I disagree with your assertion that "most people don't care if the movie was…fully AI generated with human text prompting". And more than disagree, I believe conclusive proof is out there that people absolutely do care.
It's a real issue, and it feels like a bad faith claim that people are "jumping" on the issue as a distraction.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can call out wealth inequality and oligarchy, and also talk about the very real water issue with regard to data centers (and electricity, and loss of rural land, and other many other aspects).
Ed Zitron already completely defeated the comparison that this is just another dot com boom/bust with eventual payout. You're telling yourself a just-so story.
I cannot even describe in words how much I don't care about this. I'm actually looking the angles of why this is a very good thing, being that I'm a pro-craft activist who is completely opposed to the dangerous proliferation of LLMs.
We were literally told that because of the Computer/Internet revolution, the entire nature of business was changing…politics too! Companies would become collectives, employees would have immense power to set their own goals and be radically UX-focused, profits would be widely distributed, and the old corporate structures & crony capitalism would largely be done away with. In a certain sense, becoming a software engineer was to be birthing a new form of leftism.
That largely turned out to be complete and utter hogwash. The instant capitalists realized they had extracted enough out of that myth to gain ultimate power and reassert dominance, they pounced. 2020-2026 has been a boiling-frogs-in-pots shift from collectivism to an extreme sort of New Oligarchy. Software engineers weren't making the world a more fair, creative, and democratic place. LOL! The exact opposite, in fact, has occurred.
Yes, of course we're grieving. But using agents to generate "code" isn't the issue. That's merely a symptom, one among many. The root cause? Societal systems based on pure greed and bigoted supremacy which were NEVER properly dismantled. The new leftism of tech? Nothing but a mirage. Millennials got played.
And wow did we fall for it.
My only hope at this point: Gen Z will succeed where we clearly failed. Our best hope is to listen to them, partner with them, help them channel their rage into action, and take control back from the tech moguls and oligarchs.
Every few years, I hear something like this. And every time, I wonder who is going to believe them, because almost without exception when I purchase organic produce it tastes noticeably better.
Perhaps one could argue "well, that's not because it's certified organic, it's because it's a smaller farm that uses these other crop-growing techniques blah blah blah". OK. Irrelevant. The point is, when I buy conventional produce, and then I buy organic produce, the organic stuff is clearly higher quality. Even better? Go to a farmers market and buy directly from the source.
Cool, can you reply to the person's original reply to me in which they made fun of the point I was making—how "disgusting" it is that Apple…allows photo editors in the App Store?
I've been saying this for forever. Not only isn't it, broadly speaking, true that "users don't care if/how/why…" with regard to how products & services are made, but furthermore: it's our job as craftspeople to make people care! We should be open about the tools and processes we use to make things. Even if it's less obviously artistic than, say, a John Wick movie (where it's undeniable just how much people DO care about the creative process behind it).
It's weird. I still remember 2008, when GitHub's claim to fame was that it was "the easiest (and prettiest) way to participate in the collaborative development of software."
Now they want to end that collaboration, and turn it into automation. Many C-suite executives right now are smiling bigly. Meanwhile, we're leading the exodus. Turns out, we still want the easiest and prettiest way to participate in the collaborative development of software, and GitHub ain't it!
Same. I've been a programmer for over 30 years. I'll be a programmer for another 30 years, sans the LLMs. There's nothing about the technology which appeals to me in the slightest.
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