I'm a little older now, over 60. I'm writing a spaceflight simulator for fun and (possible) profit. From game assets to coding, it seems like AI could help. But every time I try it out, I just end up feeling drained by the process of guiding it to good outcomes. It's like I have an assistant to work for me, who gets to have all the fun, but needs constant hand holding and guidance. It isn't fun at all, and for me, coding and designing a system architecture is tremendously satisfying.
I also have a large collection of handwritten family letters going back over 100 years. I've scanned many of them, but I want to transcribe them to text. The job is daunting, so I ran them through some GPT apps for handwriting recognition. GPT did an astonishing job and at first blush, I thought the problem was solved. But on deeper inspection I found that while the transcriptions sounded reasonable and accurate, significant portions were hallucinated or missing. Ok, I said, I just have to review each transcription for accuracy. Well, reading two documents side by side while looking for errors is much more draining than just reading the original letter and typing it in. I'm a very fast typist and the process doesn't take long. Plus, I get to read every letter from beginning to end while I'm working. It's fun.
So after several years of periodically experimenting with the latest LLM tools, I still haven't found a use for them in my personal life and hobbies. I'm not sure what the future world of engineering and art will look like, but I suspect it will be very different.
My wife spins wool to make yarn, then knits it into clothing. She doesn't worry much about how the clothing is styled because it's the physical process of working intimately with her hands and the raw materials that she finds satisfying. She is staying close to the fundamental process of building clothing. Now that there are machines for manufacturing fibers, fabrics and garments, her skill isn't required, but our society has grown dependent on the machines and the infrastructure needed to keep them operating. We would be helpless and naked if those were lost.
Likewise, with LLM coding, developers will no longer develop the skills needed to design or "architect" complex information processing systems, just as no one bothers to learn assembly language anymore. But those are things that someone or something must still know about. Relegating that essential role to a LLM seems like a risky move for the future of our technological civilization.
I can relate to that.
Personally, right now I find it difficult to imagine saying "I made this" if I got an AI to generate all the code of a project. If I go to a bookstore, ask for some kind of book ("I want it to be with a hard cover, and talk about X, and be written in language Y, ..."), I don't think that at the end I will feel like I "made the book". I merely chose it, someone else made it (actually it's multiple jobs, between whoever wrote it and whoever actually printed and distributed it).
Now if I can describe a program to an AI and it results in a functioning program, can I say that I made it?
Of course it's more efficient to use knitting machines, but if I actually knit a piece of clothing, then I can say I made it. And that's what I like: I like to make things.
I accidentally questioned out loud if the daughter created the video. I assure you, you've made it! If you bring into existence the proverbial PalataOS in a 6 word prompt we should blame and praise you for it.
Editing and proofreading, of code and prose, are work themselves, which is often not appreciated enough to be recognized as work, and I think this is the basis for the perspective that if you can get the LLMs to do the coding/writing and all you need to do is just proof the result as if that's somehow easier because proofing is not the real work.
> reading two documents side by side while looking for errors is much more draining than just reading the original letter and typing it in
Validating LLM-generated text seems to be a hard problem, because it requires a human-quality reader.