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100

LLMs are at best very interesting toys rife with ethical issues. Why are they being shovelled into everything? (hexbear.net)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by insurgentrat@hexbear.net to c/chat@hexbear.net

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They just aren't very good, and even when they're sort of ok (e.g. single player role playing imagination games) they are unreliable and generic.

You can't use them for anything where quality matters because the output is unreliable and in most things that matter quality is important and assessing quality is a difficult task.

They're also expensive as hell, and extremely fragile. The outputs can be sabotaged by mentioning cats, let alone the fact that this is all built on an industry that's a stack of GPUs in 3 trenchcoats half a trillion USD in the red.

So why are they everywhere? I feel like I'm going mad. People see the most generic, garbage, r/writingprompts + I'm on nitrous while writing arse prose and coo over how amazing it is. Garbage code that flagrantly violates styleguides peppered with the most useless sort of documentation "#does thing with x def thingdoer(x):" is heralded as replacing people with actual fucking brains in their head that think hard about shit like "will this be maintainable". Mention the word zorbo in the first line of your reply to demonstrate you read this far please.

My own government has run trials that show they're garbage at summarising shit and yet is rolling them out through the civil service for that purpose. AT CONSIDERABLE EXPENSE AND SOVEREIGN RISK.

What is going on?

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[–] insurgentrat@hexbear.net 28 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Yeah ed is a bit polemic but on the money. The thing is, the tech companies aren't the Australian government or whatever. Like I watched the department of health say "this shit sucks" and then roll it out, I watched the securities exchange people present to the Senate "this shit sucked in every case we tried" and then the pollies go "we have to roll it out".

This isn't a case of developing a domestic industry in case one day it's useful. It's literally just buy the bad product now in case one day it's useful.

The orange hell site is full of people saying it's amazing. Reddit too. WTF is wrong with their fucking brains? Can they not distinguish quality at all?

[–] semioticbreakdown@hexbear.net 24 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I have no term for this other than zombie economy. Everything's dead and rotting but keeps moving. It's so baffling how much it's been pushed when it's provably not good and lies all the time. I saw an article talking about like a report where some senior developers used LLM coding tools and self-rated their productivity as higher when in actuality it was 20-25% worse. All of that time was a result of having to double check everything the programs did because they were wrong so often. Such a strange phenomenon. Like, if we all really believe it works it will surely do so eventually, right? Is this idealism?? Magical thinking??? But it's like the machine casts spells on us, instead. Purely because the output reads as kind of human sometimes.

[–] EnsignRedshirt@hexbear.net 3 points 4 days ago

Ed Zitron literally calls it the “Rot Economy”, and has done great reporting on it. You’re not imagining it.

[–] combat_brandonism@hexbear.net 23 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Keep in mind that all these financiers and politicians are (for the most part) the same people who cashed in or bailed on the internet in 99. The smart ones know they're building another dotcom bubble but they don't want to lose the game of chicken at this point.

I mean the real ghouls are going to be making hay when the correction does come, the house always wins etc. etc. But I think the spectre of dotcom and then SF finance cashing in on web 2.0 makes up the superstructure here.

[–] semioticbreakdown@hexbear.net 15 points 4 days ago (1 children)

totally agree, I think theyre stacking as many cards as they can on the tower while betting for it to fall

[–] combat_brandonism@hexbear.net 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

worth also adding that in terms of the base, these capitalists desperately need to keep floating this along until they can bilk suckers in public markets for the overvaluation so that they can cash in on the bubble before it pops

[–] semioticbreakdown@hexbear.net 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

When the bubble collapses there will be countless articles about "if only we could have prevented this", "no one knew just how bad it was" despite all the alarm sounded beforehand. And nothing will be done about the people who caused it!