Eric Rodenbeck on AI as a Design Medium. “In my class, the first principle is simple: Do not take what comes back from prompts at face value. Interrogate it. Iterate on it. Stay with it longer than feels efficient.”
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As I have come to expect, Eric’s expressed perspective is in equal measure insightful and reasonable.
I miss you, John Allspaw.
The thing I keep coming back to with my teams using AI: would you rather spend time explaining a task to someone, or would you rather just do the task yourself? There's a steep ROI dropoff after the first few prompts, if you have very specific outputs that you need to produce. And the future is metered, so prompt wisely. The freebie era is drawing to a close.
I love me some AI but man its tough wading through that much AI slop of an essay. When people give up their voice I do wonder if they even read what they wrote, and why are we reading it.
The advice that they give is stupid and wrong; you should run your own models, they are free and will cost nothing forever. You can control them more, and the convergence to the anodyne is related to how you set the temperature. Its not part of "AI" its just part of the front end product, that honestly isn't worth it anyway.
The take away should be: use the tools that are available for you to control it yourself, learn how to use it, learn the shape of it.
And don't use it to write your essays! Use it to help you think, to try out ideas, more I Ching style to trigger thoughts, not to actually think. Its a tool for thinking, not a replacement for it.
I don't understand this comment. The linked essay is about using AI as a design medium and, as far as I can tell, was not written with AI. So...?
To me the essay has all of the tropes of AI generated text, which is ironic considering the content of it. I pasted parts of it into ai detection tools to "make sure" and it came back rating it 98% likely to be AI generated. To my ear it seems obviously "rewritten for clarity" but you know, given the topic covered it seems like an interesting creative choice which is why I double checked. Its not poorly written or anything like that just recognizely the output of claude
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