Anonymous #2 3w

Yeah I can still write a paper but I can also ask AI questions about entirely other stuff and get pretty good answers. And maybe it’s different because I’m in CS but yeah basically every student uses AI in my major for coding assignments

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Anonymous ireallylikepancakes 3w

Having self-worth doesn’t mean you have to be a Luddite

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Anonymous OP 3w

That’s a major-wide skill issue

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Anonymous OP 3w

At best, using AI for your homework is equivalent to asking someone else to give you the answers.

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Anonymous ireallylikepancakes 3w

Well it’s funny because I’m 99% sure I could still code circles around you so who really has the skill issue

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Anonymous OP 3w

I got through my computer science courses with no generative AI.

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Anonymous ireallylikepancakes 3w

No one says you have to use it for your homework bruh lmao

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Anonymous ireallylikepancakes 3w

Want a cookie?

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Anonymous OP 3w

You said you use it for your courses, and the entire post itself indicates that you’re fine using it.

8

Anonymous OP 3w

Nah, I didn’t earn it. Talking to you takes no effort.

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Anonymous ireallylikepancakes 3w

Like lmao I’m a SWE at a huge company. Basically every eng uses AI for automating the boring shit or summarizing documentation. I don’t really understand the need to resist things that are helpful

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Anonymous OP 3w

1) that’s different to what the post’s about. Your post is talking about people using AI in a school environment, not a corporate one. Please don’t shift the goalposts. 2) I’m also against widespread generative AI use we’re seeing due to the environmental damage it causes.

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Anonymous ireallylikepancakes 3w

The original post is just saying AI is for weenies so I’m not shifting the goalposts, I referenced using it in a school environment because this is an app for college students. And I don’t really see why that would make a difference for your argument

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Anonymous OP 3w

The difference is that using genAI for education is not as intellectually stimulating as other means of learning. So in that setting particularly, it’s important to draw attention to the drawbacks. Anyways, I gtg. My brain is fried rn and I got to be up early tomorrow.

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Anonymous ireallylikepancakes 3w

Yeah there’s a difference between dumping all the instructions into ChatGPT and hoping it one shots the entire thing and asking it a niche question that it might know the answer to so I don’t have to go digging in man pages for 20 minutes to come up with the command I need. I’m perfectly ok with and would encourage the latter most of the time since that’s not much different than asking a TA for help on something after already trying. “Using it for courses” can mean lots of different shit

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Anonymous OP 3w

The difference is that Google doesn’t generate an answer for you, it just looks provides links to things other actual human beings created themselves. Well, at least it used to, now they have their own gen AI baked into it as well :/

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Anonymous big_al_the_riddler 3w

Ok it’s not just an essay generation machine so you can still do that and use it for other things

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Anonymous OP 3w

Like what? A virtual dictionary? We already have that, they’re called search engines and they have a much smaller impact on the environment and don’t just write up the answer verbatim for you

3

Anonymous ireallylikepancakes 3w

I’d argue that, used properly, using genAI can be MORE intellectually stimulating than other means of learning. You can basically probe the world’s knowledge with pretty good reliability on-demand, so the feedback loop for learning gets much much shorter. Again I’m not arguing that having it write all your essays or code is good for learning, but asking targeted questions definitely can be.

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Anonymous OP 3w

I think having a machine spit all of it out to you rather than taking the time to seek it out yourself and read what it tells you from the original sources is far more intellectually stimulating. Gen AI just fast scans the internet and regurgitates a facsimile of what an original source initially had to say, often with inaccuracies baked into it. In my opinion that’s far less valuable than people make it out to be. I see the value in AI tech in some fields, such as medical study and…

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Anonymous big_al_the_riddler 3w

…mathematics, for solving tough equations quickly and without fuss, but if in studying something, and most certainly CREATING something, AI is just a waste of time and energy, both from a personal and environmental perspective

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Anonymous big_al_the_riddler 3w

Far less* lol

7

Anonymous big_al_the_riddler 3w

Have you ever needed to write a bash script that would render Kubernetes manifests for the same services located in 30 different files but using two different versions of your microservices’ helm chart, generate the diffs between them, then compare those to a reference to see if anything will break in an upgrade? Yeah, me neither until last week. And even though I’m sure I could’ve done it given 30 minutes or so, Copilot got me to something that I got working in 2.

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Anonymous OP 3w

Unless I could’ve found that exact or very similar use case on Stack overflow, no search engine was gonna help me significantly with that

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Anonymous big_al_the_riddler 3w

So does ChatGPT if you prompt it to

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Anonymous OP 3w

You don’t think it would have been more valuable for building up your skillset in your industry to learn how to do that within 30 minutes rather than have a machine do all the work for you in two?

5

Anonymous big_al_the_riddler 3w

I know how to do it, I don’t feel like taking the time to write the code and inevitably debug my mistakes when a machine can get me 95% of the way there and I just have to do a bit of debugging. And don’t you think to some extent, if a machine can do my work in a fraction of the time, learning how to use that machine to increase my productivity ought to be a good skill to have?

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Anonymous OP 3w

Except it’s not YOUR productivity. The machine is doing the work and production. At a certain point, what value do you bring to the position? Why even have you around in the company if all you need is to pump the prompt into the machine? Why pay you as much for your position if that’s all you’re doing within it? Do you see what I’m getting at here

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Anonymous OP 3w

Using AI as a tool to further your own work and ingenuity is one thing, using it in place of it is another. It’s part of why some people in industries like yours and mine are already losing their jobs to this kind of thing. When you fail to see the value in having human minds and human creation behind work, you end up kicking those humans to the curb to save money and cut out the middleman.

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Anonymous big_al_the_riddler 3w

lEveryone learns in different ways. I am cognizant of AI hallucinations and I’m not going to just take everything it says at face value. But I think to some extent you’re missing what I’m saying: not every question has an answer that exists somewhere on the public Internet. Sometimes it’s really useful to ask niche questions that I couldn’t just Google and have AI give me an idea. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a replacement, but a complement to traditional methods

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Anonymous OP 3w

That I can see, but what you were saying earlier with having it solve an equation, start to finish no additional building off from there in the problem solving process, is not a “complement” to a traditional method. That’s a replacement, my friend

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Anonymous big_al_the_riddler 3w

Did tractors not make farmers more productive? Did trucks not make mailmen more productive? See anyone can have ChatGPT generate code for them, not everyone can have ChatGPT generate the code that’s needed. I KNEW what the script needed to do. I GAVE Copilot the necessary information. I still FIXED its mistakes. So yeah, it is MY productivity. If companies can just pay engineers less and fire them all because of this whole AI thing, why haven’t they already? It’s because they can’t

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Anonymous big_al_the_riddler 3w

The idea that anyone qualified to work in tech is losing their job to AI is a complete sham. Conveniently almost all the companies that tell you they’re doing that also sell AI products. In reality they all overextended themselves during Covid and now had to either offshore jobs to India or cut them entirely

0

Anonymous big_al_the_riddler 3w

What equation?

0

Anonymous OP 3w

Except a tractor and a truck doesn’t complete the work for you, it merely expedites a portion of the work. You’re comparing a machine that produces answers to equations to ones that simply allow physical labor to progress at a higher rate. Those machines do things a human being cannot. You yourself admitted you can generate the code ChatGPT does. A human being cannot do what a truck or tractor can, but a human can do what ChatGPT does. Again, when it comes to employers looking to cut corners…

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Anonymous big_al_the_riddler 3w

…at a certain point they’re going to start reconsidering how much labor is being put into a position if a machine is expediting a major process and how much that position is worth, how much salary should be put into it. The same thing is happening in many industries. Breaking news and brief writers are being laid off at major publications because ChatGPT can do it passably well.

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Anonymous OP 3w

I meant generating code. I have no insight as to the jargon used in your industry so I just went with that word as a placeholder.

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Anonymous big_al_the_riddler 3w

And ChatGPT didn’t complete the work for me. It automated one part of my task that also involved reading documentation and specifications, communicating with stakeholders, monitoring for incidents, etc. It generated me a mostly working script (that again, I still needed to fix) that helped me expedite the step of verifying that an upgrade wouldn’t break anything when deployed. So it expedited a portion of my work. My job isn’t just writing code all day

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Anonymous big_al_the_riddler 3w

And wtf do you mean a tractor and a truck do things people can’t? How do you think anyone farmed or delivered mail before those things existed? Sure the methods are obviously very different, but the end result of planted fields/harvested crops or delivered mail happened prior to the machinery. Those machines made the humans more productive at their jobs, just like AI that can sometimes give me good code does

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Anonymous big_al_the_riddler 3w

I mean to be completely frank I think there’s a pretty big difference. If a news article is written “passably well,” then that’s kinda just it. The publication still makes money. Code can’t be written “passably well” or all your customer data will be in Russia before you can count to ten

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