It was obviously huge. You could see it taking off. Yet a lot of people proudly displayed ignorance and backed each other up on it to the point that discussion around the topic was often drowned out by the opposition to change. Now today it takes minutes of playing with ai coding agents to realise that it’s extremely useful and going to be similarly huge.
Resistance to change is not a virtue!
My position with the AI is almost the same. It is overall a net negative for cognitive abilities of people. Moreover I do think all AI companies need to pay fair licensing cost to all authors and train their models to accurately cite the sources. If they want more data for free, they need to propose copyright changes retroactively invalidating everything older than 50 years and also do the legwork for limiting software IP to 5 to 10 years.
I agree. A bunch of us here might use it to scaffold applications we already understand, use it as a rubber duck to help understand and solve new problems, research more effectively, or otherwise magnify skills and knowledge we already have in a manner that's directed towards improving and growing.
That's cool. That's also not what most people will do with it. A bunch of us are total nerds, but most of the world really isn't like that. They want more entertainment, they want problems solved for them, they want ease. AI could allow a lot of people to use their brains less and lose function far more. For the minority among us who use it to do more and learn more, great. That group is a tiny minority from what I can tell.
Take for example that a huge use case for generative AI is just... More sophisticated meme images. I see so much of that, and I'm really not looking for it. It's such an insane waste of cycles. But it's what the average person wants.