Comment by 🌆 skyjake
Re: "My view of why I feel that AI is not a thorn in the side of…"
AI is a such a complex topic. On one hand, you have massive ethical, societal, financial, environmental, and technical issues (like DDoSing everyone's web servers), but on the other, you have genuine, massive benefits for software development and other fields where patterns dominate, like anything involving a translation from one form to another.
Using AI for creative and artistic endeavors seems more difficult. It can be a powerful tool, but wielding it correctly requires a strong vision of what you're after in the first place. AI may help you get there, or it may completely skew and bias the results to unintended directions.
You need to tread lightly with AI, to control it, or it will control you.
Apr 20 · 2 weeks ago
5 Later Comments ↓
👻 darkghost · Apr 20 at 17:01:
My thinking changed and frankly all I've been doing with it is tool construction. The only difference is it's not me writing that code. I'm missing out on new skills but getting the more interesting things done instead while saving myself the headaches of getting the tool to do what I need it to. I think there's a right way and a wrong way to use this tech. I don't exactly know what the right way is, but I can be certain the low power low value chatbots on search results are the wrong way.
The tool is just that—a tool,
em dash spotted. opinion ignored.
jokes aside, small web != permacomputing/minimalism, even if there is an overlap. using LLMs for maintaining code is probably fine (I mean I can't stop you) but I never understood this whole "democratizes creativity" argument. if you want to polish your writing: just write. in gemini, your writing will only be seen by like 10 people anyway (give or take).
I would be more interested in reading AI-assisted content if prompts were disclosed.
Big difference between:
“Spellcheck this essay and suggest changes that will improve clarity and flow”
and
“Write an essay about how LLMs can be used in the spirit of the small web without compromising authenticity”
😎 flipperzero · Apr 21 at 07:26:
The important balance to keep in mind, I've observed at least, is not so much to do with bashing assistance to building plans for pre-production development like flowchart, project outline, mission statement or whatever related to getting the ball rolling. Even using generated models for functional demonstrable executable which can be tested, modified, then augmented by personal intuition a more efficient and practical output. That's not the point, so much as it is the prevalence of using a bot to build -an entire app- or entire sections of routine to sub-routine blocks, seemingly proficient then as time goes on break apart at the cracks.
👻 darkghost · Apr 21 at 11:51:
I've done it for an entire analytical app, one that will only be used by me for as long as this project lasts. A year at most. It lowered the bar to this kind of analysis I want to do while being specific purposed enough to create value over general purpose tools that have to be contorted in weird ways to produce a similar, less nuanced output. I tested its output by hand calculating everything and coming up witn every possible edge case. No blindly trusting the bot to do it right. It wasn't so much the type of analysis being hard so much as it is the scale of analysis I need to do. This feels like a right way to use this tech.
This is also not how management told me to do it, they want me to feed it the data set and have the bot tell me the outcome and what it meant. It went off the rails immediately.
Original Post
My view of why I feel that AI is not a thorn in the side of the small web: [gemini link]