I will cautiously say that these tools have their use for non-programmers. For example, I have to store some data in the format that would be easy to plot. I could spend half an hour doing that in Origin each time and hope its quirks won’t crash it… or I could use my rudimentary Python knowledge to shove comments into Copilot and correct my output by trial and error and have an ugly script that would nonetheless do the task every time in 5 seconds. Or I could learn to actually program and have non-ugly scripts. But I probably won’t in the foreseeable future, because it’s very time-consuming and what I do with AI tools is for myself, not for production.
For those who program for life it’s a different story. I won’t give up my primary research tasks to AI and I hope programmers won’t give up their primary job to AI too.
I don’t understand why this keeps happening. It’s zero effort to add a person, a dozen or even a thousand to the list, and nobody loses anything by simply writing in a name.