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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17843 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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I think that AI has been gravitating towards software development (perhaps to the detriment of other skills), in part because software development helps develop AI! But software development is fairly validation oriented – code runs or it doesn't. Someone who is lazy enough to have an AI write text with their name on it may also be too lazy to validate that text, or even too lazy to have another AI fact-check it.

You can say "yeah they are a poor user" and fair enough, but people will say things like "AIs have PhD level intelligence" or "AIs can act as a smart research intern" and then (in my experience) from time to time they go and make stuff up. Certainly lazy PhDs and research interns do this, all the time, but I don't think that demonstrates intelligence.

I'm not an AI-denier, I use it relatively consistently and I like it for research – but a lot of that is because Google is bad now (and their AI overview is atrocious, I've seen it present conflicting information), and you can use AI to get you links that you can check with your own eyeballs, and you can give it specific prompts that help mitigate other bad tendencies. But the fact that you have to do these things means that you cannot necessarily just expect AI cruising around on its own recognizance (or in the hands of someone who is not intelligent and/or used to using AI) to operate at that high level.

But software development is fairly validation oriented – code runs or it doesn't.

Sweet summer child. One of the undocumentd laws of programming is that if you have even number of errors you will get program that works mostly ok.

I have had way too many debug sessions that were - here is the error, how the fuck this thing worked at all, ahhh - here is the other error.

I am familiar with this dynamic, but (at least from where I sit) a mostly-functional program is different from a mostly-true thesis, or what have you.

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