Of course using AIs is a skill, just like e.g. effectively writing search queries used to be a skill back in the day. When I actually tried getting something done with AI models for the first time, rather than just kicking the tires with the implicit motivation of showing how useless they were, it took way more iterations to get a satisfactory output at the start than a week later.
The kinds of things you'll learn are:
- What's even worth asking for? What categories of requests just won't work, what scope is too large, what kinds of things are going to just be easier to do yourself?
- Just how do you phrase the request, what kind of constraints should you give up front, what kind of things do you need to tell it that should be self-evident but aren't?
- How do you deal with sub-optimal output? Whe do you fix it yourself, when do you get the AI to iterate on it, when do you just throw out the entire sessions and start afresh?
The only way for it to not be a skill would be if how you use an AI either did not matter for the quality output, or if getting better results just a natural talent some people have and some don't. Both of those seem like pretty unrealistic ideas.
I think there's probably a discussion to be had about how deep or transferrable the skill is, but your opening gambit of "it's not a skill, stop trying to make it one" is not a productive starting point for such a discussion.
> What's even worth asking for?
That seems to be a struggle for many. A friend of my wife turned 50 and we went to her birthday party. Two speechs and one song was AI generated, two speeches where written by actual humans, guess which should never have been created, let alone performed?
More and more I struggle to see the point of LLMs. I can sort of convince myself that there are niches where LLMs are really useful, but it's getting harder to maintain that illusion. There are cases where AI technologies are truly impressive and transformative, but they are rarely based on a chat interface.
But why would you devote much time and energy trying to massage AI when you can instead apply directly to the problem? With likely more satisfying process and result. You paint it as if that was some prejudice.
No, I was pretty careful to address only the very specific claim the OP made about how effective AI use is not a skill. If you're reading anything more than that into the comment, I think you're projecting. I really don't care at all whether you or the OP use AIs, and am not trying to convince you of that either way.
My personal experience is that it might be called a skill like learning to use dull knife can be called a skill. I might be mistaken, but I need to see clear process and result. Not lengthy comments like "no it's still useful but you need to approach it deliberately".
And rest assured I don't care about you either(why such tone lol).