That’s the true danger of the tools, imo. They aren’t the digital All Seers their makers want to market them as, but they also aren’t the utterly useless slop machines the consensus on the Fediverse appears to vehemently be.
Of course they’re somewhere in-between. Spicy auto complete sounds like a put down but there is spice. I prefer to think of LLMs as word calculators, and I do mean that I have found them analogous in the sense that if you approach them with a similar plan of action as you would an actual calculator, you’ll get similar results.
Difference is of course that math is not fuzzy and open to nuance, and 1+1 will always equal 2.
But language isn’t math, and it’s trickier to get a sense for what the “equations” that will yield results are, so it’s easy to disparage the technology as a concept given (as you rightly point out) the boiling of the planet.
Work has been insisting we tool with an LLM and they’re checking but thankfully my role doesn’t require relying on any facts the machine spits out.
Which is another part of why the technology is so reviled/misunderstood; the part of the LLM that determines the next word isn’t and can’t judge the veracity of it’s output. Any landing on factual info is either a coincidence or the fact that you as the user knew to “coach” things in such a way as to arrive as the most likely output which the user already knew is correct.
Because of the uncertainty, it is simply unwise to take any LLM’s output as factual, as any fact checking capacity isn’t innate but other operations being done on the output, if any.
Then there’s all the other reasons to hate the things like who makes them, how they’re made, how they’re wielded, etc, and I frankly can’t blame anyone for vehemently hating LLM’s as a concept.
But it’s disingenous to think the tech is wholly incapable of anything of merit to anyone and only idiots out there are using it (even if that may still be often the case).
Or put another way: A sailor hidden within the ship’s hold will still drown and die alongside the ones that don’t resist the siren call above and pilot straight for the rocks.
Cool stuff, deployed in maximally foolish ways. I think I rambled a bit there, but hopefully a bit of my point made it across.
You’d think that, but that’s part of the point and magic, and it does not necessarily add up to that point of “leave us both more stressed than ever”.
It still adds up to increasing connection, not decreasing it. The caveat is that the whole leaving room for the other person too is vital, it can’t be overwhelmingly one sided, good or ill.
The human condition includes depressive shit too, and no one is unique in capacity for suffering, only details. That’s still something to bond over.