The Human AI Interface

Recently I’ve noticed a weird set of phrases that I had never read before, getting popular. The first one was “defense in-depth”. I’ve been working in web development for 15+ years so that wasn’t a common term for me. I thought: that’s a concise way of putting it. I’ll add it to my dictionary!

Eventually when arguing with an AI against some defensive programming it was doing (check X is not nil, even though it’s impossible to be nil due to the context), it valiantly defended its decision mentioning it was “defense in-depth”. That immediately tickled my spidey senses. Was my colleague merely repeating the slop machine’s output as his own? But I ended up dismissing it as a mere coincidence.

Then the same happened with more terms like “belts and suspenders solution” and “load-bearing changes” that eventually also got spewed by the AI. This particular colleague dove in head first in the AI hype train and, after seeing several of their gigantic pull requests with comments about “belts and suspenders”, I knew these were not really their words anymore.

It’s not that the these terms are new or wrong. They are merely not commonly used inside my sphere. But now when using these tools we’re, intentionally or not, conforming to it. Were they using a better word to describe something or copying what the AI said? I don’t know anymore. Not really.

Later they argued that a problem was unsolvable because the AI couldn’t do it. But even smart people seem to forget the fact that AI is not only incomplete, but also very easily falls into bad answers. One of the most common phrases I see on the AI output now is “that’s the real culprit”. Only to then repeat a variation of this phrase five minutes later after you correct it. Ah, now that’s the smoking gun!

But this is not really about my colleague. It’s now spread everywhere and I don’t know how to feel about this. I want to hate it but it does also enable so many good things for me. I can code much more than before, even though I don’t understand or learn as much. But I’m still using it as a tool and it’s clear that many fully depend on it. They delegate everything they can and really don’t want to… think.

Instead of the future where the AI extends us, we’re heading into a different version where the meat bag is the middleman but the content is all AI. Fuck that. I don’t care about what the AI has to say, I care about what you, fellow human being, has to say.

At what point do we become the tool for AI?