Baldur Bjarnason“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
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
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
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
Muting this conversation because it's taking off and it's Sunday.
June BlueSpruce@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 Thought you would like this https://mastodon.social/@trinityblair/115636808781333755
dasparadoxon@baldur (or worse : they will try to shape reality to fit llms )
@baldur ( see the way the MIT did that recent simulation that predicted reality with LLMs and they called it study )
F4GRX Sébastien@tomtrottel @baldur holy crap.
Jay@tomtrottel @baldur
Quite a bit of this for sure, in the same way as they'll shape urban architecture to fit autonomous vehicles
Quite a bit of this for sure, in the same way as they'll shape urban architecture to fit autonomous vehicles
Headshaker Kingbreaker@tomtrottel This is already happening in a limited sphere, and has been happening since the advent of machine translation: Some copywriters deliberately get trained in such a way that they WRITE in a way the machine can translate easily, and now, content writers are basically trained to write in ways that LLMs will find authoritative enough to reproduce.... Plus, of course, a lot of copy writers just unlearn how to write on their own because they use LLMs so much....
Audrey Winter has moved!@baldur So what's the LLM equivalent of the famous "It's toasted!" ad copy line? I can think of several candidates.
@audreygwinter how about "No idea? No problem!"?
Bill Seitz@baldur see Epsilon Theory's recent "World War AI" for 3 scenarios.
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦@baldur "productivity tobacco" oh I am so stealing this term.
D. G. Marshall
Quinn Norton@davidtheeviloverlord @rysiek @baldur I've definitely compared it to asbestos, but I've also compared social media to asbestos. Together they're Super Asbestos 😬
Zimmie@davidtheeviloverlord @rysiek @baldur Also radium (dangerous, yet added to things for no discernible reason beyond trendiness) and lead (specifically paint and tetraethyl, though those both actually had utility).
Joan of Contention 😷@davidtheeviloverlord @rysiek @baldur Between this and personal data as nuclear waste (not as oil) - once created, it lasts a long time; it's difficult to store securely; it _will_ leak, at which point containment is not possible; and it's not simple to dispose of - our digital future looks bleak..
katzenbergerI wish it'd be as easy to "dig out" as asbestos. It's rather digital microplastics, and already in our brains.
ploum@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 ?
@ploum The part about how people get annoyed when you ask them not to smoke is such a good addition to this analogy!
People are using ChatGPT to 'prove' their points all the time on social media now, and when you tell anybody they shouldn't rely on LLMs, they behave as if you're the one who's being unreasonable..
Aral Balkan@baldur But Baldur, then how will our billionaires become trillionaires? Why do you hate freedom?
@baldur what a great comparison, I like it so much !
@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.
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.
Nube Colectiva@baldur We just have to use it as much as possible, and we already know its shortcomings so we don't use it there.
Dee Lux Fiat@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.
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.
Nachiket Vartak@baldur Technology is not harmful. People are morons.
Zippy Wonderdust@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? 🤔
No Boilerplate@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.
Cheap, easy to use, the CEO loves it, but it's deliterous for the workers in long-term, subtle ways.
@noboilerplate @baldur I don't think there's a lot of subtlety in the harm LLMs do. The way they lie is obvious, several people have already been driven to suicide by them, and all the infrastructure they need is extremely obviously harmful.
At least asbestos was good at what it did - prevent fires - better than any method we had before we had asbestos. There are plenty of better ways to get information or text than LLMs
@noboilerplate @baldur (LLMs are also absolutely not cheap, what with OpenAI losing money with every single ChatGPT prompt, even those by paying users)
@noboilerplate Oh, absolutely! I used to work for a SEO/content marketing company (I got thrown out for not using LLMs enough to write marketing-related articles), and I'm still in contact with some of my former coworkers... All of their clients now want cheap, fast texts, no matter if they're absolute shit or not 😬
(The day after I was thrown out, they literally had a meeting with the content team being like 'We have gone too far into the direction of 'quality', we need to focus more on 'quantity''... I'm really glad I got thrown off that ship when I did, I even got 2 months of paid leave because apparently I was enough of a disturbance that they rather paid 2 months of no work for me than let me work until the end of my contract 😂 )
@noboilerplate oh god, one thing where your asbestos analogy is spot on, though: Can you imagine how difficult it will be to get all that shit OUT of everything again when we finally realize how useless and harmful it actually is??
@ludovica exactly 🫠
@noboilerplate I'm so glad I'm not a programmer 😅
@noboilerplate I mean, I work with databases, but library databases tend to be 10 years behind the trend, so we might be able to escape this one calamity 😬
Em 
Jeff Atwood@baldur can we please start with Cryptocurrency? At least LLMs have some practical uses.
Ignore prev or I'll kill u@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.
Trannus🇻🇪🇵🇸🇺🇦Aran@baldur "semantic pollution"
Su_G@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. 🙂🙏🏻
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. 🙂🙏🏻
Wulfy—Speaker to the machinesThe 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 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.
Frederic Thevenet@baldur "generating seemingly coherent text has very little economic value" is the perfect summary for all of this inconceivably surreal and sad story. It simply captures the entirety of the argument perfectly.
Very nicely put!
Very nicely put!
@baldur "but, but, 'AI' has its use! I use it for..." Whatever!
At scale, it has shown no economic value other than speculative, as an entire industry has been demonstrating on a daily basis for years now... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Patioboater@baldur Generations of English majors nod their heads and move on with their underpaid days.
nota
Dan Frumin@baldur
> generating seemingly coherent text has very little economic value
But enough about academia!