Comment by jeffbee
5 hours ago
Your list of evidence-free vibe complaints perfectly exemplifies the reasons why regulations should be approached carefully with the advice of experts, or not at all.
5 hours ago
Your list of evidence-free vibe complaints perfectly exemplifies the reasons why regulations should be approached carefully with the advice of experts, or not at all.
I'm not sure what you mean as evidence-free here.
Debates for public regulation should not be started by evidence-backed conclusions, but rather they are what pushes research and discussion in the first place.
Perhaps the conclussion to AI's impact on mental health is "hey, multiple high quality studies show that the impact is actually positive, let's allow it and in fact consider it as a potential treatment path". That's perfectly fine.
What is not fine is not considering the topic at all until it's too late for preventive action. We don't need to wait for a building burning before we consider whether we need fire extinguishers there.
My list is not made of complains at all, it's just a few of the ways in which we suspect AI can be disruptive, which are then probably worth examining.
Evidence-free? Did you even skim OP's list?
Healthcare/Social damage: we already have peer reviewed studies on the potentially negative impacts of LLMs on mental health: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10867692/ . We also have numerous stories of people committing suicides after "falling in love" or being nudged to do so by an LLM.
Energy/Resources: do I even have to provide evidence that LLMs waste enormous amounts of electricity, even leading to scarcity in some local markets, and even coal power plants being turned back on?
Those are just the ironclad ones, you can make very good data privacy and national security arguments quite easily as well.
> Energy/Resources: do I even have to provide evidence that LLMs waste enormous amounts of electricity, even leading to scarcity in some local markets, and even coal power plants being turned back on?
Yes, if you want to be taken seriously, then your claims about this should be based in evidence and contextualized amid the overall energy market.
Exactly. Energy/resources line is by far the most silly out of anti-AI arguments being regurgitated by people.
Electricity is fungible. Before decrying that LLMs are using it to provide the world (probably) more utility on the net per watt than your own work output (which segues into an actual problem of labor as source of personal and social worth), contrast it with what we'd otherwise be doing with that same electricity - e.g. more sportsball streams in higher definitions, more cryptocurrency shams, more Juiceros and other borderline-fraudlent startups in physical space (cheap energy means cheaper manufacturing, which means materials become more like bits, and it's easier to pull the same crap in the real world, as companies now pull in virtual).
Point being, if you want to judge use of electricity on AI, judge it in context of the whole human condition - of everything else we'd otherwise be using it on.