Ok. I cut my end of the world AI rant down from 3,000 words to 2,000 words, then 1,000, then 500. Now the forum seems to have gone mental with half the new posts being about AI integration and my rant has increased in size again.
But, I will keep that to myself for now and just ask one genuine question. Isn’t the inevitable end point of this dive into AI going to be the end of tools like Elements?
Why would AI even need an app to build a website if all the information is out there to build it totally from scratch?
No. Probably just the opposite. Mainstream media and Wall Street are both getting this wrong. If I had more investable money at the moment, I’d be betting the opposite of the market. (Before anyone asks, no, you don’t want to be investing in AI infrastructure; Nvidia for example, is thinking their data center investments will last 10 years; they’re wrong. They’ll have to completely redo them in 2 years, so there’s no payback on the money they’re putting into it right now.)
The problem is that not a lot of folk actually really understand what AI enables and what it doesn’t do. If you think that it’s going to be used for content, then you’re betting on all content getting stale. Sort of like if you required everyone writing anything first get it approved by a copy editor. This makes for non-unique, barely useful, and non-entertaining content, and ultimately productivity goes to zero just as fast as unique content.
On the other hand, used properly by someone who knows what they’re doing, AI tools are highly enabling and that person’s productivity goes up. Way up. I think you need to actually watch someone using AI the correct way in real time to have the Aha! moment that will make your opinion flip.
As for Elements, it’s a Lego set. You can have AI do a lot of simple things very quickly (“build me a red wall with 2x1 bricks that’s 8 bricks wide and 4 bricks tall”), quicker than you could do it by hand. But the creative designer is thinking about doors, windows, walls, roofs, floors, furniture, interior design, exterior design, unusual/original arrangements of same, and a whole host of other things to create something unique. While Elements has Components (just like Legos have various blocks), unlike Legos, Elements allows you to build blocks that have never existed before and lock them into the other blocks. And yes, you can build those new blocks with AI and a little imagination.
Using the Lego analogy, I guess if you tell AI to restrict itself to using Lego then it will build things with bricks, and everything else in the Lego catalogue, but if you give it free reign could it not give you the same result on screen simply by using code, ie the plastic that the bricks are made of?
I am not going to pretend that I know how things work but I do know that if I transfer Elements files to my host server then suddenly a website magically appears. All those files are just code.
Yes, you could tell AI to build and publish a complete website. But think about what you would have to do to change any small bit of that site. If it was built with AI, you would have to go into the generated code, find what you wanted, then change it yourself; or you will be forever dependent on AI to make changes. With AI integrated into Elements, you get a WYSIWYG Elements project that any non-coder can manage.
Isn’t that exactly where we are heading? Rather than open Elements and do a couple of edits, save it, publish and back up I can just tell my AI to do X and Y and tell me when it is finished. I won’t need to maintain any software or know anything about websites at all, just keep throwing tokens at my AI.
To be honest I am more worried about the implications of this kind of thing reported on CNN today us-military-ai-false-intelligence but, IMHO, it is all part and parcel of the current headlong dive into AI.
Elements as a tool is finished 