The Rise of Whatever | slacker news

Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there.

But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline.

> There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though.

> I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?”

When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good.

But up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle.

I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come.

> You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right.

> up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle.

https://www.deviantart.com/scotchi/art/keep-tryin-690533685

Exactly.

Only putting the work is going to get anyone places. And yes it takes _time_, like, tons, and there's no shortcut.

And I can explain in excruciating detail how to do an ollie or a kickflip even and from a physics point of view you would totally get it but to land the damn thing you simply have to put a shitload of time on the board and fail over and over and over again.

We come from a place where we've been trained as engineers or whatever to do this or that and - somewhat - critically think about things. Instead picture yourself in the shoes of a beginner: how would you, a beginner who has not built their own mental model of discipline $foo, even begin to be critical of AI output?

But we're being advertised magic powder and sweating overalls and whathaveyou that makes you lose weight a) instantly† and b) without going to the gym and well putting in the effort††.

LLMs are the speed diet of the mind.

† comparatively

†† not that putting any arbitrary amount of effort is going to get you places, there _is_ a thing such as wasteful effort; but NOT putting the effort is a solid guarantee that you won't.