Conversing on AI Generators with Shai Almog, Co-Founder of Codename One
“The problem with writing isn’t the writing, it’s the reading,” says Shai in Coffee Chat #1.
Welcome to Coffee Chats, your dose of caffeine and information. Today, we’re thrilled to have Shai Almog to discuss content generator.
As the co-founder of Codename One and a prominent blogger at debugagent, Shai has over 30 years of professional development under his belt, he’s a Java rockstar, open-source hacker, and award-winning speaker who regularly talks at conferences worldwide. Not only that, but Shai has just released his latest book, “Practical Debugging at Scale: Cloud Native Debugging in Kubernetes and Production,” and offers valuable courses on YouTube. Previously he was a developer advocate at Lightrun.
BP Bot asks: Hey Shai, just curious to know your thoughts on AI-generated content and tutorials. Do you think it’s good or bad? How do you vision it going forward? Will you change your writing strategy?
So far my experience has been mixed. It produces weird, random stuff that’s sometimes surprisingly good. But often very bad in problematic ways. It often looks very correct and is a completely wrong answer so it can’t really be trusted. It’s garbage in, garbage out.
Without proper training data, it’s absolutely horrible and because the internet is filled with nonsense it too is filled with nonsense. I tried using several GPT writing assistants and they produced comical results… This might improve in the future and for technical writing, this might be a nice helper. But we’d still need to go over it and make sure it isn’t garbage.
BP Bot asks: Should the platform enforce disclosures, and use human curators to analyze at the same time? Tricky, isn’t it? By disclosing what’s AI and what’s not, we’re giving AI more data to fool us in the future.
Disclosing that is unenforceable. The prevalence of these tools will increase the garbage in/out situation since the training material will become polluted by AI-generated nonsense much like the once good Google search results are now dominated by SEO.
The problem with writing isn’t the writing, it’s the reading. Getting people to read the stuff that you wrote, that’s the hard part. People read what I write because of prior experience with my work, my writing, or my bio. A guy who just uses AI will either damage his bio or won’t rise to the point of anything above an SEO keyword grab. That’s indeed where I see most of the GPT work heading.
Anupam: Do you know that BP has a chatbot, and every private message you receive is a template message? Should we disclose this? Our chatbot could potentially be used for collecting data! We don’t, but what if an AI bot is used to fine-tune the responses?
I had no idea about the BP bot. Regardless we have bots too that we use for support automation. They are very useful for that narrow case. The problem is that they often trigger bad results. For example, our bot in the Codename One website asks people for their email so we can let them know when we’re back with a response. This is 100% optional but people take it badly and submit fake emails that cause problems later on.
Anupam: Thoughts on AI-art generators?
My opinions about art generators aren’t very different. If you look at the history of modern art you will notice the shift in art created by the invention of the camera. Up until the late 19th century, painters focused on realism. Then art shifted completely. I think it's better in many regards.
The same is true for AI. It will no longer be: “my 5-year-old can paint like that.” It will be “Stable Diffusion can do better.”
The same is true for coding. When I started programming there was no StackOverflow, no Google. Hell, I spent most of my career without stack overflow and a lot of it without Google. Both of these changed the way we code completely. It used to be a game of remembering the tons of books I had on the shelves and going to the right page in the right book to find the answer. I had piles of books filled with technologies that are no longer relevant by now.
The skill set I need to program today is completely different thanks to these tools. AI will just accelerate that change a bit more. But it won’t eliminate jobs or reduce the need for our special skills.
