Comment by vanderZwan
18 hours ago
Even assuming all of what you said is true, none of it disproves the arguments in the article. You're talking about the technology, the article is about the marketing of the technology.
The LLM marketing exploits fear and sympathy. It pressures people into urgency. Those things can be shown and have been shown. Whether or not the actual LLM based tools genuinely help you has nothing to do with that.
The point of the article is to paint LLMs as a confidence trick, the keyword being trick. If LLMs do actually deliver very real, tangible benefits then can you say there is really a trick? If a street performer was doing the cup and ball scam, but I actually won and left with more money than I started with then I'd say that's a pretty bad trick!
Of course it is a little more nuanced than this and I would agree that some of the marketing hype around AI is overblown, but I think it is inarguable that AI can provide concrete benefits for many people.
> If LLMs do actually deliver very real, tangible benefits then can you say there is really a trick?
Yes, yes you can. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this thread:
> When a con man sells you a cheap watch for an high price, what you get is still useful—a watch that tells the time—but you were also still conned, because what you paid for is not what was advertised. You overpaid because you were tricked about what you were buying.
LLMs are being sold as miracle technology that does way more than it actually can.
And at a cost im not sure most fully understand. We've allowed these companies to externalise all the negative outcomes. Now were seeing consumer electronics stock dry up, huge swaths of raw resources used, massive invasions of privacy, all so this one guy can do his corpo job 10x faster? Nah im good.
The marketing hype is economy defining at this point, so calling it overblown is an understatement.
Simplifying the hype into 2 threads, the first is that AI is an existential risk and the second is the promise of “reliable intelligence”.
The second is the bugbear, and the analogy I use is factories and assembly lines vs power tools.
LLMs are power tools. They are being hyped as factories of thoughts.
String the right tool calls, agents, and code together and you have an assembly line that manufactures research reports, gives advice, or whatever white collar work you need. No Holidays, HR, work hours, overhead etc.
I personally want everyone who can see why this second analogy does not work, to do their part in disabusing people of this notion.
LLMs are power tools, and impressive ones at that. In the right hands, they can do much. Power tools are wildly useful. But Power tools do not make automatically make someone a carpenter. They don’t ensure you’ve built a house to spec. Nor is a planar saw going to evolve into a robot.
The hype needs to be taken to task, preferably clinically, so that we know what we are working with, and can use them effectively.
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But saying it's a confidence trick is saying it's a con. That they're trying to sell someone something that doesn't work. Th op is saying it makes then 10x more productive, so how is that a con?
The marketing says it does more than that. This isn't just a problem unique to LLMs either. We have laws about false advertising for a reason. It's going on all the time. In this case the tech is new so the lines are blurry. But to the technically inclined, it's very obvious where they are. LLMs are artificial, but they are not literally intelligent. Calling them "AI" is a scam. I hope that it's only a matter of time until that definition is clarified and we can stop the bullshit. The longer it goes, the worse it will be when the bubble bursts. Not to be overly dramatic, but economic downturns have real physical consequences. People somewhere will literally starve to death. That number of deaths depends on how well the marketers lied. Better lies lead to bigger bubbles, which when burst lead to more deaths. These are facts. (Just ask ChatGPT, it will surely agree with me, if it's intelligent. ;p)
Yeah, but it should have been in the title otherwise it uses in itself a centuries old trick.
Exactly. It’s like if someone claimed to be selling magical fruit that cures cancer, and they’re just regular apples. Then people like your parent commenter say “that’s not a con, I eat apples and they’re both healthy and tasty”. Yes, apples do have great things about them, but not the exaggerations they were being sold as. Being conned doesn’t mean you get nothing, it means you don’t get what was advertised.
The claims being made that are cited are not really in that camp though..
It may be extremely dangerous to release. True. Even search engines had the potential to be deemed too dangerous in the nuclear pandoras box arguments of modern times. Then there are high-speed phishing opportunities, etc.
It may be an essential failure to miss the boat. True. If calculators were upgraded/produced and disseminated at modern Internet speeds someone who did accounting by hand would have been fired if they refused to learn for a few years.
Its communication builds an unhealthy relationship that is parasitic. True. But the Internet and the way content is critiqued is a source of this even if it is not intentionally added.
I don't like many people involved and I don't think they will be financially successful on merit alone given that anyone can create a LLM. But LLM technology is being sold by organic "con" that is how all technology such as calculators end up spreading for individuals to evaluate and adopt. A technology everyone is primarily brutally honest about is a technology that has died because no one bothers to check if the brutal honesty has anything to do with their own possible uses.
> The claims being made that are cited are not really in that camp though..
They literally are. Sam Altman has literally said multiple times this tech will cure cancer.
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