I read the other piece and now this piece and it still reads like scaremongering to me. Sure there is hype and a lot of stuff will turn out to be bad. A lot of people (me included) will say "told you so". On the flip side, I do use code generation and we review that code like we review all code. The formal scientific approach demanded in the article runs against my option of just trying it out.
So the question becomes whether my colleagues will change their review practices to humor me and my dumb bot. If they do, yes we've become hype-infected and will earn us some failures down the line. But I don't see why we should be helpless here and why we should defer to whatever scientists for their judgement.
> It’s next to impossible for individuals to assess the benefit or harm of chatbots and agents through self-experimentation. These tools trigger a number of biases and effects that cloud our judgement. Generative models also have a volatility of results and uneven distribution of harms, similar to pharmaceuticals, that mean it’s impossible to discover for yourself what their societal or even organisational impact will be.
Yeah, but so do people.
> When we only half-understand something, we close the loop from observation to belief by relying on the judgement of our peers and authority figures, but these groups in tech are currently almost certain to be wrong or substantially biased about generative models.
Yeah but the same could be said basically about any hype, like XML 25 ago or object-oriented programming. There is huge hype and then at some point the dust settles down and the society and businesses use the bits that are actually useful.