Comment by foobarchu

Absolutely. They have dramatically worsened the world, with little to no net positive impact. Nearly every (if not all) positive impacts have an associated negative that that dwarfs it.

LLMs aren't going anywhere, but the world would be a better place if they hadn't been developed. Even if they had more positive impacts, those would not outweigh the massive environmental degradation they are causing or the massive disincentive they created against researching other, more useful forms of AI.