Stephen Downes

I've seen this perspective presented a few times over the last three years and it makes sense to me: AI is to today's coding languages and today's coding languages were to Assembler and Machine Language. We can, in other words, just think of AI as moving the development of software to a higher level of abstraction. OK, so who cares, it's an old argument. Yeah, but it made me wonder about the analogous argument for writing (say) documents and articles. I mean, you generally don't just AI to write some random article. From what I can tell, people who use AI to write have some idea of what they want to say, and they use AI to develop the article for them based on that. Now, in my view, what I'm really interested in is what they give to the AI as a prompt; I can figure out for myself what it might look like as a full article. But for people who don't have experience at that level of abstraction, the article might be necessary. Something to think about.