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[–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

Nothing wrong with a professional developer with years of experience using AI as a tool for coding, just as long as they review the output first before using it in their project. My workplace (where I work as a dev) provides us with a Claude subscription to use it as a tool. It's kind of just like using a drill instead of a screwdriver to screw something into a wall - done well in the right hands it's fine, give it to a 13yo and they're going to drive the screw through the plaster and make a holy mess of it.

What IS wrong is a human who has little-to-no experience coding using an AI to develop the entire codebase and then the human releases the code into the wild without some level of peer review from a human who DOES have experience and then claiming it as their own creation. That's almost sloppy plagiarism (of ironically already sloppy plagiarism).

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    I'm a self taught web dev whose only had a single fullstack job under their belt, some charity coding at a nonprofit, and plenty of group and solo projects.

    I've used ChatGPT mainly to code and also teach myself Calculus as I get ready to go back to school and get a CS degree to hopefully help my chances at getting some work. I'm not saying as a tool on its own, LLMs aren't useful.

    But I do use these LLMs with a severe sense of guilt considering:

    • The plight of Kenyan workers who got paid almost nothing to have their mental health absolutely violated while setting up initial training parameters around abusive/sensitive training material

    • The many teens who have committed suicide while being influenced by LLM advice

    • The massive amount of land, water, and power that is being utilized to put it all together

    • The massive amount of carbon emissions that the data centers that power these LLMs releases into the atmosphere, exacerbating an already dire climate crisis

    • The massive amount of scraped data that was stolen without anyone's consent in order to train it

    • The fact that our entire world economy seems to now rely solely on AI companies and NVIDIA's stock price going up ad infinitum even if their economic metrics make no sense at all

    • The exacerbation of the already existing education crisis where both students and teachers are offloading critical thinking skills

    • The destruction of the useful search engine, which honestly feels preordained by the ensuing enshittification of search due to invasive advertisement/marketing strategies

    And honestly that isn't even scratching the surface.

    So yeah...I got some guilt using this crap. But hey, at least I got to live another day in the torment nexus.

    EDIT: Removal of massive doomerism rant towards the end there.

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