Curmudgeonliness & LLMs
I still think the discourse around LLMs right now is bad. By which I mean: most of the stuff I see on my feeds, boosted by people I like and whose ideals I tend to share, seems intellectually lazy, politically shortsighted, rhetorically misdirected, etc., in ways worse than we accept on other topics.
And yet! The average quality has gone way up over the last few months. And that gives me some hope.
Curmudgeonliness & LLMs
Partly I think the Anti faction seems to be doing a reasonable job of shifting from a “say scary and sweeping things at random to see what sticks” to “let’s try to articulate what actually concerns us here”, and that’s good. I am still not a card-carrying member of that camp, but I think it’s being a lot more honest now than it was in March, and I respect that.
Curmudgeonliness & LLMs
@litherland There are many legitimately scary and sweeping things to be said.
Curmudgeonliness & LLMs
@vruba @litherland my bet is it plateaus into mehdom and baseline institutional cruelty like every other overhyped tech
Curmudgeonliness & LLMs
@doriantaylor @litherland I think this is a solid take, but that it has the potential to adjust the baseline more than some, and that’s worth thinking about.
Curmudgeonliness & LLMs
@vruba @litherland indeed; anything with pmarca's noseprints on it has big make fetch happen energy but it's not like there are no epiphenomena
Curmudgeonliness & LLMs
@vruba it feels like we're watching a "time is a flat circle" replay of the Luddite movement. They may have been concerned with how new tools could be misused (especially to capitalist ends) but they weren't anti-technology and history often (and unfairly) leaves that out.
Curmudgeonliness & LLMs
@numist Granted, but I think that if you were watching the Luddites at the time, you would have heard a lot of Luddite-aligned people say a lot of extremely silly things. That doesn’t discredit the philosophical core, but enough of it happening does tend to change what a movement actually does in the world.
Curmudgeonliness & LLMs
@numist There were some nosebleed-inducingly bad takes going around six months ago from public intellectuals who are now saying much more measured, contextualized, evidenced things. It’s a little odd seeing some of those same people now being held up as the clear-eyed Cassandras who were right from the beginning. It’s not the worst thing in all this, but it is … odd.
Curmudgeonliness & LLMs
@vruba I’m definitely guilty of saying scary and sweeping things at random. Trying to calm down—to learn more and freak out less.