It can absolutely be both. Expensive competent people are replaced with inexpensive morons all the time.

Not to mention the environmental cost is literally astronomical. I would be very interested if AI code is functional x times out of 10 because it's success statistic for every other type of generation is much lower.

Lots of assumptions there. In case you actually care, I don't think any one company should be allowed to own the base system that allows AI to function, especially if it's trained off of public content or content owned by other groups, but that's kind of immaterial here. It seems insane to villainize a technology because of who might make money off of it. These are two separate arguments (and frankly, they historically have the opposite benefactors from what you would expect).

Prior to the industrial revolution, weaving was done by hand, making all cloth expensive or the result of sweatshops (and it was still comparatively expensive as opposed to today). Case in point, you can find many pieces of historical worker clothing that was specifically made using every piece of a rectangular piece of fabric because you did not want to waste any little bit (today it's common for people to throw any scraps away because they don't like the section of pattern).

With the advent of automated looms several things happened:

• the skilled workers who could operate the looms quickly were put out of a job because the machine could do things much faster, although it required a few specialized operators to set up and repair the equipment.
• the owners of the fabric mills that couldn't afford to upgrade either died out or specialized in fabrics that could not be made by the machines (which set up an arms race of sorts where the machine builders kept improving things)
• the quality of fabric went down: when it was previously possible to have different structures of fabric with just a simple order to the worker, it took a while for machines to do something other than a simple weave (actually it took the work of Ada Lovelace, and see above mentioned arms race), and looms even today require a different range of threads than what can be hand woven, but...
• the cost went down so much that the accessibility went through the roof. Suddenly the average pauper COULD afford to clothe their entire family with a weeks worth of clothes. New industries cropped up. Health and economic mobility soared.

This is a huge oversimplification, but history is well known to repeat itself due to human nature. Follow the bullets above with today's arguments against AI and you will see an often ignored end result: humanity can grow to have more time and resources to improve the health and wellness of our population IF we use the tools. You can choose to complain that the contract worker isn't going to get paid his equivalent of $5/hr for spending 2 weeks arguing back and forth about a dog logo for a new pet store, but I am going to celebrate the person who realizes they can automate a system to find new business filings and approach every new business in their area with a package of 20 logos each that were AI generated using unique prompts from their experience in logo design all while reducing their workload and making more money.

At that point just let me ditch the formality and send over the summary in the first place.

A tangent a little bit but so much this. Why haven't we normalized using fewer words already?
Why do we keep writing (some blogs and all of content marketing) whole screens of text to convey just a sentence of real content?
Why do we keep the useless hello and regards instead of just directly getting to the points already?

Automating parts of something as a reference tool is a WILDLY different thing than differing to AI to finalize your code, which will be shitcode.

Anybody right now who is programming that is letting AI code out there is bad at their job.

but you know, you can keep using that push lawnmower, just don’t complain when the kids next door run circles around you at a quarter the cost.

That push lawnmower will still mow the lawn in decades to come though, while your kids fancy high-tech lawnmower will explode in a few months and you're lucky if it doesn't burn the entire house down with it.

GenAI is automating the more human fields, not some production line work. This isn't gonna lead to an abundance of clothing that are maybe not artisan made, but the flooding of the art fields with low quality products. Hope you like Marvel slop, because you're gonna get even more Marvel slop, except even worse!

Creativity isn't having an idea of a big booba anime girl, it's how you draw said big booba anime girl. Unless you're one of those "idea guys", who are still pissed off that the group of artists and programmers didn't steal the code of Call of Duty, to put VR support into it, so you could sell if for the publisher at a markup price, because VR used to be a big thing for a while.

Have you had to code review someone who is obviously just committing AI bullshit? It is an incredible waste of time. I know people who learned pre-LLM (i.e. have functioning brains) and are practically on the verge of complete apathy from having to babysit ai code/coders, especially as their management keeps pushing people to use it. As in, they must use LLM as a performance metric.

Gotcha, so no actual discourse then.

Incidentally, I do enjoy Marvel "slop" and quite honestly one of my favorite YouTube channels is Abandoned Films https://youtu.be/mPQgim0CuuI

This is super creative and would never be able to be made without AI.

I also enjoy reading books like Psalm for the Wild Built. It's almost like there's space for both things...

No argument there.

but the flooding of the art fields with low quality products

It's even worse than that, because the #1 use case is spam, regardless of what others think they personally gain out of it. It is exhausting filtering through the endless garbage spam results. And it isn't just text sites. Searching generic terms into sites like YouTube (e.g. "cats") will quickly lead you to a deluge of AI shit. Where did the real cats go?

It's incredible that DrNik is coming out with a bland, fake movie trailer as an example of how AI is good. It's "super creative" to repeatedly prompt Veo3 to give you synthetic Hobbit-style images that have the vague appearance of looking like VistaVision. Actually, super creative is kinda already done, watch me go hyper creative:

"Whoa, now you can make it look like an 80s rock music video. Whoa, now you can make it look like a 20s silent film. Whoa, now you can make look like a 90s sci-fi flick. Whoa, now you can make it look like a super hero film."

It even made "manual" programming worse.

Wanted to google how to modify the path variable on Linux? Here's an AI hallucinated example, that will break your installation. Wanted to look up an algorithm? Here's an AI hallucinated explanation, that is wrong enough at some parts, that you just end up just wasting your own time.

the data you input can and WILL eventually be used against you.

Can you expand further on this?

chatbot DCs burn enough electricity to power middle sized euro country, all for seven fingered hands and glue-and-rock pizza

congratulations on offloading your critical thinking skills to a chatbot that you most likely don't own. what are you gonna do when the bubble is over, or when dc with it burns down

User data has been the internet's greatest treasure trove since the advent of Google. LLM's are perfectly set up to extract the most intimate data available from their users ("mental health" conversations, financial advice, ...) which can be used against them in a soft way (higher prices when looking for mental health help) or they can be used to outright manipulate or blackmail you.

Regardless, there is no scenario in which the end user wins.

Read 'The Communist Manifesto' if you'd like to understand in which ways the bourgeoisie used the industrial revolution to hurt the proletariat, exactly as they are with AI.

taking a couple steps back and looking at bigger picture, something that you might have never done in your entire life guessing by tone of your post, people want to automate things that they don't want to do. nobody wants to make elaborate spam that will evade detection, but if you can automate it somebody will use it this way. this is why spam, ads, certain kinds of propaganda and deepfakes are one of big actual use cases of genai that likely won't go away (isn't future bright?)

this is tied to another point. if a thing requires some level of skill to make, then naturally there are some restraints. in pre-slopnami times, making a deepfake useful in black propaganda would require co-conspirator that has both ability to do that and correct political slant, and will shut up about it, and will have good enough opsec to not leak it unintentionally. maybe more than one. now, making sorta-convincing deepfakes requires involving less people. this also includes things like nonconsensual porn, for which there are less barriers now due to genai

then, again people automate things they don't want to do. there are people that do like coding. then also there are Idea Men butchering codebases trying to vibecode, while they don't want to and have no inclination for or understanding of coding and what it takes, and what should result look like. it might be not a coincidence that llms mostly charmed managerial class, which resulted in them pushing chatbots to automate away things they don't like or understand and likely have to pay people money for, all while chatbot will never say such sacrilegious things like "no" or "your idea is physically impossible" or "there is no reason for any of this". people who don't like coding, vibecode. people who don't like painting, generate images. people who don't like understanding things, cram text through chatbots to summarize them. maybe you don't see a problem with this, but it's entirely a you problem

this leads to three further points. chatbots allow for low low price of selling your thoughts to saltman &co offloading all your "thinking" to them. this makes cheating in some cases exceedingly easy, something that schools have to adjust to, while destroying any ability to learn for students that use them this way. another thing is that in production chatbots are virtual dumbasses that never learn, and seniors are forced to babysit them and fix their mistakes. intern at least learns something and won't repeat that mistake again, chatbot will fall in the same trap right when you run out of context window. this hits all major causes of burnout at once, and maybe senior will leave. then what? there's no junior to promote in their place, because junior was replaced by a chatbot.

this all comes before noticing little things like multibillion dollar stock bubble tied to openai, or their mid-sized-euro-country sized power demands, or whatever monstrosities palantir is cooking, and a couple of others that i'm surely forgetting right now

and also

Is the backlash due to media narratives about AI replacing software engineers?

it's you getting swept in outsized ad campaign for most bloated startup in history, not "backlash in media". what you see as "backlash" is everyone else that's not parroting openai marketing brochure

While I don’t defend them,

are you suure

e: and also, lots of these chatbots are used as accountability sinks. sorry nothing good will ever happen to you because Computer Says No (pay no attention to the oligarch behind the curtain)

e2: also this is partially side effect of silicon valley running out of ideas after crypto crashed and burned, then metaverse crashed and burned, and also after all this all of these people (the same people who ran crypto before, including altman himself) and money went to pump next bubble, because they can't imagine anything else that will bring them that promised infinite growth, and they having money is result of ZIRP that might be coming to end and there will be fear and loathing because vcs somehow unlearned how to make money

For slightly earlier instance of it, there's also real time bidding

Don't forget problems with everything around AI too. Like in the US, the Big Beautiful Bill (🤮) attempts to ban states from enforcing AI laws for ten years.

And even more broadly what happens to the people who do lose jobs to AI? Safety nets are being actively burned down. Just saying "people are scared of new tech" ignores that AI will lead to a shift that we are not prepared for and people will suffer from it. It's way bigger than a handful of new tech tools in a vacuum.