For the next half an hour, my opinion on Generative LLMs will be that it is a nothingburger, a search engine with the additional features of a glorified Turing machine on natural language (with its fallacies, perhaps when inferred without projecting neurally from author’s mind, perhaps mirror neurons).
- It will pollute (we’re going one level up of the pollution of information ladder, necessitating their use),
- it will enable new ways of doing a shit job (which, however, can sometimes be useful).
And it will be addictive to people in the same way that talking to ELIZA could be — the prompts served to us is the thing we should replace with alternatives that mess less with our minds. (And they are thus propaganda, and you’re not immune to propaganda. Obviously. To reiterate: the exposure is through their use.) ( …I should not be adding out-of-sentence parentheses to earlier paragraphs.)
But:
- it contains all the stolen content compressed and it is not in their interest to credit it (which they will occasionally claim to be technically infeasible);
- the corporate world will waste a lot of needless (diluted of purpose) inference that could have been needlessly done by humans instead, at scale of unsupervision greatly impairing the effectiveness (as understood in terms of waste);
- we will go up a whole (one) new level on the ladder of what can a shit job be, and we will need to devise ways to avoid that.
We probably don’t need to worry about individuals wasting the planet by paying for needless AI inference.
However, individuals pay more for the same, and so especially when they use as-a-Service solutions, they may also contribute to pumping up the bubble that does the marketing. And the marketing then goes even to the education system, where it’s goals are just like Microsoft pushing VS Code for Education, even once competing with PyCharm Edu for the strategic position.
Why ways to avoid a shit job rather than avoidance — why compromise? Perhaps because of competition. Perhaps because of other factors due to which purity of abstaining is going to be hard to achieve. Would have to think. Spent half an hour already, incidentally hitting the time when the moment I hit Publish, there will be no thoughts.