Sure, AI can write very decent Java code. But asking it the right question is the hardest part, and it won’t help you with that.
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ChatGPT is taking the world by storm and redefining the definition of hype in the process. Dutch high school students use it for their homework and instantly give themselves away by handing in essays with perfect spelling and grammar. Everybody’s talking about it; I’m already late to the party. Comments range from admiration to stoic resignation, to plain fear for one’s job or the fate of humanity. I’m no pundit with a crystal ball, but my instinct is that our jobs as software developers are safe. For now.
Thanks to my background in linguistics and short stint as a translator, I took an early interest in machine translation and am still unimpressed by the state of the art. It’s hardly surprising. Perfect comprehension of human language is the holy grail of AI. It’s not about self-driving cars. If those performed as poorly as the best translation engine, none would be allowed off the test lot.
The native speaker’s intuition of a meaningful sentence is not something you need to be taught. You start picking it up as a baby. For most of human history, we didn’t have schools, and yet we understood each other perfectly — within the same tribe, naturally. This capacity is a defining part of being human. We’re born to speak, with no neat separation into hardware and software. All that makes human language a very hard problem to express in algorithms.
Machines are better at systems we designed ourselves, with predictable and exceptionless rules. No board game is safe from AI domination, it would seem. This doesn’t diminish the impressive mental prowess of professional chess or go players. The computer just happens to be better at it, like a deer can outrun you and salmons are better at swimming. None of this should spoil your appetite to compete in these pursuits with other human begins. Just don’t cheat.
AI does an impressive job of stealing and interpolating. It invents the room where the original Giaconda posed for da Vinci, but it’s still the result of an algorithm and by nature predictable. Predictable is bland. Great art emerges when the combination of otherwise mundane elements (words, notes and chords, or brush strokes) combines into something that is more than the sum of its parts. You can’t predict, much less force this originality and few artists manage to produce a consistent stream of genius output. They all have their off days.
When AI can write a sequel to Macbeth and an album of original Beatles songs worthy of Shakespeare and McCartney, the singularity has arrived. Humans are effectively redundant. It won’t happen in our lifetime, so let’s set our present expectations lower. Surely it can help us write Java?
Yes, it can.
