cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2811405
"We view this moment of hype around generative AI as dangerous. There is a pack mentality in rushing to invest in these tools, while overlooking the fact that they threaten workers and impact consumers by creating lesser quality products and allowing more erroneous outputs. For example, earlier this year America’s National Eating Disorders Association fired helpline workers and attempted to replace them with a chatbot. The bot was then shut down after its responses actively encouraged disordered eating behaviors. "
I’ve been making the same or similar arguments you are here in a lot of places. I use LLMs every day for my job, and it’s quite clear that beyond a certain scale, there’s definitely more going on than “fancy autocomplete.”
I’m not sure what’s up with people hating on AI all of a sudden, but there seems quite a few who are confidently giving out incorrect information. I find it most amusing when they’re doing that at the same time as bashing LLMs for also confidently giving out wrong information.
Can you give examples of that?
The one I like to give is tool use. I can present the LLM with a problem and give it a number of tools it can use to solve the problem and it is pretty good at that. Here’s an older writeup that mentions a lot of others: https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/emergence
I suspect it’s rooted in defensive reactions. People are worried about their jobs, and after being raised to believe that human thought is special and unique they’re worried that that “specialness” and “uniqueness” might be threatened. So they form very strong opinions that these things are nothing to worry about.
I’m not really sure what to do other than just keep pointing out what information we do have about this stuff. It works, so in the end it’ll be used regardless of hurt feelings. It would be better if we get ready for that sooner rather than later, though, and denial is going to delay that.