@rabiezaater@piefed.social @nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

generating ideas

LLMs don't generate ideas, stricto sensu. They do, and I find it useful for esoteric (gnosis through chaos magick) purposes, output names and words unbeknownst to the user (this is how I, as an ESL person, learned some words I didn't know before).

But if we consider hard determinism, do we as biological automatons, though?

learn to code

As someone who codes since my childhood, I wouldn't suggest relying on LLMs for that. They could be used to output a descriptive text about some function or library, but you must know LLMs are statistical machines, the output text is a chain of "which token is the most probable next?", an auto-completing only slightly "better" than, say, Gboard's auto-complete. They "hallucinate" precisely because they rely on statistics and randomness.

Again: extremely useful as an "Ouija board", not very useful for blindly relying for learning something, definitely not reliable for "vibe coding".

Wanna learn how to code? Do the Elliot Alderson (Mr. Robot TV series) approach: find an existing "Hello world" project/source-code, tinker with it, change things here and there, try to compile/run, Google the exception that the compiler/interpreter thrown at you, change more things, break things, then fix the things you broke... This is exactly how I did. Let go of any hurry and you'll likely going to master it eventually.

d&d [...] I need a character [...] it makes it up quick

Yes, this is one of the use cases where LLMs can thrive, as a dice with hundreds of billions of sides.

You may want to roll real dices, convert the number into the respective letter (A=1,B=2,...) then append it as a source of real entropy, because the randomness you get from LLMs is likely to be pseudorandom.

Ideally, you'd tune (using a RTL-SDR) to a blank radio frequency and digitize the (true noise) spectrum into ASCII, and voila: free randomness, straight from the Cosmic Womb to your computer!

get upset about AI “stealing” work with regard to code or other stuff that people willingly put out there for free for others to consume

Totally agree with you in this regard. Throughout the history, humans relied on other humans' "ideas". Most of the novelty stemmed from "what if I were to take this flamey thing that consumed the tree I used to sit on, and put it under this food?", mashing up existing things. If we really were to appeal, evolution is that, merging two genetic sequences in an approximate manner while trying to replicate, still I don't see humans accusing newborn of "stealing genetic work from their ancestors".

definitely useful in a lot of ways, [..] if [...] developed on a more localized and decentralized scale

I totally agree in this regard, too.

To answer the main question: IMHO, people hate AI because it has been pushed and used by corps to further enshittify this world. I'm not Anti-AI, but I'm not pro-AI either. There can be nuance from both.