AI should only run as fast as we can catch up

> A very good example of the first category is image (and video) generation. Drawing/rendering a realistic looking image is a crazily hard task. Have you tried to make a slide look nicer? It will take me literally hours to center the text boxes to make it look “good”. However, you really just need to take a look at the output of Nano Banana and you can tell if it’s a good render or a bad one based on how you feel.

The writer could be very accomplished when it comes to developing - I don’t know - but they clearly don’t understand a single thing about visual arts or culture. I probably could center those text boxes after fiddling with them maybe ten seconds - I have studied art since I was a kid. My bf could do it instantly without thinking a second, he is a graphic designer. You might think that you are able to see what « looks good » since, hey you have eyes, but no you can’t. There’s million details you will miss, or maybe feel something is off, but cannot quite say why. This is why you have graphic designers, who are trained to do that to do it. They can also use generative tools to make something genuinely stunning, unlike most of us. Why? Skills.

This is the same difference why the guy in the story who can’t code can’t code even with LLM, whereas the guy who cans is able to code even faster with these new tools. If use LLM’s for basically auto-completion (what transformer models really are for) you can work with familiar codebase very quickly I’m sure. I’ve used it to gen SQL call statements, which I can’t be bothered to type myself and it was perfect. If I try to generate something I don’t really understand or know how to do, I’m lost staring at sole horrible gobbledygoo that is never going to work. Why? Skills.

There is no verification engineering. There is just people who know how to do things, who have studied their whole life to get those skills. And no, you will not replace a real hardcore professional with an LLM. LLM’s are just tools, nothing else. A tractor replaced a horse in turning the field, bit you still need a farmer to drive it.

Centering text boxes in competent design software is easy because it has a tool to align things to the centre of other things.

For example, Inkscape has this and it is easy to use.

I meant just by eye, mate. But it is pretty bad example anyway, obvs it is something that any program can do better than us. Better would be layout or maybe typography. Even professionals mess it up all the time.

Point is, even basic visual design is far from intuitive.

> You might think that you are able to see what « looks good » since, hey you have eyes, but no you can’t.

I'm sure lots of people will reply to you stating the opposite, but for what it's worth, I agree. I am not a visual artist... well, not any more, I was really into it as a kid and had it beaten out of me by terrible art teachers, but I digress... I am creative (music), and have a semblance of understanding of the creative process.

I ran a SaaS company for 20 years and would be constantly amazed at how bad the choices of software engineers would be when it came to visual design. I could never quite understand whether they just didn't care or just couldn't see. I always believed (hoped) it was the latter. Even when I explained basic concepts like consistent borders, grid systems, consistent fonts and font-sizing, less visual clutter, etc. they would still make the same mistakes over and over.

To the trained eye they immediately see it and see what's right and what's wrong. And that's why we still need experts. It doesn't matter what is being generated, if you don't have expertise to know whether it's good or not, the chances are glaring errors will be missed (in code and in visual design)

Though it's notable that sometimes this will produce "wrong" results because it centers on the geometric middle point of the box, while the correct thing is often more like bringing the center of gravity into the middle

I'm more of a fan of aligning to an edge anyways. But some designers love to get really deep into these kinds of things, often in ways they can't really articulate

> A tractor replaced a horse in turning the field, bit you still need a farmer to drive it.

Before mechanisation, like 50x more people worked in the agricultural sector, compared to today. So tractors certainly left without work a huge number of people. Our society adapted to this change and sucked these people into industrial sector.

If LLM would work like a tractor, it would force 49 out of 50 programmers (or, more generically, blue-collar workers) to left their industry. Is there a place for them to work instead? I don't know.

Centering the text on a slide is such a trivial thing. It is the default behavior.

I have learned a little bit of photoshop and 10 years ago maya too.

But i'm a software engineere by trade and I do not struggle with telling you that this thing has to move left for reason xy, i would struggle with random tools capable of doing that particular thing for me.

And it does not matter here how i did it if the result is the same result.

In Software Engineering this is just not always the case. Because often enough you would need to verify that what you get is the thing you expect (did the report actually take the right numbers) or Security. Security is the biggest risk to all ai coding out there. Security is already so hard because people don't see it, they ignore it because they don't know.

You have so many non functional requirements in software which just don't exist in art. If i need that image, thats it. Most complex thing here? Perhaps color calibration and color profiles. Resolution.

If we talk about 3D it gets again a little bit more complicated because now we talk the right 3d model, right way to rig, etc.

Also if someone says "i need a picture for x" and is happy about it, the risk is less customers. But if someone needs a new feature and tomorrow all your customer data are exposed or the companies product stops working because of a basic bug, the company might be gone a week later.

We literally have self driving tractors now.

https://www.deere.com/en/autonomous/

Fair point. The farms also begun to produce exponentially more food. If LLM’s would prove as revolutionary as Spinning Jenny and mechanisation of farm labour (which I don’t believe for a second), we could provide a easier life for billions of people, cure illnesses and poverty, provide education for countless children… The farm hands and their families moved to cities into factory work, which at least in England was dickensian horror of poverty and slums, but in many other countries (Nordic for instance) created urbanisation and new meaning of life as well as upwards social mobility. Many computer scientis here had a farmer as a grand-father or great-grandfather.

But none of this chamged how food grows and that you need somebody who bloody well knows what they are doing to produce it. Especially how machinised it is today.

However, I do not believe LLM to be a tractor. More like a slightly different hammer. You still need to hit the nail.