Slopportunities or Robot Fren?

My social network has been split pretty much 50-50 recently, most glaringly on LinkedIn but it is starting to creep into others such as the retro games community.

The split is pro or anti AI in creative pursuits. You can see which side of the fence you are on by your reaction to this image that has been going around lately

Looking at all the issues with the image, I feel like it might be mocking the AI maximalist folks. Hope so, anyway.

Surely they could have at least fixed the sleeve? And to finish on "everyone clapped"? Embarassing.

As you might have already gathered, I have a nuanced interest in the subject. Like most technology things, as soon as a topic comes on my radar as potentially important, like it or not I feel like I have to learn about it.

It was the same with crypto, which didn't pay off very well, but I was an early adopter of the WWW as far as the UK goes and that did pay off.

While I don't trust it to code for me, I've found Cursor a great help in coding for the "auto completion", debugging, and things like CI/automations. Last night I helped two different friends with transcriptions of their videos using MacWhisper (uses local LLM so no datacenters involved).

With AI there are also a lot of bad things about it that can get solved given the will, things like the massive amount of power and water, the noisy data centers, the pollution they pump into the water table, all of that.

They could also make some reparations to the IP they stole for training.

My grumble today though is about all the people who are claiming to have made/tag/built things when all they did was talk to a chatbot.

If you get a drink from a vending machine, even if you were very specific about exactly the beverage you want, that doesn't make you a barrista, it doesn't even mean you made the drink. You asked for a drink to be made for you.

That said, I do think there is a threshold where vibe coding crosses into programming. After all, programming is asking a computer to do something for you in exacting detail.

Not sure where that line is drawn yet ...