Can absolutely be a great tool in addition to one's skills, it's when people solely use it at a crutch and dont do any due diligence is where it can be a mess. Friend of mine's son is in college for computer science and he's been skirting by having AI doing all his heavy lifting without actually understanding what he's doing and how the code works. Then when he landed a solid internship, he started spiraling because he didn't know how to do any of the tasks.

I'm not going to argue against engineers using AI coding tools to write boilerplate code faster. I certainly think it's a useful tool for that.

But outside of that context, it's problematic to argue that "you can't tell if something was created by AI just by looking at it. And if you can't tell the difference, then the difference doesn't matter."

It feels like we aren't too far away from AI being indistinguishably good at other things. Actors would obviously be upset if you started producing movies with their likeness without paying them (and without them shooting a single scene). Screen writers, voice actors, authors, and artists would be similarly upset. Fans have already rallied against video game studios that try to use AI to replace artists.

I certainly think the "if you can't tell the difference, then the difference doesn't matter" test is problematic when you look at video shared with news stories.

So what makes writing code different? Is it because consumers of movies, television, books, and art care if AI took a job away while consumers of code don't? Is it because people who write code don't really care about writing boilerplate and just want to get past that to bigger, better things? Is it because a lot of people writing code don't like it at all and only got into it for the money?

I don't think the knee-jerk reaction to reject all AI generated content is misplaced. AI raises real questions and creates real problems that we need to address instead of simply dismiss because writing CRUD is boring.