Comment by roughly
2 years ago
Boy, the LLMs have really been an apocalypse moment for the web, haven’t they? Between hoovering up and monetizing every bit of content they can without any attribution or compensation and the absolute flood of mediocre generated content, they’ve really done in the last straggling remains of the open internet.
It’s not like everyone wasn’t already pulling the same grift, but quantity really does have a quality all its own.
Of course, we have to be careful not to villainize a neutral tech. Instead let's call it what it is: unchecked capitalism and monopolistic behaviors.
Capitalism seems to work ok for the common good until you remove all the protections. LLMs provide a defacto monopoly for the owner which must already be a near monopoly: they take vast resources to train; only a giant corp can afford to buy all the content and provision enough resources to train one.
LLM did not enshittify what's left of the internet, greed did it.
On the one hand, you’re absolutely right. But on the other hand it’s not like it matters in practice. Isn’t most technology technically neutral? But it’s also made to be used by people, who can do so beneficially or detrimentally. Criticising a technology is a shorthand for criticising how it’s used.
> Of course, we have to be careful not to villainize a neutral tech
This is a very good point IMO. If we're going to chastise LLM's we may as well give servers, switches, routers, fiber-optic cable, and silicone a bollocking as well since that's ultimately what's facilitating all this.
No, those are not comparable. If someone criticises the electric chair, it’s not reasonable to defend it with “if we’re going to chastise the electric chair we may as well give wood, metal, chairs, and electricity a bollocking since that's ultimately what's facilitating all this”.
Things are more than the sum of their parts. If you have a ton of beneficial things which can be cobbled together into one bad detrimental thing, the existence of the latter does not remove the benefits of the former.