aside from the considerable ethical concerns with the unauthorized scraping of everybody’s creative work,
If you want to make this argument, I'm "on board."
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and the dismal treatment of the people who annotate that work, and the electricity it takes to compile those annotations into models, and the likelihood that companies will see this new technology as a cheaper alternative to their human employees
Agree as well.
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those things aside, I thought we agreed that all of these “AI” systems are fundamentally just making shit up, and that if they happen to construct coherent sentences more often than your phone’s predictive-text keyboard then the difference is one of degree rather than kind.
But I'm tired of hearing this argument. I mean, if the LLMs work better and faster than the majority of _human_ assistants at my disposal, then who cares if they are "fundamentally just making shit up". They're better and faster than the competition, no matter how much you damn them with faint praise--end of story as far as I'm concerned with this argument.
if the LLMs work better and faster than the majority of _human_ assistants at my disposal
You've added an additional condition to the if expression from what you quoted above, which would require substantiation for the conclusion to follow.
They certainly work /cheaper/ and /faster/ than alternatives, /better/ is an open question (and, at least in my experience so far, not even close to settled). However, companies are much more strongly incentivized to lower costs than to increase beneficial outputs (especially so in this case since human capital has become one of the most expensive costs for companies specifically /because/ it has been so hard to replace in “intellectual/creative” fields). The result is that they may (are?) replace human workers with sub-par alternatives as a cost-cutting measure.
I can imagine a (probably not steel, but hopefully more wood than straw) neoliberal capitalist might reply with something like “but if the result is subpar, then the market will respond by purchasing from alternative providers; and it will self-correct.” Unfortunately, if the entire market (read: a sufficiently large portion of the options in a given market segment) takes such actions together, the consumer has no choice, and the invisible hand shrugs as best it can.
I can imagine a (probably not steel, but hopefully more wood than straw) neoliberal capitalist might reply with something like “but if the result is subpar, then the market will respond by purchasing from alternative providers; and it will self-correct.”
Eh, I don’t think that works. This only really works if the market _knows_ the result is subpar _in a timely fashion_. If you plough a few years and a hundred million VC cash into your robot dentist or tax advisor or whatever (real examples of things that people somehow think these things are appropriate for!) then by the time you realise that it’s totally unfit for purpose, it’s far too late.
Comments
If you want to make this argument, I'm "on board."
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Agree as well.
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But I'm tired of hearing this argument. I mean, if the LLMs work better and faster than the majority of _human_ assistants at my disposal, then who cares if they are "fundamentally just making shit up". They're better and faster than the competition, no matter how much you damn them with faint praise--end of story as far as I'm concerned with this argument.
You've added an additional condition to the if expression from what you quoted above, which would require substantiation for the conclusion to follow.
They certainly work /cheaper/ and /faster/ than alternatives, /better/ is an open question (and, at least in my experience so far, not even close to settled). However, companies are much more strongly incentivized to lower costs than to increase beneficial outputs (especially so in this case since human capital has become one of the most expensive costs for companies specifically /because/ it has been so hard to replace in “intellectual/creative” fields). The result is that they may (are?) replace human workers with sub-par alternatives as a cost-cutting measure.
I can imagine a (probably not steel, but hopefully more wood than straw) neoliberal capitalist might reply with something like “but if the result is subpar, then the market will respond by purchasing from alternative providers; and it will self-correct.” Unfortunately, if the entire market (read: a sufficiently large portion of the options in a given market segment) takes such actions together, the consumer has no choice, and the invisible hand shrugs as best it can.
All the best,
-HG
Eh, I don’t think that works. This only really works if the market _knows_ the result is subpar _in a timely fashion_. If you plough a few years and a hundred million VC cash into your robot dentist or tax advisor or whatever (real examples of things that people somehow think these things are appropriate for!) then by the time you realise that it’s totally unfit for purpose, it’s far too late.