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Post by Hanno Zulla

Earlier in the thread

Ela @ela@infosec.exchange

You know, I do get - and share - the concerns about the resource consumption, environmental impact, corporate power grab and attempt to undermine sovereign computing that comes with AI.

But oh girl is it a power amplifier in the right hands! If your discourse is still about "protecting hand crafted code from AI slop", you are missing out on the implications and potential of that technology big time.

Maybe LLMs are just fancy pattern matching. But maybe I just pattern machted myself some really nasty bugs in your code. Maybe I pattern matched myself a complete reverse engineering of a tricky binary. Or a complete set of unit, integration and end to end tests for that feature I built.

Too many of you just sound like "Real Men don't use AI", exactly as in this timeless satire piece, poking fun at the resistance against structured programming languages more than 40 years ago.

archive.org/details/bitsavers_

Internet Archive datamation :: 198307 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive From the bitsavers.org collectio n, a scanned-in computer-related document.datamation :: 198307

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Hanno Zulla @hzulla@infosec.exchange

@ela speaking for myself, I certainly see the benefits of experts using generative AI in their field of expertise where a user is willing and able to spot mistakes in the generated output. A force multiplier, yes.

However, the current generative AI mania is fully driven by using it outside of the users' field of expertise. "A PhD in your pocket" is the literal ad copy. The organisations pushing the use of generative AI are using it to replace human expertise and craft, without understanding if the plausible-looking generative AI results are correct. This way lies madness and one day we're going to be very sorry looking back at the many failures, cruelty and general downdumbing caused by AI use in our current era.

Anyway, since you're generalising about how AI opponents sound to you, let me clap back that these "True, I share concerns about the AI industry, but my coding assistant is great for me and I'm only using it ethically unlike everybody else around me" comments like yours sound like so many white-lie responses by meat eaters to the ostensibly annoying vegan: "Sure, you have a point about the global-scale negative effects of the meat industry, but I eat less meat than average and only buy from the organic butcher."

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Ela @ela@infosec.exchange

@hzulla I'd like to be very specific here. The ethical debate is legit, and I don't even claim ethical AI usage for myself. However, any attemt to frame this debate as "AI does not work" is bound to fail.

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