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..
@codinghorror You seem to think that a strong position is necessarily one reached without reason or rationality? If I'm incorrect in understanding your position, please let me know, but it seems like you're conflating my having a strong view — one that I have repeatedly explained and justified on my feed — with a pseudoreligious "zealotry."
@codinghorror But that conflation doesn't hold in other cases. To do the physicist-coded thing of looking at the extremes to understand the bulk (I'm not that kind of doctor, but I do have a PhD in physics, it comes up in my thinking sometimes), would you similarly say that a position like "no one should ever be a Nazi or do Nazi-like things" is one of zealotry?
The truth isn't always in the middle, and assuming that it is gives bad-faith actors immense power to unduly shift narratives.
@codinghorror Regardless, though, I think you've badly missed the point of my thread. I'm not looking to convince you on LLMs, you've convinced me you have enough vested interest in the success of LLMs that I recognize that's a fruitless endeavor.
But you jumped in my replies, on a thread that didn't mention or refer to you, a thread about what goes wrong with "purity culture" rhetoric, to make the only marginally related argument that a strong opposition to LLMs is necessarily one of zealotry.
@codinghorror To get to my original point, then, if you believe as I do that it is bad to use tools developed under eugenicist philosophies, that predominantly profit and fund fascists, that carry inordinate environmental costs, that are based on stolen labor, that act as automated scabs, and that don't work, then an opposition to those same tools is a moral position and not one of "purity culture."
@codinghorror I've made my arguments for each of those many times, it's beside the point here. But critically, none of the above requires me to be correct in my beliefs — only that I have reached those rationally if perhaps based on incomplete or flawed data. In which case, make that argument (not to me, as noted above)! But it's intellectually dishonest to say that that opposition is "purity culture."