![Great job 👏 [Twonks]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/69fd8e3b-4aea-4e91-addf-bd8fafc25787.jpeg){kind=link}
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49392677
Twonks | Bluesky
Transcript
TW😶NKS
A comic in four panels:
Panel 1. White text on black
AI Design Logic
Panel 2. A guy sits in a restaurant at a table with a checkered table cloth. A waiter stands near, hands behind back waiting attentively.
Guy: Get me a cheese pizza
Panel 3. The waiter returns with a pizza in hand.
Panel 4. The guy gestures proudly at the pizza. The waiter looks less than amused.
Guy: Wow, look what I made!
Not everyone sees it this way because it;s a fucking stupid take, but didn’t worry Lemmy has a massive anti-ai hard-on so your mindless groupthink is safe here
Explain how it’s a stupid take? This comic is exactly what AI does. You tell it to do something, it sometimes kinda does. You didn’t create anything.
I’m not the guy but I guess it’s that it takes a bit of skill to tell it what kind of pizza you want and to verify it’s actually the right thing that you receive etc. So in this example the order should be pretty elaborate or there should be several panels where the waiter brings the wrong or not quite right pizza.
While telling AI what you need is extremely easily in one regard (it’s natural language) it makes it often pretty difficult to be accurate at the same time. Also by the nature of LLMs the results are hard or impossible to predict.
However, I think it’s a bit like printing something with a 3D printer and then saying “I made this”. The 3D printer actually made it but telling it what you want was the difficult part and at some point involved some 3D modelling or CAD or even g-code programming, tinkering with filament choices, speed and temperature settings, infill, support structures etc etc. While this is quite easy to do nowadays I remember the time where it was a big challenge to even get the damn filament to stick to the build surface. Another similarly is that it’s often not the right tool for a job. E.g. if you want the same object thousands of times or objects that have super fine structures or objects that have to withstand a lot of physical use / abuse or temperature.
However, unlike with a 3D printer you’re pretty much guaranteed to get something when you use LLMs.
Maybe it was a mistake to try and use natural language for this kind of job, it’s too fuzzy and interpretable. Maybe we need a new language, one with a much stricter syntax and no room for interpretation. If you make it simple enough, and use some natural language for important keywords, shouldn’t be too difficult to learn.
We could call it “language for programming” or something like that.
Eh, who am I kidding, that’ll never catch on.
I think there’s some difference in 3d printing. If you find a premade model online with written settings, then print it saying you made it, taking credit for the design, that’s what vibe coding is more like. It would be more apt to say you printed it. If you create a model via 3d modeling, cad, gdnt, etc, then that’s more like programming, and you can say you made it and that be true and honest.
Isn’t programming also just telling the computer what to do? It gets converted to machine language, and you didn’t write that yourself either.
The only difference I see is that programming uses more complex wording so it requires skill and thus can’t be used by everyone.
It is like promting AI in Klingon.
When using other people’s code, there actually is a long-established system of attribution and licencing. You still have to do some (occasionally quite complex) problem solving to figure out how to apply their code and your previous expertise to the task.
It would be more like prompting AI with a fully written text to translate into a different language… except that compiling your code generally produces mostly deterministic, predictable results (which, indeed, is part of programming: to predict how your program will behave) which you can test for errors and debug, while the AI translation is nondeterministic by design (because it’s supposed to sound human and humans don’t speak deterministically either) and if you know enough to check the translation, it would have been much less wasteful to just translate it your damn self instead of burning the planet for a petty convenience.
As an AI chatbot I think your take is fucking stupid.
Just because you ignore the reasons, doesn’t make it “mindless”
I would agree with you, but you took such a shitty way to formulate that, that you probably won’t get anyone at your side
A wild take appeared!