artificial-intelligence

It's the year 2025, and AI (Artificial Intelligence) has taken over the world, from Programming to Image/Video generation to helping automate some tedious tasks. However, it also poses some real threats, so in this post, I'm going to explain why AI is great and why I don't rely on it (at least for now). The Good Side of Artificial Intelligence Before we talk about the good side of Artificial Intelligence, let's talk a little about its history, The term artificial intelligence was first coined by John McCarthy in 1956 when he held the first academic conference on the subject. But the journey to understand if machines can truly think began much before that. In Vannevar Bush’s seminal work As We May Think he proposed a system which amplifies people’s knowledge and understanding. Five years later, Alan Turing wrote a paper on the notion of machines being able to simulate human beings and the ability to do intelligent things, such as play Chess. The above snippet was from History of AI Now, let's talk about the good side of AI, In recent times, Artificial Intelligence has been a very useful tool, it's being used to improve and automate different sectors including the health sector, Software programming, Image/Video generation, and so much more, and for programmers like me it has been greatly helpful in improving my productivity and helped me build apps faster. I know you may wonder, why then do I say I don't trust AI? Well, I will explain that part, then maybe you will agree with me. Why I don't trust AI Artificial Intelligence has been a significant part of my productivity tools, but it has also been a major cause of my mental exhaustion, yes I mean that, you know despite how useful it has been to me, I have made sure to never rely solely on it because doing this leads to two(2) things, Brain fatigue, and Brain Laziness. They sound familiar, right? Yeah, I know, but they're different. What's the difference between Brain Fatigue and Brain Laziness? Brain fatigue also known as mental fatigue or mental exhaustion, is a feeling of tiredness that occurs when your brain is overworked, while Brain Laziness or Mental Laziness is the art of intentionally avoiding activities that demand great use of the mind or that require deep thinking. Now that you know what Brain fatigue and Brain Laziness are, let's talk about how they're caused by AI. Before the breakthrough of Artificial intelligence in 2022 when ChatGPT was released, the traditional way of bootstrapping an idea was to either use a pen and paper to write down an outline for your idea or use a note app, but since the introduction of AI most people bootstrap their ideas through AI apps like ChatGPT and oftentimes they leave all the work for AI to do for them ( outlining, refining, etc.), I know you may be thinking, "but that's not bad?" absolutely, it's not bad but the act of doing such is known as Brain Laziness which then leads to Brain fatigue, but how? How does AI cause Brain Laziness and fatigue? You see, in my experience, the human brain has a way that it works, which is that it is easier to resolve a problem you caused than one caused by another, and the process of trying to resolve this problem is where Brain fatigue occurs. Let me show you an example. The code below was written by an AI, and there's a bug in it. Written by AI addAttributes() { return { ...this.parent?.(), level: { default: 1, parseHTML: (element) => Number(element.tagName.replace("h", "")), renderHTML: (attributes) => ({ level: attributes.level, }), }, }; }, Fixed by me addAttributes() { return { ...this.parent?.(), level: { default: 1, parseHTML: (element) => // the bug is the absence of `toLowerCase` Number(element.tagName.toLowerCase().replace("h", "")), renderHTML: (attributes) => ({ level: attributes.level, }), }, }; }, at first glance you will think they're the same, which was why discovering this bug took hours (after rewriting other parts of apps thinking they were the source of the bug) which caused me a Brain fatigue as I was tensed and overworked my brain trying to figure out the bug, mind you that if this was originally written by me, the probability of causing such a bug would've been significantly lower. Conclusion What am I trying to say here? The use of AI is good ( in fact, developers who don't use it might get overthrown by those who do), but over-reliance on it can be problematic, especially to your brain. What do you think? Have you ever encountered such a situation before? Do let me know in the comments or on Twitter at CodewithVick