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Comment by pluc

2 days ago

That's a fair answer. How do you stop people from doing it though? How do you stop it from becoming every lazy person's first reflex instead of every smart person's third?

I don’t know. But at least you’ve identified the real problem: lazy people generating trash code. AI isn’t bad, people are.

  • I suppose the issue is that it's a multiplier for bad actors. It has become so much easier to generate plausible-looking code (or any number of things that would've previously required a knowledgeable human to make something that at least passes the sniff test, let's say legal documents as another example) and just overwhelm the limited bandwidth of good actors.

  • We have historically intervened socially (via state regulation, taboo, or censure) in areas where the likelihood of misbehavior was high or the result of misbehavior was severe enough.

    For example: nuclear material possession or refinement; slavery; consumer-available systemic antibiotics; ozone-damaging coolants; dowries.

    Proscriptions on those are imperfect and inconsistent worldwide, but still prevalent. Each of them is a thing which benefited many people but whose practice enabled massive harm due to human failures (like laziness).