AI is not a tool. Its an addiction

I totally agree. I'm watching people lose their drive to create and it's so sad. They're getting high off the satisfaction of "creating" without the work.

...and then they lose access to their wündertool and they can't do anything.

I have it create things for me that I would otherwise never have. I wanted an app for dream tracking. They were either pay walled, didn't have the features I wanted, or both. Ai created what I wanted in a weekend. That's just one example. I've created many single use apps as well.

If I'm at a takeaway store I take a photo of the board and it makes me an interactive menu that totals the price of what everyone wants and let's us browse without trying to see the board and get in people's way.

I don't expect anyone else to use these. I don't expect anyone else to want to use them. Though they're welcome to. But if I can have a thing create exactly what I want and use it why not?

"but what if it has a bug and you lose a year of journals". Well it created me manual timestamped backups as well as automatic timestamped backups to oauth Dropbox in a dedicated folder without the app having access to the rest of my Dropbox. It could crash everything and I would have every single thing safe in 2 places up to the most recent entry. And they're just text files. I could take them anywhere if AI disappeared and the app broke tomorrow. I could just continue writing in notepad in the worst case until I found something else. But the app looks nicer and does interesting things.

The alternative to this isn't me learning to code and spending months creating them. The alternative is them never existing.

agreed, a tool that you have to actively fight to do something well is a garbage tool. it's like trying to cut some chicken meat with a knife that's magnetically drawn to living beings. You can make some nice diced chicken with it, but it is way more likely that you'll slip up and cut off your finger than with an actual knife.

regardless of the original intention, the purpose of generative "AI" is to become a manager that's out of touch with the actual creation process, so at best no one will know how something works, at worst no one will be able to fix it if it breaks.

This exactly what I was thinking. This doesn't even mention the ramification of AI outside the digital space such the environmental costs, the replacement of labor and the complete disregard of copyright or even preservation. I understand people can use many things as a "tool" but when the tools cause some much untold harms as a side effect, is it truly just a tool? It's something used at the expense of another. I know there is no ethical consumption under capitalism but AI is one of those things you could personally avoid if you wanted to. One of the things you technically shouldn't be forced to use. The fact that it is pushed everywhere is so you devalue everything else along with it. For me, it started as being anti-AI in terms of art and academics alone but it has evolved to being anti-AI in general.

You could say the same about a compiler

I think AI is a tool but very advanced tool. AI is great tool but very unpredictable in many cases. I think it should be used because it makes coding more effective but as you say it kill every fun in coding. As Linus said tool is not important if code is great. If you used AI and its good then why not. Sometimes you can write worse code then AI. But on other side yes it can be hard for repository owners when they must reject tons of shit code created with AI. So it have advantages and disadvantages and when do you want some fun (or maybe some security stuff) don't use it.