MoS is going around again for what is now its 21st year of operation, and there’s been a lot going on in the off-season, much of it assisted by AI, in particular ChatGPT.

I’m very aware of the ambivalence and sometimes clear hostility that many people feel about AI, and LLMs in particular, and can understand the outrage that artists and authors feel about their works being incorporated wholesale, with neither permission nor recompense, in the training material for LLMs.

Oddly, I think, there appears to be little or no backlash about the similar absorption of extant programming code into the corpuses of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini AI and others. There seems to be a collective agreement that such coding effort does not embody creativity, or at least not in the same way or to the same extent as does, say, a novel or a painting. This sells short the art of coding, I’d suggest, but it is what it is.

In any case, as I say, ChatGPT has been a very helpful companion for much of the new work I’m about to describe. My feeling at this stage is that AI represents a clear benefit for people at my level of coding ability, which allows me to craft prompts for coding efforts using the appropriate terminology and to intuit when the outputs of those prompts are likely in error. What those prompts create are outputs that would either take me orders of magnitude longer to produce or, in some cases, would not be possible for me to produce at all given my current knowledge.