I just recently realized that what I truly hate about LLMs is that it devalues language. I love language, I love using it very intentionally, I love how different people wield and work language differently. A well forged phrase can cut right to the soul. Language is literally magic. It can do things where man and machine all fail.

But now with the press of a button you can get sugary pink language goo in any shape you like. And this is sold as an equal replacement to real human language. The insult! The depravity!

I think it might say something about how far language is already devalued. We live in a morass of content marketing and business process documentation and terms and conditions and propaganda and spam. All soulless language that nobody asks for but that people are compelled to create. We can't imagine not creating such language goo. And so we're grateful for the pink goo machine.

You know those stories about how there was once magic in the world but it was lost? This is it. This is how it happens.

@plexus I am genuinely conflicted about it. I am generally optimistic about technology making things better for humanity in the medium-to-long term (agricultural technology is why so many of us are alive today), and I reject the facile "luddite" dismissals. And yet much of what you write could have been written by, say, a highly trained cavalry officer decrying the advent of mechanized warfare circa 1918. These new tools will take over because it's what humanity does when better tools appear.