"ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

Like any reference or other person, one needs to question whether those ideas fit into their mental models and verify things anyhow. One never could just trust that something is true without at least quick mental tests. AI is no different than other sources here. As was drilled into us in high school, use multiple sources and verify them.

I will not use Jr developers for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of a Jr.....

You don't have to outsource your thinking to find value in AI tools you just have to find the right tasks for them. The same as you would with any developer jr to you.

I'm not going to use AI to engineer some new complex feature of my system but you can bet I'm going to use it to help with refactoring or test writing or a second opinion on possible problems with a module.

> unlikely to have a future in this industry as they are so easily replaceable.

The reality is that you will be unlikely to compete with people who use these tools effectively. Same as the productivity difference between a developer with a good LSP and one without or a good IDE or a good search engine.

When I was a kid I had a text editor and a book and it worked. But now that better tools are around I'm certainly going to make use of them.

I do not use books for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own original thoughts and ideas no writer has seen before.

If anyone gives me an opinion from a book, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evolving from that point, and are unlikely to have a future in this industry as they are so easily replaceable.

If this pisses you off, ask yourself why.

(You can replace AI with any resource and it sounds just as silly :P)

For me, I am not sure it has eliminated thinking.

I have recently started to use codex on the command line. Before I put the prompt in, I get an idea in my head of what should happen.

Then I give it the instructions, sometimes clarifying my own thoughts while doing it. These are high level instructions, not "change this file". Then it bumps away for minutes at a time, after which I diff the results and consider if it matches up to what I would expect. At that point lower level instructions if appropriate.

Consider whether it was a better solution or not, then ask questions around the edges that I thought were wrong.

It turns my work from typing code in to pretty much code design and review. These are the hard tasks.

Is copy-pasting from Wikipedia an "opinion" from Wikipedia?

<3

I’m in the same boat, and what tipped me there is the ethical non-starter that OpenAI and Anthropic represent. They strip-mined the Web, ripped off copyrighted works in neat space, admitting that going through the proper channels was a waste of business resources.

They believe that the entirety of human ingenuity should be theirs at no cost, and then they have the audacity to SELL their ill-gotten collation of that knowledge back to you? All the while persuading world governments that their technology is the new operating system of the 21st century.

Give me a dystopian break, honestly.

> If this pisses you off, ask yourself why.

Why would it piss me off that you’re so closed minded about an incredible technology?

Isn't it the modern equivalent of "let me Google that for you"?

My experience is that the vast majority of people do 0 research (AI assisted or not) before asking questions online. Questions that could have usually been answered in a few seconds if they had tried.

If someone preface a question by saying they've done their research but would like validation, then yes it's in incredibly poor taste.

To modifying a hitchism.

> What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Becomes

> That which can be asserted without thought can be dismissed without thought.

Since no current AI thinks but humans do I’m just going to dismiss anything an AI says out of hand because you are pushing the cost of parsing what it said onto me and off you and nah, ain’t accepting that.

> someone else will reply with “I asked ChatGPT and it says…” or “According to AI…”

I had a consultant I’m working with have an employee do that to me. I immediately insisted that every hour they’ve billed on that person’s name be refunded.

The irony is that the disclosure of “I asked ChatGPT and it says…” is done as a courtesy to let the reader be informed. Given the increasing backlash against that disclosure, people will just stop disclosing which is worse for everyone.

The only workaround is to just text as-is and call it out when it's wrong/bad, AI-generated or otherwise, as we've done before 2023.

Indeed. On the other hand, there's a difference between "I one-prompted some mini LLM" and "A deep-thinking LLM aided me through research with fact-checking, agents, tools and lots of input from me." While both can be phrased with “I asked ChatGPT and it says…” or “According to AI…”, the latter would not annoy me.

It must be the randomness built into LLMs that makes people think it's something worth sharing. I guess it's no different from sharing a cool Minecraft map with your friends or something. The difference is Minecraft is fun, reading LLM content is not.

It is not the same. It needs some searching, reading and comprehension to cite Google etc. Copying a LLM output "costs" almost no energy.

I think the difference is people use those as citations for specific facts, not to logically analyze your code. If you're asked how technical detail of C++ works then simply citing Google is acceptable. If you're asked about broader details that depend on certain technicalities specific to your codebase, Googling would be silly.

Does that particularly matter in the context of this post? Either way, it sounds like OP was handed homework by the responder, and farming that out to yet another LLM seems kind of pointless, when OP could just ask the LLM for its opinion directly.

Careful with this idea, I had someone take a thread we were engaged in and feed it to an LLM, asking it to confirm his feelings about the conversation, only to post it back to the group thread. It was used to attack me personally in a public space.

Fortunately

1. The person was transparent about it, even posting a link to the chat session

2. They had to follow on prompt to really engage the sycophancy

3. The forum admins stepped in to speak to this individual even before I was aware of it

I actually did what you suggested, fed everything back into another LLM, but did so with various prompts to test things out. The responses where... interesting, the positive prompt did return something quite good. A (paraphrased) quote from it

"LLMs are a powerful rhetorical tool. Bringing one to a online discussion is like bringing a gun to a knife fight."

That being said, how you prompt will get you wildly different responses from the same (other) inputs. I was able to get it to sycophant my (not actually) hurt feelings.