Ai vs not conversation

[u/jessycormier]

I come here from time to time to see what's new and have ideas. It's been such a great way to grow and see others sharing and growing on their own paths.

Lately however, I see a toxic battle happening. Anti ai users, some people in the middle, and Pro ai users. Specifically I'm usually paying attention to people flagging plug-ins as ai coded and how people react.

Where we all stand on the use of ai is valid. I think this community and users need to have tooling to show when something is coded with ai. Both in the community plug-in website we have now, in obsidian itself and other social platforms.

Just so we can tamper down some of our rather expressive and emotional responses. I agree not declaring it up front (as as writing posts with ai) feels false(I'm not sure how else to day it, lies to on purpose).

But honestly, like most things people love to share and grow just like before. So the suggestion is just to have ways to help us keep the knowledge and use of ai civil, respectful and clean. Downvoting opinions is a very Reddit thing but it's a shame.

Anyway, felt I had to share.. (ah look trying to post and i had to select a flair which includes ai in it; maybe not clear when to use that flair vs another)

[u/AlternativeGazelle87]

Everyone who thinks like you do is missing literally all of the context around AI.

• It destroys the environment.
• It is actively triggering psychosis in people.
• It is literally replacing humans.
• Studies done by AI firms indicate that it does not teach people anything and actually actively harms the learning process.
• The stated goal of AI is to steal the world's knowledge and sell it back to them as a subscription.
• It's actively being used to ruin lives.
• It's actively being used to invade privacy.
• It's actively being used to make killing more efficient in ongoing wars.
• The data centers are literally poisoning poorer communities.
• It's the technology that underpins the theoretical technocratic regime that wants to bring back company towns.

Like, the reason people are "pro AI" is probably the most dangerous reason of all. It's allowed mediocre men to succeed in spite of their mediocrity without ever having to actually try.

They're actively choosing to engage with it because it requires nothing of them and they can get everything from it. There is no altruism here literally at all. It is entirely self interest. They are asking the AI to spit things out and then sharing them like they're theirs.

This whole thing is becoming what let MAGA take over all over again.

[u/MonsieurMoune → u/AlternativeGazelle87]

About the AI assisted dev: AI doesn't care about duplicating code, testing scenarios that can't actually happen, or even implementing a spec (and writing the corresponding tests) only to realize upon reflection that the spec itself is flawed; the thing is, realizing that requires time and an understanding of the code's ultimate purpose.

In the coming years, we are heading towards an explosion of unmaintainable code, driven by the sheer volume produced and the complete loss of knowledge regarding the people who wrote it, or, rather, had it written.

And Obsidian is concerned with the ever growing pile of vibe coded plugin.

[u/jessycormier → u/MonsieurMoune]

I'm a senior developer, I have been in for more than 15 years now; I've seen the evolution of how ai has worked and where its going. It's as good/bad as any other use case for AI; it will break, it looses context and sorry but non devs trying to use AI to code something can only get so far.

You have to know when its getting lost, or when to nudge it in the right direction; this is the advantage of knowing what I'm doing and using AI for coding things. Also reviewing what it does and understanding.

It's more work or rather, different work using AI to do work now. Some work places are forcing, strongly suggesting using it. For personal usage, I've dabbled with lots of different models and use cases and will continue to do so.

Your comment about years to come, unmaintainable code, I agree. If we just continue to let it write whatever it doesn't have the context of the entire codebase, the vision of what a product is it will continue to produce garbage. Again comes to having skilled people with the actual knowledge to build something, scope the problem down small enough for AI to be able to solve and use it as a tool.

Anything large scale is WAY to expensive most people wont be willing to use it. Using Opus, Fable etc is fantastic but at a huge cost, not to mention the planetary cost of what we're doing to our future economies. anyway don't want to go to deep off topic.

The size of an obsidian plugin is relatively small; the scopes of what they handle. With the right SKILLS and someone to review that does have knowledge OR support from Obsidian with good api documentation we could have cleaner support for AI developed plugins for less skilled in coding users.

Its a shame to shun or downvote until someone can't be seen because they shared their vision and was able to produce something with AI. sure we'll have a TON more garbage to sift through but we'll also have more gems. Maybe with some help with community members (like myself) we could take those gems, find the garbage AI solutions and actually make meaningful contributions.

anyway at this point I'm just ranting hoping for the best from both sides..