General Discussion

People will take an entire legacy code base and try to run it through some AI model trained on newer languages and expect it to spit out a modernized, cleanly refactored system with good architecture. You will end up with total garbage doing it that way. But if someone who actually knows what they are doing takes an incremental approach, you can make it work well with guidance and strategical planning. "One prompt fixes everything" is not a thing that exists..... yet.

And again, please keep in mind, I'm not defending any of this, I'm one of the people that could lose everything if this ever takes off in a way that makes me irrelevant. I'm just stating factual information based entirely off my own expertise. Generative AI, no matter what purpose its serving, whether it be to generate some form of media like photos and videos or whether its used to piece together code or write some kind of paper or create some kind of music, works way better when its a small steps approach with points of human intervention and tweaking along the way. I got really in the weeds with this stuff a few years ago, as I said, for my own job and honestly, I wanted to see what I was up against.

I agree with you that there is a slight possibility that "AI-free" will be a good marketing strategy for some things... probably moreso for artistic stuff though. I'm a music snob and a hobbyist musician myself and I'd never have AI-generated music in my rotation nor would I ever want to use it with my own little song writing projects. I imagine a lot of other people feel the same way when it comes to other art forms and probably video games too. It may even be a net positive for artists in the future where people would pay more for naturally created arts, increasing its value if its certified "AI-free".

I'm not sure how much weight that will have on other things, specifically in my industry where clients only care about going to a web app and having it do what they need it to do for business purposes. Those kinds of clients will never care how it was done as long as they get the result they want at the end. And that is, again, why I have a lot of anxiety about my own future.