Cassandra is only carbon nowNo, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.
Jeff Atwood@xgranade it depends so much, I mean I can oppose screwdrivers being used to drive nails into the wall
@codinghorror Sure, but we're not talking about "which tool is best for driving a nail that I own into a wall that I own," we're talking about "is it ethical to use a technology built on fascist ideology and stolen work, that carries unconscionable environmental costs, and that's used to disrupt labor movements to perform a task that that technology is fundamentally unsuited to?"
It's quite fair to have a very firm "no" by way of answer to the second question.
@codinghorror Anyway, this isn't the first time you've replied to me to make the argument that LLMs are just another kind of tool. I suspect we won't see eye-to-eye on that, especially as my work has been abused to make LLM products.
I hope we can agree though, that my objection *even though you disagree with it* is principled and neither knee jerk nor purity culture.
@xgranade LLMs told me something critical about my health that no healthcare professional -- and I have a whole team working on me, because I'm bonkers -- ever did. If you want to ask, ask, I can provide very detailed citations and proof.
@codinghorror I'm not a doctor (well, not that *kind* of doctor, anyway), so I'll absolutely admit that I'm not the right person to evaluate those citations. I'll say that from a pretty damned nontrivial degree of expertise with machine learning, I would find it extremely surprising if *on average* text recombination without any underlying semantic model yielded useful advice more commonly than outright dangerous advice.
@codinghorror Like, nothing about LLMs and the theory behind them prevents anyone from getting lucky — and I'm glad that you got lucky instead of the much more common and probable case. But that doesn't mean that they're anything other than outright terrifyingly dangerous in a medical context more generally.
@xgranade people should absolutely be taught all the pros and cons, but I really dislike absolutism and zealotry.. it's not useful, it's not practical, it accomplishes nothing (except in the very narrow cases of civil rights or human dignity). If I wanted more ones and zeroes, I'd own more computers..
@xgranade and as I've said before, if you want to be angry, be angry at cryptocurrency which is gambling, grifters, and human trafficking to the bone. It's horrendous.
aburka 🫣@codinghorror @xgranade we can be angry at multiple things
@codinghorror @xgranade your persistent sea lioning, for example