Comment by uncivilized
9 hours ago
In your examples, you didn’t “make” anything. The person whose work trained the LLM made the work. The landscaper made the lawn. I don’t know how it’s possible to take pride in doing nothing.
I can hire a maid to make my bed for me and tell her how exactly to fluff my pillows and duvet but I would take no pride in that.
Your compiler created the bytecode that the CPU runs. How can you take pride in writing your Rust code?
If you go to a coffee shop and ask for extra ice, whole milk, double espresso latte - did you make the coffee or did the Barista make it. You gave him some specific directions didn’t you?
It’s the same with LLMs.
That point was specifically addressed in the article.
Given that a compiler doesn't include a statistical model likely to create one's written Rust code, the compiled bytecode is quite clearly an expression of said writing.
How can you take pride in writing a novel when it’s Notepad and Windows that is translating keystrokes to letters?
> I don’t know how it’s possible to take pride in doing nothing.
Aw, now I feel sad for you. It's definitely possible, and I do it every weekend.
I wish I could know that feeling
Let’s not argue about the meaning of “making”, but that’s a very limited view of how value is created. So in your view the producer or even the director of a movie cannot take pride in it because the actors are the ones doing the work?
you can take pride in it, definitely added value and also acknowledge that an actor turned director (to keep the metaphor going) may have different feelings about the process even if they are happy with the end result similarly a coder turned manager or director may have some internal struggle with not actually doing the coding anymore -- similar to how one might feel having made a product or feature entirely with AI coding
Article does take a stance on the term "making" vs "having a hand in creation" fwiw. I guess the latter doesn't have a great term yet which is why an argument over the term making is sincere
A large part of how actors act is specific cues given to them by the director, which is pretty clearly work by the director. A director also gives specific instructions for a lot of other things that have a noticeable impact on the resulting value of the movie.
That's different from telling a maid to generally clean your home. If you gave a maid specific instructions on how to clean and how to move things around in a way that made a noticeable impact on how clean your house ended up being, you could be proud of the managerial work you're doing. But no one does that, because people pay money to not have to work.
Likewise, if you just told an LLM to let it rip on a general task then you're not doing much work, but if you were managing the LLM to do specific things then you are doing significant work.