among our developers. And that's speaking just from the enticing use on an individual level, before considering then also the added workload from everybody else churning through LLM accelerated workloads, having to deal with all the bug reports and pull requests (many of which will be hallucinated, or have insidious malicious injections, many of which will be vital critical issues), and then all the extra pressure to try harder to keep up your own skills against the accelerating spray, and those skills being moved to where your lower level skills atrophy, especially amidst the social pressure, perhaps even economic pressure and pressure from bosses and hierarchies and investors, to "keep up", and quantity over quality lines being blurred in the self reassurance that it's not being enshitified and our atrophying capacity to discern for ourselves.... the demands increasing and capacity decreasing, drives the race to the bottom even harder. So I suspect we may see an increase in burnout among our developers.

Rather than relaxing back towards a 4 hour working week, or to lives of leisure, the driving inertia of society's contemporary socio-economic model would instead have us see this promise of extra potential as something to maximally exploit, for the more that can be done. ... Which in turn drives that ambition even more. And do-addiction is a hard chariot to dismount from, or to slow down. Unlike food-addiction [the other difficult addiction (~ because you have to eat)], the dopamine from a do-addiction is largely celebrated and not shamed nor generally offered help to break the addiction.

All this a verbose way to get around to depicting that... we may see many of those who embrace "AI" more, despite an initial apparent "getting ahead", may be headed for a big long stall and crash, and instead it's they who "fall behind".

Depends how one uses it; How well one manages to titrate ones use. It could be a great pedagogical facilitator. But then, so could the internet... remember...? Remember when the internet was more like a library and science club, before it became more like TV and a bar fight? ... With the perverse incentives of big actors with the most grasp of the steering wheel, we may see LLMs/AI head the same degenerative direction, despite the early hopium promise that it wont be skynet, and will be a paradise generator that helps us sublimate past such societal structural corruption issues. Remember when electromagnetism was going to power the world for free, wirelessly in cymatic cromulence, making us all free and healthy (~ no, I guess not... a bit before our time), and now look and the technology born of electromagnetic discoveries and depictions, the prisons it gets shaped into, by those lacking the wisdom to see beyond their petty parasitic short-loop "well I have more than them", with all it's attention hijacking, with trillions invested in ensnaring our minds [(~ glad I got outta that biz, where that used to be my "just doing my job")]. Difficult to see, if pattern will hold, with all this hopium and urgent socio-economic pressure and terror gumming up our senses. It could save us, you have to or you'll fall behind, it could enslave and kill us all. Hope, pressure, terror. But if we take a step back... maybe we can get a more sober assessment.

Anyways, long rambles aside, really just posing the counter-notion to the assumption in the statement being queried in the original post,

despite an initial apparent "getting ahead", with the demand, the churn, the lure, they may be headed for burnout, and instead it's they who "fall behind". Depends tho.

Good job on absolutely completely missing the point of my comment. I'm not even mad, that's impressive.

There are people who's job it is to describe movies to the crew. They're called directors and producers.

You can delude yourself all you want that the AI is enabling you to do "x". But all it's doing is ensuring that you can never do x and that you keep getting worse at everything related.

And science is proving it. In just a few years of usage, llms are making people stupid and insane.

The brain is like a muscle. Each time you get in a car to travel 5 miles in 6 mins instead of running there in 30 minutes you get weaker. After 10 years your body will be in a horrible shape and much closer to death.

Yes I'm against calculators too for most things. Because of avoiding them I can do small calculations faster in my mind than most people can type into a calculator.

And guess what I'm not left behind. Because of my philosophy I am stronger and sharper than most people half my age.

Put simply, it's propaganda by the LLM salesman and liars like scam altman.

Avoid LLMs. Preserve your brain and skills. Don't become a slophead.

The only think you'll fall behind on is humanity's race to the bottom into total idiocracy.

Business is at the mercy of the people.

I'm in software engineering. AI is pretty far along in my field, and also very suited for it.
I've spent two decades writing everything from very low-level to high-level code. I enjoy it, but it's just labor at this point. What LLMs allows me to do is move to the role of systems architect. I have an endless supply of tireless jr engineers to execute my designs.

I get quick results. But I'm not as in touch with the codebase as if I had written it myself. You can do things wrong, and you can do things right. I like to compare it with a chainsaw. You get the job done a lot faster than with a regular saw, but you can fuck up a lot harder, too.

The field is moving fast. In the last two years it's gone from helpful auto-complete to finishing projects on its own.

I expect to be downvoted.