Fuck AI

Exactly. At best you're commissioning work to a machine. You didn't provide much creativity, at best a direction and some constraints.

In the art world it's been settled ages ago that the underlying concept isn't protected, and few if any prompts go beyond just describing a vague concept.

I have had in person conversations with multiple people who swear they have fixed the AI hallucination problem the same way. "I always include the words 'make sure all of the response is correct and factual without hallucinating'"

These people think they are geniuses thanks to just telling the AI not to mess up.

Thanks to being in person with a rather significant running context, I know they are being dead serious, and no one will dissuade them from thinking their "one weird trick" works.

All the funnier when, inevitably, they get screwed up response one day and feel all betrayed because they explicitly told it not to screw up...

But yes, people take "prompt engineering" very seriously. I have seen people proudly display their massively verbose prompt that often looked like way more work than to just do the things themselves without LLM. They really think it's a very sophisticated and hard to acquire skill...

Reminds me of the very early days of the web, where you had people with the title "webmaster". When you looked deeper into the supposed skillset, it was people that knew a bare minimum of HTML and the ability to manage a tree of files?

I'll never forget being at an ATM and overhearing a conversation between two women in their 30s behind me - the one woman tells the other - "I've been thinking about what I want to do and I think I want to be a webmaster". It just sounded like a very casual choice and one about making money, and not much deeper than that.

This was in 1999 or so. I thought - man, this industry is so fucked right now - we have hiring managers, recruiters, etc...that have almost no idea of the difference in skillsets between what I do (programming, architecture, networking, database, and then trying to QA all of that and keep it running in production, etc.) and people calling themselves "webmasters".

Sure enough, not long after, the dotcom bubble popped. It was painful for everyone (even people that kept their distance from the dotcom thing to an extent) without question, whether you had skills or no. But I don't think roles like "webmaster" did very well...

This reads like NFT bros.

My thoughts exactly, but the past few years have* really lowered my expectations of other humans

“Amira” is a pretty female sounding name

Based on my own in person experience with some LLM fanatics, I think this is quite probable. I've heard very sincere feedback from people that think they are amazing because they have "advanced prompt engineering" skills. They think "prompt engineer" will be a very selective job in and of itself and think they have an edge. They think they will be able to work on any field because the LLM will take care of domain specific stuff and their "rare mastery" of prompts will be the hot skill.

I used to unironically be low-key proud of my googling skills. Before google got so crummy, at least.

It's worse than your typical creative claim on copyright of something like a poem - because prompts are by definition functional more than creative, and typically contain too few purely expressive elements to meet creative height. They managed to put prompts in a worse position than boilerplate code in terms of protection, lol