I consider it at the point I didn't build it with my hands. If I'm placing the girders, I built the building. If I'm instructing someone to place the girders, I didn't. In that case, the best I can get is "we" built the building.
If you open up the web browser in the simulation it's the homepage, and it links out to Extend (in your actual browser) if you click the navbar company logo. I was figuring it was either made with Extend or is an ad for it. Possibly both.
I think this is cut from the same cloth as getting the model regulated. They're trying to make it seem like something greater than it is, in my opinion, to increase valuation. A pattern matching tool is rather unexceptional. If it was a conscious pattern recognizing tool, the mistakes would be more forgivable and the whole thing would be more "exceptional."
What's the outlet then? Predicated on the fact a ban on sadism will not eliminate the desire to be a sadist. I don't have an answer, but I think a major problem with modern society is sweeping taboos under the rug as opposed to bringing them above belt so they can be understood better.
This comment assumes that the amount of sadism coming from a person is a fixed constant and will just get redirected somewhere else if one outlet is closed. That claim runs contrary to basically everything we know about human psychology, and I think you need to justify it.
> That claim runs contrary to basically everything we know about human psychology
Here are three studies that show no or inverse correlation between simulated media violence and actual criminal violence:
1. “Results suggest that societal consumption of media violence is not predictive of increased societal violence rates.”[0]
2. “… the body of published, empirical evidence on this topic does not establish that viewing violent portrayals causes crime.”[1]
3. “We find that violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies. … The substitution away from more dangerous activities in the field can explain the differences with the laboratory findings.”[2]
What is the evidentiary basis for your opposing claim? Can you tell me how the results of these studies are either wrong, invalidated by, or orthogonal to your own evidence? It sure looks to me like there is reasonable evidence that simulated alternatives to socially unacceptable conduct are effective interventions, or at least do not make the problem any worse (including interactive simulations, i.e. video games).
You're changing the subject from sadism to violence. The vast majority of media portrayals of violence portray the violence as morally justifiable (according to some system of morality, which might not be the dominant system). That's quite different than causing injury or distress because it is fun, which is what sadism is.
Would you consider that you have perhaps both misstated the parent’s claim, misrepresented the study you are quoting, and failed to offer any counter-evidence in support of the parent’s actual claim?
The introduction from which you cherry-pick excludes a refutation of claims about media violence and aggression, not because they are valid[0] or causal, but because their analysis was focused on answering a different question. It is that different question which seems relevant to refuting the parent’s original claim.
If you can offer some actual evidence for the actual original claim, not this differently stated claim, I would certainly be interested in that.
[0] First, these claims apply only to non-interactive media, which a chatbot is not. Studies on video games more consistently show no or negative correlations. Second, they almost certainly are not real. The last study I cited explicitly mentions how these prior lab results do not seem to transfer to real life outcomes. And I cannot write a dissertation here about the flawed methodology of many of these aggression studies and the outright fraud of people who conducted some of them, like Fredric Wertham (whose fraud was not uncovered until 2012).
The problem is that the folks at Anthropic seem convinced that Claude is conscious (or at least likely to be so) and so there is nothing "simulated" about the harm that sadistic users would be causing it.
I need to inhale to breathe. If I'm addicted to a substance, I need it like the air I breathe. Hypothetically, if a portion of me needs sadism to release tension, then I need it, regardless of social norms. Banning it doesn't remove my need for it, but it might change shape. If society banned sadism in such a way as to make the concept esoteric, then I might wander the earth wondering why I have violent dominant fantasies. It doesn't remove the desire, it removes the definition, is my point.
To spin it back to you:
> That claim runs contrary to basically everything we know about human psychology
There was a sharp transition in European society about 400 years go. Before then, burning cats alive was a popular entertainment and so was being a spectator at a public execution or a public torture session. If human psychology worked the way you say it does, then although it would be possible to reduce public displays of violence (e.g., if people opposed to it find themselves with much more power than usual) European society (and its derivatives, e.g., the US) would have a strong tendency to bounce right back to having high rates sadistic violent after a generation or two (because according to you, repressing the impulse permanently is futile). But that is not what happened. The most parsimonious explanation for what actually happened is that before 400 years ago, the high rate at which people (and particularly impressionable male teenagers) were exposed to sadistic violence greatly increased the desire of the average person for sadistic violence in a self-sustaining cycle and that making it much less likely that boys and male teenagers would witness any sadistic violence greatly decreased the appetite for sadistic violence in the society again in a self-sustaining cycle.
> the high rate at which people were exposed to sadistic violence greatly increased the desire of the average person for sadistic violence in a self-sustaining cycle
Well yeah, everyone wants to belong and be part of the tribe. We conform a lot to societal tendencies. That's not what I'm referring to. I'm referring to the individual sadist with that as a core part of their identity, not an individual with an anthropological adaptation.
The only way I see AI killing us is by killing our spirit. We're going to automate our humanity away if we're not careful. Or the water. The environmental impact may get us as well.
Serious question: Does the ease of building cheapen the final product? Like something I've been struggling with is how can I show effort in the design of a product if I can just one-shot it with a prompt?
Essentially no actual product that users will pay for can be one-shot with a prompt. But you can dream bigger and do harder, more valuable things.
Design is still hard. People are very good at sniffing out shortcuts and inconsistencies and AI “smell”. The last 10% of designing a product is more like the last 400% (because you’ll probably need to throw it away or start over). It’s not spending time on design that cheapens the product
It doesn't cheapen the product, but it may cheapen the experience of developing it. Part of the satisfaction of being a developer is overcoming the complexity and challenges of the task, learning something new, some amount of struggle. You're not going to get that same satisfaction from a task that is too easy, or has become too easy.
The current state of AI seems to be more about automation of well defined tasks rather than things like creativity and challenging design that bucks convention, or requires human sensibility, so I think there is still room to get satisfaction from that aspect of it (you do the design, AI does the coding).
People point out how computer chess hasn't killed human chess, but I don't see much satisfaction from doing any development work by hand that could equally well (at least as far as the resulting artifact goes) be done by one/few-shot prompting, even though part of the fun of being a developer is being able to conjure dreams into reality - the end result is part of the satisfaction, but the challenge in getting there also matters.
Cheapen to whom? If you're building software for yourself I don't think this matters a whole lot as long as its valuable to you
If you're building it to sell.. I don't see how this doesn't commodify most products if a competitor can just clone what you're selling with minimal effort
> Like something I've been struggling with is how can I show effort in the design of a product if I can just one-shot it with a prompt?
You're discovering that effort doesn't matter, only results.
I bought an old house and started renovating it. Countless hours of back breaking work to get things up to a modern standard of living. Yet bringing people over to see the finished result felt so hollow. There's no "gosh this must have been so hard, great work!". To them it is just a house, like any other. The incredible amount of effort on my part to get it to that point meant absolutely nothing. No one cares how much work you put into something. It ultimately only matters what something is or isn't, and competence is the expected baseline.
Well, the care is evident in subtle ways. No one is going to come over and exclaim "wow you put a lot of care into this!" But when they see cabinets that match, design elements flow from one part of the house to another, and other things buttoned up, they might say: "This is a really pleasant space." Which, in my mind is synonymous. I've learned these are synonymous reactions over many years of making art.
I do think if someone started to dig deeper on the house renovation and you had an answer for your choices, it would come across a lot better than always replying "I don't know, I paid an interior decorator." Everyone likes a good story, and that storytelling lets a visitor go deeper in their relationship with the homeowner. Obviously there's a myriad of different people, but this is how it generally works in the circles I run in.
I want to renovate a house myself too and we would ask your ears off and you could show us every single detail of your renovation story and challanges.
There's a way in which it can definitely cgeapen things.
When you are vibecoding or vibe engineering, you're moving so quickly that it's difficult to evaluate what you're actually building and why. This often significantly reduce the quality and usefulness of the result.
It seems very difficult to mitigate, even if you were aware of the phenomenon. I think that the speed alone plays a large role. I'm not sure how one can build quality products without careful reflection and thoughtful iteration throughout the process.
What matters is human hours invested. A tic tac toe game hand coded in 30min and a fully playable 3d platformer created in 30min both have the same value in my eyes.
You can make cheap things with AI, but you can also make things that are rich and have depth. That deepness though comes from days of thinking, reflecting, and iterating on the problem. It doesn’t come from a fire and forget prompt.
Two days ago I had someone on socials send me a message saying they had cloned my platform, and that they were going to undercut me. It gave me a good laugh. A prompt isn’t a product, it’s the first step of one. I’ve poured thousands of hours into the part of the product that makes it real - the administration, the financials, the infrastructure, the marketing, the iteration and refinement. One thing a lot of people are now facing the realities of is that there is far, far more to a product than just code. AI can’t one shot a business - that still takes blood sweat and tears.
I'm doing the same thing as op and at least for me no; There are soooo many details i like to have changed, it doesn't feel like its just slop.
It feels like a very very well done exhaustive PoC.
Like executing an Idea is a 1000 times more fun than just thinking it and rethinking it a few month later again and then typing a few things down, again, and then thinking about it again and then thinking "i should do some sabatical to work on that stuff" Just to talk to friends who did sabaticals and never done anything with their time and realizing that you wouldn't just do that just because you took some sabatical.
See, I don't know, I almost have a romantic vision of the sabatical work. I could have done anything. I could have done most everything. But I didn't. I did _THAT_ thing. And maybe that's the thing I have to get over; it's only romantic to me, not the person experiencing the work.
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