You may have watched or heard of the recent Chat GPT-4 announcement which converted a hand-drawn sketch of a snippet of a website into code (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) successfully.
Naturally, this is a hot topic for us at Sixtwo and prompted us to play an April’s Fool to start conversations like; should developers be worried about Open AI? What does this mean for Web design agencies?
So, should developers be worried about Open AI? Is it time for a career change?
The answer is no, Open AI will not replace developers in the immediate future. Open AI, has gained attention for its ability to generate ‘human-like’ text with high accuracy. The model is trained on massive amounts of natural language text that it parses to create responses to user prompts.
Let’s compare what Open AI can do and what Human Developers can do:
Developers:
Understanding User Needs: Humans understand their fellow humans’ needs. They understand how people think, interact, and problem-solve. This is when website agencies will call on their UX/UI designers for advice. This makes their code human-centric and more accessible. Open AI can not make informed decisions about what users need and want. This is an important aspect of development that AI models can’t replicate.
Use Creativity: Website development is a creative process that undoubtedly requires a human touch and engagement from fellow humans such as web designers. While Open AI can generate natural language text, it lacks the ability to think outside the box and come up with original ideas.
Problem Solve: Developers need to and can identify and solve complex problems. While Open AI can assist developers in solving problems, it cannot do so on its own as the code it generates typically requires refinement and some untangling. Human developers possess the critical thinking skills to approach a problem from many angles, engage with other humans and find the best solution, while Open AI lacks this advanced functionality.
Debugging and Troubleshooting: These are critical skills that developers constantly use. Open AI can generate code and even assist with simple debugging and troubleshooting. However, it lacks the ability to identify and solve highly complex problems on its own.
Open AI:
Input: Open AI receives a prompt from a human.
Embed: The input text is turned into numerical representations, called embeddings, which are used as inputs in the natural language model.
Encode: The encoder element of the model processes the embeddings and creates a hidden representation that summarises the inputs.
Contextualise: Then, Open AI’s attention mechanism allows it to selectively focus on certain parts of the input and generate representations that consider the input’s context.
Decode: The decoder part of the model then uses the hidden representation and the attention mechanism to create a response.
Output: The output from the decoder is turned back into text, and that text is returned to the user as the final written output.
Lucian, our Senior Developer’s summary on Open AI and AI tools
“AI tools such as GitHub Copilot have been a tool for developers for years and that is what they are TOOLS. Open AI isn’t able to work with a person who isn’t educated in website development or coding. It can request and output code but is far from providing the ideal full solution. It generally requires developers to understand the requirement to check it’s work, troubleshoot it, understand what has been generated and integrate it with existing software. Until Open AI reaches a point where somebody could write “Build me a homepage” and it delivers a fully functional piece of code, it won’t replace developers or website agencies. Rather, it will be a tool that aids developers. Open AI and similar systems will probably become another one of these tools, enabling existing developers to be more productive, and allowing them to create better and more complex pieces of software.”
In summary
Open AI and other AI platforms will not likely replace developers or web agencies soon. As far as AI has advanced, it still falls short of replicating those invaluable human skills such as creativity, problem-solving, interpersonal communication, and more. These skills will keep developers and designers in high demand for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, Open AI and other AI models may assist developers by helping flesh new ideas or frameworks that are then refined by developers.
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