Comment by heresie-dabord
2 days ago
> The thing that bothers me the most about LLMs is
What bothers me the most is the seemingly unshakable tendency of many people to anthropomorphise this class of software tool as though it is in any way capable of being human.
What is it going to take? Actual, significant loss of life in a medical (or worse, military) context?
It's the fact that these are competent human language word salad generators that messes with human psychology.
My calculator produces accurate, verifiable results.
My calculator is a great tool but it is not a mathematician. Not by a long shot.
And you can tell this pretty easily because it can't have a conversation with you.
That qualifier only makes the anthropormorphization more sound. Have you actually thought it through? Give an untrained and unspecialized human the power to cause significant loss of life in a medical context in the same exact capacity, and it's all but guaranteed that's the outcome you'll end up with.
I think it's important to be skeptical and push back against a lot of the ridiculous mass-adoption of LLMs, but not if you can't actually make a well-reasoned point. I don't think you realize the damage you do when the people gunning for mass proliferation of LLMs in places they don't belong can only find examples of incoherent critique.
> an untrained and unspecialized human
An untrained and unspecialised human can be trained quickly and reliably for the cost of meals and lodging and will very likely actually try to do the right thing because of personal accountability.
Delegating responsibility to badly-designed or outright unfit-for-purpose systems because of incoherent confidence is plainly a bad plan.
As for the other nuances of your post, I will assume the best intention.