The Devil's Pact

I know that if you're reading this you already have a formed opinion about the moral, economic and ecological consequences of generative AI use, so I'm not going to bother. But I think that I still have something to say about the impacts of AI use in you. Specifically, how it impacts the way you learn and create new things. So I'm going to focus on people that use LLMs to build their website, like asking questions about HTML, CSS and JS.

If you are here in this corner of the web creating a personal website, one of your biggest motivations is probably self-expression. Me, at least, wanted to create a website to freely express myself, both in writing and crafting. Other common motivation is learning, creating stuff here makes you learn a bunch of new things that makes your creativity more capable. Learning things is like getting new painting materials for your brain: It expands your possibilities.

Using AI, however, limits both of these things.

So, to start to create, you go on your learning journey. Spending a lot of time in w3Schools, old StackOverflow questions, maybe checking out some links at 32bit.cafe and bashing your head against the keyboard when something doesn't work.

Then, when you finished your "early bird" phase, already knowing the basic tags and structure of HTML and CSS, you start aiming higher, questioning yourself how to do really specific things.

"How do I make some, but not all hyperlinks have a little icon and animation that starts when I hover over them?"

"How can I make gifs only animate when I hover over them?"

When you reach that point, the usual google search stops working, you can't find anything that specific or, if you do find, a lot of the times it requires some advanced knowledge that you are far from having at the moment.

Then, you have two options:

1. Keep trying and failing until it works; or...
2. ...Make The Pact™

The Pact™

Well, there are tools created that are perfect for solving that kind of problem: you can say how you want your website to look in natural language, no matter how specific the request is, even using analogies if you don't know the right terminology, and it spits out every HTML, CSS, and JS you will ever need! Isn't it perfect?

It's not like you need to use AI to do this stuff. I mean, I could, if I wanted, try to learn it myself through a lot of trial and error, dividing the specifics in broader ideas that are easier to find tutorials on, asking people in forums, checking out websites codes trying to figure out how things work and eventually I would be able to do the same thing I did with AI help.

So I am capable of learning myself, It's just that AI is easier. What's the problem with that?

The problem with that

Again, not going to touch on AI problems in general, just the things that happen to you when you create your website like that.

Learning is hard, there's no escape from it

One of the two major problems with AI use that I can pinpoint is that if you are just asking a LLM to create something for you and them pasting them on your files you aren't really learning anything.

I have a little confession to make: I used AI to create this site sidebar (yes, the second example question is mine, fuck gifs). And I still have a hard time knowing how "I" did it.

Other things that I did all by myself, like setting up eleventy, I did learn. Even though I still forget some things, every time that I use eleventy I learn a little more, the knowledge gets ingrained deeper in my brain and that thing alone sparks new ideas for other things that I can do in and outside the website.

That's the thing, going through the manual route is hard, but so it's learning anything. You need to fail, you need to do it manually, you need to do it manually A LOT OF TIMES, that's what creates connections in your brain. This is the reason why most of math studying, for example, is just solving exercise lists over and over.

You could use AI as an aid in that manual, laborious route. Asking questions on why x doesn't work, why y CSS selector is not covering the right div even though clearly it's in the right place. But, still, at the corner the Devil still whispering in your ear that you can just give up learning and go full send on AI.

Also, is it really your creation?

Beside all of that, there's also the problem of self-expression. I can't help but feel that you are not the one creating if you are asking AI to do it for you. Even if the code it spits does exactly what you wanted.

As I said before, the process of trial and error itself create new ideas, so I'm going to argue that skipping this process with AI changes your mind. You are going to create different stuff, not necessarily better or worse stuff, but different. Just like a Devil's Pact would change you.

This is present in every creative medium, really. While you are tinkering with something, you may create something "broken", and by that I mean something that doesn't work the way you originally wanted it to work. But you take a look at it and think "Well, I kinda like it!" and decide to move on with the """broken""" code. This is only a small example, I know that if you are in the hobby of website crafting for a while you probably have countless others.

So, what?

I'm kinda privileged, not gonna lie. I'm a high school student lucky enough to have a tech course integrated in the usual curriculum (check out about page), so I have teachers doing a lot of the heavy lifting in teaching me web development and programming in general. That's why I feel kinda bad bashing others for using AI to help them with CSS or JS when their only option is using crapped out current search engines and tutorials that are not specific enough.

Even then, I'm still gonna ask you to think twice before resorting to using generative AI to create stuff on your website. I'm not an anti-ai absolutist that thinks that AI = bad, I just think that we should be more mindful about our decisions.

But don't think you can't do something just because people don't like it. Don't think you can't do something because "it's a sin" or whatever (which is how I feel a lot of the time in these topics). Do or don't do something because you, a smart and sensible human, can figure out stuff by yourself and have decided after reflection, research, and thinking that the use of generative AI is bad/good.

I think Nietzsche said something among these lines, but I didn't read any Nietzsche, so I can't be sure.

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