“AI sceptics” who work on policy and education continue to overestimate the utility of LLMs—portraying it as a potential revolution even as they warn against overhype—simply because they can’t see that generating seemingly coherent text has very little economic value
@baldur
> generating seemingly coherent text has very little economic value
But enough about academia!
@baldur the issue is that to a certain kind of person if you're 100% against something that makes you a zealot who cannot be trusted, whereas if you do a whole song and dance about the good and the bad that's sage and erudite
@baldur everybody who worked as a copywriter in the last 20 years could tell them that, too 😂
@baldur Generations of English majors nod their heads and move on with their underpaid days.
LLMs are not automation. That would have economic value. The generated text artefacts look coherent and we, as a society, don’t even value the coherent kind. We underpay most forms of writing. Even code has no inherent value (see open source) outside of the associated integration and expertise
Between diffusion models and LLMs, tech has inflated a trillion dollar bubble around automating activities that have immense social and cultural capital—writing, art, photography—but little actual capital. It’s harmful to education, culture, and society with minimal overall benefit
@baldur I really wish the robot people would have more success. If all that capital were dumped into automating recycling, garbage sorting, and solar panel installation, we might make some genuine progress.
The current situation does remind one of 1984 where the books were written by machines while the grunt work was still done by humans. That's the bad outcome.
The wealth always tried to diminish cost of Labor.
With AI, they finally can push everyone to the brink of starvation and own slaves again.
@baldur
It's as if the value proposition was removing all those pesky progressive, anti-billionaire writers, artists and photographers from the culture generation process.
@baldur
Great summary of the essence of the bubble: 🎈 “tech has inflated a trillion dollar bubble around automating activities that have immense social and cultural capital—writing, art, photography—but little actual capital. It’s harmful to education, culture, and society with minimal overall benefit”. Even excellent writing & art are undervalued in our current cultures just as writers, artists & teachers are. Bad writing & art are even less valued so of course people aren’t interested in paying a lot to generate them. Thanks for your thread which makes the relative value argument clear. 🙂🙏🏻
More and more, generative models are looking like productivity tobacco. Promoted by biased research, it’s addictive, harmful, and the little benefit it has (nicotine is a somewhat effective ADHD drug, for example) cannot outweigh the fact that it’s hurting us all, directly and indirectly.
This shit is already turning out to be one of the most harmful tech innovations of the 21st century. It needs to be regulated at least as much as tobacco, if not banned outright from most economic spheres
@baldur "semantic pollution"
@baldur can we please start with Cryptocurrency? At least LLMs have some practical uses.
@codinghorror @baldur Nicotine isn't a health tonic but nicotine itself doesn't cause cancer though, although the whole tobacco does. It's like faulting betel leaf for its role of making the cancer-producing betel nut delicious.
@baldur good analogy, I think of it like aspesdos, myself.
Cheap, easy to use, the CEO loves it, but it's deliterous for the workers in long-term, subtle ways.
@baldur Your throwaway “nicotine is a somewhat effective ADHD drug” has me wondering whether the perceived increase in #adhd diagnoses in western countries in the last 40 years parallels the decline in tobacco use over the same time period. Were we all unknowingly self-medicating either by smoking directly or by exposure to secondhand smoke? 🤔
@baldur Technology is not harmful. People are morons.
@baldur Technology is not harmful. People are morons.
@baldur ty for justifying my decision to continue using nicotine
@baldur
Tobacco and asbestos are good analogies! If we’re forced to use gen “ai” at work we should all light up ciggys or cigars (pipes too!) while using that shite as a visible protest.
@baldur sorry but they've already spent billions on it and now need us to buy it from them for their profit.
@baldur We just have to use it as much as possible, and we already know its shortcomings so we don't use it there.
@baldur I feel it's a step backward; it only helps with code auto-completion in complex projects. It doesn't perform well. I prefer writing code manually.
@baldur
The best analogy I have heard of is;
"its the asbestos of the technology world, we will be removing and remediating it for generations to come."
#AI #technology
#democracy is more than voting! we-the-people need to control what #bigCorp does.
@baldur what a great comparison, I like it so much !
@baldur But Baldur, then how will our billionaires become trillionaires? Why do you hate freedom?
@baldur : I always use that analogy too.
We live in a world where it is considered normal to destroy your health, destroy the health of people around you while polluting heavily the environment.
And simply asking "can you please not smoke near me" is seen as, at best, very annoying.
For something which is well known for the last 50 years AND very intuitive.
But, yet, smoking is still authorized.
So what do we expect from such a society for matter that are just less intuitive ?
@baldur Heh damn, I was having a similar thought this morning! The parallels between the big tobacco wave and the current nonsense are remarkably extensive
@baldur "productivity tobacco" oh I am so stealing this term.
But, unfortunately I don’t see that happening. If we’re lucky, a bubble pop will clear it out of education and the economy, but if we’re unlucky, governments in charge will use public funds to try and rebuild after LLMs with more LLMs, baking this shit into the foundation of our economy for a generation
@baldur see Epsilon Theory's recent "World War AI" for 3 scenarios.
Muting this conversation because it's taking off and it's Sunday.
@baldur Thank you for this perspective! You’ve put into words what I have suspected but don’t have the knowledge or background to express.
@baldur So what's the LLM equivalent of the famous "It's toasted!" ad copy line? I can think of several candidates.
@baldur (or worse : they will try to shape reality to fit llms )
