My Current Thinking about AI - Oct. 2025
Head's up that this post is still a draft. I've started writing [issue: could not generate tlink]. I may or may not get back to this one to wrap it up.
During a conversion with a friend in discord they asked:
I wonder what kind of world we’d have if they gave up the Chat GPT code for the asking.
Do you think that your use of AI made you more skeptical/critical of code you look at or just more critical and doubtful of AI?
I'm writing my response here to avoid spamming the channel. I'm also using it as a chance to drop a reference to my perspective on it now to see how things change over time.
Various Angles
-
The first thing to get out of the way is that AI is an overloaded term. It can mean so many things it's easy over generalize.
- The algorithms that pick music
- Full on image generation like midjourney
- Partial image generation that alter an existing image like photoshop's smart fill tools.
- Image recognition that attempts to describe the contents of photos
- Recent auto complete in computer programming that attempts to give you fill out the entire function instead of just a stub
- Chat GPT style interfaces that take prompts and mimic human responses
- One of the fundamental tools of modern computer programming is Automated Testing. You create a suite of tests that sends specific input to your app and verifies the output matches what's expected. For example,
- Note about the thing where the AI said it smiled. That's bullshit.
- Mimicing feeling is super effective. The best reference to that I've seen is people suggesting that a species that sees faces in their pancakes is super seceptable to assigning consiousness to AI where none exists.
- There's this thing with photography. In the early days, you had to get your own chemicals, mix them without killing yourself, coat the light sensitve emulstion a paper canvas yourself.
- There's currenlty no way to automatically test the reponses from AI during development
Endnotes
The statistical analysis companies use on all the vairious surveilance data they get by monitoring your browsing, credit card transactions, etc...
Footnotes
The term AI is used in other ways too