A friend of mine was helping me to do some screens to make some OBS Studio scenes. We were on discord sharing our workflow via screen share, then he looks for an AI model using a search engine. Then upload an image just to cut the white background. I told him that easily he could use the magic wand in photoshop or gimp to cut it out, even, if he wanted, customize the settings to achieve saw edges or none of them. The place where he works loads a bunch of work to him, so, he says me that that’s the only way to make the day job done, but, the image that the AI spit out was horrible. The AI not just cut the background, it cut relevant part of the image too, also, it added some transparency to the image. Thing that my buddy had to fix in photoshop adding some black under it in another layer.
I do not know how to talk to him about it, because he was the photoshop guy in highschool and I was the gimp guy in highschool, we always tried to achieve the same things in both softwares, we got pretty good in them. He uses AI for everything now, to add subtitles, to delete content from a video or image, to cut background, etc, just to fix it in photoshop or whatever.
If I’m completely honest, I’ve felt that with my own use of AI and it’s my primary driver in reducing or outright avoiding its use personally - I’m not learning anything when it codes up crap that barely works, and then debugging that crap later on is a nightmare because I don’t have the requisite experience.
Is it really though? Because would you have actually put in the effort in the first place to build that app?
I am sure in some instances yes, like I grew up wanting to learn a ton of different things and dove in and learned a lot.
On the other hand though, having to dig in and debug in a way actually is teaching you, surely not the “proper” way to learn and there are absolutely downsides regardless, but I’d posit it’s still better then simply not doing the thing at all. 🤷
I wanted to set up automatic color lighting based on various factors in node-red, I didnt know shit about node-red though I’m familiar with low-code tools like powerautomate so some of that knowledge helped but I was still extremely out of my depth on where to even begin.
So I asked AI, and within a couple days I had it functional and learned a lot about how passing messages worked and some typescript too. I very much doubt I would have put in the effort to learn how to do all of that on my own entirely and still did gain knowledge through the process. Absolutely not as much if I took the real time to learn, but I wasn’t going to do that for such an overall low-tier goal and that would absolutely have taken more then a few hours over a couple days lol.
Then again, I am pretty sure I’m some strain of neurodivergent and when I use LLMs I’m not generally asking it to “do it all” for me, rather I ask how to do very specific tasks and “put it together” myself. 🤷