Comment by dasil003
6 days ago
I am squarely in the bucket of AI skeptic—an old-school, code-craftsman type of personality, exactly the type of persona this article is framed again, and yet my read is nothing like yours. I believe he's hitting these talking points to be comprehensive, but with nothing approaching the importance and weightiness you are implying. For example:
> Claiming that IP rights shouldn’t matter because some developers pirate TV shows?
I didn't see him claiming that IP rights shouldn't matter, but rather that IP rights don't matter in the face of this type of progress, they never have since the industrial revolution. It's hypocritical (and ultimately ineffectual) for software people to get up on a high horse about that now just to protect their own jobs.
And lest you think he is an amoral capitalist, note the opening statement of the section: "Artificial intelligence is profoundly — and probably unfairly — threatening to visual artists in ways that might be hard to appreciate if you don’t work in the arts.", indicating that he does understand and empathize with the most material of harms that the AI revolution is bringing. Software engineers aren't on that same spectrum because the vast majority of programming is not artisinal creative work, it's about precise automation of something as cheaply as possible.
Or this one:
> Blaming LLM hallucinations on the programming language?
Was he "blaming"? Or was he just pointing out that LLMs are better at some languages than others? He even says:
> People say “LLMs can’t code” when what they really mean is “LLMs can’t write Rust”. Fair enough!
Which seems very truthy and in no way is blaming LLMs. Your interpretation is taking a some kind of logical / ethical leap that is not present in the text (as far as I can tell).
> Software engineers aren't on that same spectrum because the vast majority of programming is not artisinal creative work...
That's irrelevant. Copyright and software licensing terms are still enforced in the US. Unless the software license permits it, or it's for one of a few protected activities, verbatim reproduction of nontrivial parts of source code is not legal.
Whether the inhalation of much (most? nearly all?) of the source code available on the Internet for the purpose of making a series of programming machines that bring in lots and lots of revenue for the companies that own those machines is either fair use or it's infringing commercial use has yet to be determined. Scale is important when determining whether or not something should be prohibited or permitted... which is something that many folks seem to forget.