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manOnPavementWaving t1_isqdf9x wrote

Reply to comment by Owner2229 in Talked to people minimizing/negating potential AI impact in their field? eg: artists, coders... by kmtrp

Disagree, gave my dad my DALL-E access, and he learned to prompt engineer to reasonable success in an hour. Once you've got quick iteration, specifying what you want becomes trivial.

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Redifyle t1_isr0oac wrote

But specifying what you want in terms of coding is more complex and requires more background knowledge than just typing a prompt for DALL-E (in which case quick iteration is way less of a factor).

In time, the level will of course be so abstract that that that isn’t necessary anymore, but while the technology is still progressing there will definitely be a need for programmers (aka the guys who know what to put in the prompt).

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berdiekin t1_iss2afs wrote

I guess if we ever get to the point where you can describe an entire app/project with a simple (none-technical) description and get something out of it that does what's expected then programmers would become obsolete.

Honestly I'm more interested to see if an AI would be able to integrate into a legacy project and take over / improve that.

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freeman_joe t1_iswfjlx wrote

Why would it try to improve legacy project when it could do one better from scratch? I won’t ask AI to improve steam engine when it could make me electric motor from scratch.

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berdiekin t1_iswpk2e wrote

That's a fair question, but so much depends on the how/when/what. Like how fast will these tools appear, how good will they be, how powerful will they be, how easy to use will they be, ...

I personally don't see these tools going from pretty much not existing to writing entire projects from scratch based on a simple description. At least not without at least some human intervention.

Because code generation is 1 thing, now tell it to integrate that with other (human written) APIs and projects with often lackluster documentation (if there's any in the first place). Not gonna happen.

Unless we hit some kind of AGI breakthrough ofcourse, then all bets are off.

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freeman_joe t1_isyv8ff wrote

I think it will have better capabilities than humans. Every time AI is better in some domain we ignore it and point to what it can’t do at the moment and project to future and say it will probably do it good but not that good. Yet AI shows as every time it is better in domains it learned fully than humans.

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manOnPavementWaving t1_issmqzx wrote

I don't think this holds for higher layers of abstraction. If all I need to do is ask to make the porgram faster, and then a model does it for me, that's easy. If I ask it to optimize cache hits and data locality, that task would be more difficult for the prompter (more specific). Depending on the quality of the system, the level of abstraction will eventually reach a point where anyone can code, with very little background knowledge.

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