I am dealing with it by walking away from the internet and connected technology as much as possible.

Unfortunately, generally if people can do something, they will. And with AI systems they have been given one of the largest short cuts possible, thus they take it relentlessly. There is no concern for quality so long as it is good enough to benefit them.

They will try to rationalize it but it typically ends up in moral corruption of "If I don't, they will."

It saddens me because I saw the vision of what computers and connected technology could be in the 90's and 2000's, only to see it turn bitter.

I remember reading an essay by Richard Stallman calling all this kind of stuff out in the late 1980's and I kind of hate that he got it so right. In assuming that many will take the power play and the convenience means that this is the path we take.

The more you can walk away form this stuff the better even if you don't want to.

The cost of producing code has dropped to almost zero, but the cost of knowing whether that code is actually useful hasn't.

I think the same is true for images, videos, and music. The cost of producing content is approaching zero, but taste, originality, judgment, and intent still matter.

In a world where anyone can create almost anything, having good taste could become increasingly important.

(Tree was full of apples before, easy to grab, and no one even knew it. Later we started to jump, climb and find new ways that was progressive and very exciting. All a sudden they figure out the tree that was already running out of apples, so what. Find a new one that requires tools/skills not much people has and still valuable, it is much harder to say but you are already one of the people who can and should. Your 12 year old of your self used curiosity, passion, what ever the motive is still there, just kick start it again, find your new AOL, do your first new Geocities level project that matches today's tech.That means imo it is time for you to train your first llm, dig into how inference works. Or write your first arduboy game for fun. The new challenging stuff that they can not touch any time soon hopefully that will trigger back your curiosity and passion. Best of luck! My 2 cents.)

This can’t go on, so it won’t. The 20s will be looked back at as a really awful time except for the ultra rich. Wait and watch and give actual people a chance, humans are better than this, but we’ve gotta develop antibodies to this new strain of leech.

Your client sounds like a prick of a person - I hope you find better clients!

What is the response here to finding out the plans of reply with agents and post as agents? If we do nothing the flood of AI posts will overwhelm the internet. But doing something seems impossible too.

Every industry goes through a cycle of birth, explosion of creativity, enormous profitability, followed by consolidation and a small corporate class, and a large hobby class.

A time ago, sewing and tailoring was a valuable skill. Cheap clothes made it unnecessary. Today sewing is a hobby and most people who sew do so at a lower quality than a machine. You can say the same about pottery and ceramics.

There was a time when there were hundreds of car companies. Folks who wanted to could build a car, or plane, from scratch. That's not possible anymore.

Today lots of people cook at home at a level far superior to (at least) fast food restaurants. But of course fast food still exists.

I have been lucky to spend my career at the birth of the industry. It is now moving into the next stage, the commoditization of the skill set. I've seen the industry change before though, this is just the next cycle of that.

Lots of people will make a lot of software for themselves. But they won't sell it. Lots of other people will buy software because programming (ai or not) won't interest them. Programming isn't the skill here. Everything else in the business is.

I agree. A lower barrier entry at a significant cost to society.

I wish there was a way to metric creativity, strategy and effort.

I have an ipad and it came with Garage Band to create music. I toyed around with that a little. I think thats like with AI - people will play around with it, figure some things out but do they have the interest and time to take on all the work involved with something like a restaurant management app? I certainly am not interested enough to become a music producer, nor do I have enough taste to know if something is good. There's an entire process to getting music produced that I'm ignorant of. People can generate toy apps or websites with AI all they want ... back in the dot com days people could create HTML sites from MS Word (it was disgusting output). They have no interest in maintaining, patching, troubleshooting, and scaling any of these toy apps. Sure they could get AI to do that too - can they check that AI is doing it correctly? what about when it fails?

I think the thing that humans are going to find is AI has no taste. Its the statistical median/average of solutions. AI slop is going to become prevalent and people are probably not going to like it after the hype fades. Part of the human experience is connecting with other humans, even if its following a band, or artist, etc. Things created by AI don't have that human experience element.

Some skills are impressive, hard to learn and take years or decades to master but are essentially worthless in a monetary sense. Just yesterday I witnessed a musician masterfully playing a beautiful piece on the accordion. Only he wasn't playing in a great music hall, he was in a busy subway station hoping to collect a few coins from passersby. I assume he mostly did it for the love of the game, while he could have made more money delivering food or sorting boxes at Amazon.

That got me thinking that programming might be like that in the near future, it's still an impressive skill for a human to learn and master and it takes tremendous effort and the craft itself is beautiful, but economically it will just not matter anymore. And in the same way as the music industry today is bigger than it ever was and there's tremendous money in it but 95-99 % of highly talented musicians will never earn a decent wage with it, the software industry will be bigger than it ever was but the money will be highly concentrated in the hands of a few players. Maybe we will still have some rockstar programmers than can masterfully command legions of agents or that win the love of the crowd for their unique work, but most of us will be enjoying this craft as a creative hobby and will do other things for a living.

Then again, coming back to the music parable, for a long time "amateurs" can make music with software tools without having any talent or even knowing musical notation or anything about tempo. Does that make them musicians? So take solace in the fact that these people aren't programmers and never will be, they're just pushing buttons on a synth board watching the "music" that comes out. Mastering a skill, regardless of what it is, will still matter to people, it will just not be worthwhile economically for most of us. There are so many things in that category, running for example isn't worthwhile for most of us in an economic sense as you have to be at the top 0.1 % of runners to make a living with it, still it has tremendous benefits and brings enjoyment.

It is good for them TBH. I don’t think there is anyway to stop that, and they do genuinely feel good so it’s kinda fine for me.

I have learned to cope with AI tools at work, but use it scarcely, and went back to books and hand-coding if I really want to learn something because that’s the only way that makes the knowledge stays in my brain a bit longer.

I did lose some interests in programming in general, but AI is just a part of the reason —- most of it is because I don’t have good mental health —- and AI is part of the reason triggering anxiety.