this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

At the designing stage, the CEO asked the CTO to "propose a concrete programming language" that would "satisfy the new user's demand," to which the CTO responded with Python. In turn, the CEO said, "Great!" and explained that the programming language's "simplicity and readability make it a popular choice for beginners and experienced developers alike."

I find it extremely funny that project managers are the ones chatbots have learned to immitate perfectly, they already were doing the robot’s work: saying impressive sounding things that are actually borderline gibberish

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

What does it even mean for a programming language to "satisfy the new user's demand?" Like when has the user ever cared whether your app is built in Python or Ruby or Common Lisp?

It's like "what notebook do I need to buy to pass my exams," or "what kind of car do I need to make sure I get to work on time?"

Yet I'm 100% certain that real human executives have had equivalent conversations.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

And ironically Python (with Pygame which they also used) is a terrible choice for this kind of game - they ended up making a desktop game that the user would have to download. Not playable on the web, not usable for a mobile app.

More interestingly, if decisions like these are going to be made even more based on memes and random blogposts, that creates some worrying incentives for even more spambots. Influence the training data, and you're influencing the decision making. It kind of works like that for people too, but with AI, it's supercharged to the next level.