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Trusting your own judgement on 'AI' is a huge risk (www.baldurbjarnason.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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OC below by @HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org

What called my attention is that assessments of AI are becoming polarized and somewhat a matter of belief.

Some people firmly believe LLMs are helpful. But programming is a logical task and LLMs can't think - only generate statistically plausible patterns.

The author of the article explains that this creates the same psychological hazards like astrology or tarot cards, psychological traps that have been exploited by psychics for centuries - and even very intelligent people can fall prey to these.

Finally what should cause alarm is that on top that LLMs can't think, but people behave as if they do, there is no objective scientifically sound examination whether AI models can create any working software faster. Given that there are multi-billion dollar investments, and there was more than enough time to carry through controlled experiments, this should raise loud alarm bells.

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[–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

LLM are poor snapshots of a search engine with no way to fix any erroneous data. If you search something on Stack you get the page with several people providing snippets and debating the best approach. The LLM does not give you this. Furthermore if the author goes back and fixes an error in their code the search will find it whereas the LLM will give you the buggy code with no way to reasonably update it

LLM have major issues and even bigger limitations. Pretending they are some panacea is going to disappoint.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    LLM also does not bully you for asking. Nor it says "duplicated question" for non duplicated questions... There's a reason people prefer LLM to SO nowadays.

    It's not panacea. But it's not the doom world destroying useless machine that some people like to tell it is.

    It's a useful tool for some task if you know how to use it. Everyone who actively use it is because we have find put that it works for us better than other tools for that task, of not we would not use it.

    Giving my own personal experience, I tend to ask first to an LLM rather that what I used to do digging in old SO answers because I get the answer quicker and a lot of the times just better. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it serves me a purpose.

    For instance last week I needed a PowerShell command to open an app compatibility menu from the command line. I asked and got this as a response:

    (New-Object -ComObject Shell.Application).Namespace((Split-Path "C:\Ruta\A\TuPrograma.exe")).ParseName((Split-Path "C:\Ruta\A\TuPrograma.exe" -Leaf)).InvokeVerb("P&roperties")

    Worked at first try, exactly as I wanted.

    You are free to try a search engine with the query "PowerShell command to open an app compatibility menu from the command line" and check for yourself how little help the firsts results get you.

    It's a tool, as many others. The magic lies in knowing when and how to use it. For other things I may not use it, but after a couple of years using it I'm developing a good sense of which questions does it handle well and which questions is better not even to try.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    It takes an enormous amount of energy and processing power to create these shitty snapshots so in many ways it is doom considering it will dramatically increase our energy usage.

    I get it, you are an AI supporter but you fail to critically analyze it or even understand it. What tool would you use that you can't correct errors to or even determine how it works. You are really operating on faith here that the black box your getting an answer from is giving you the correct answer.

    Perhaps a code snippet works, but after this is where it all falls apart. What if the snippet does not work or causes a problem. The LLM has nothing to offer you here.

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