Comment by bigbuppo
6 hours ago
> A human must verify everything an LLM presents as fact. Everything. If you don’t, we all pay the price. LLMs do not remove the onus of responsibility on the human being, if anything they amplify it because LLMs can generate lots more output more quickly that needs to be verified than humans can.
The sort of person that's going to offload their thinking to AI is the exact sort of person that is not going to verify anything because they've already offloaded their thinking to AI.
For a long time I was anti-licensure in tech; now with the bar being lowered to next to nothing, it seems as if licensure is more important than ever — not to protect this trade (though it will do that, and that is a benefit), but because the sheer amount of irresponsibility in the usage of LLMs and “AI” in general begs for licensure and adoption of a regulatory body for software in general.
This is unfortunately a feeling I share. It wasn't until LLMs have become nearly ubiquitous at this point, and there has been zero realistic technological response to the dangers they present. Not to mention I suspect there may be some psychological element to being exposed to interactions with AI models and their nonsense for hours a day. Not all of it is nonsense....but you won't ever know for sure.
100%. I don't think "AI" has changed anything wrt to the responsibility of the tech industry in general. Tech has always been pretty much devoid of ethics or a sense of responsibility at the executive level (and therefore "management" more broadly). But before LLMs it was easier for ethical engineers to surreptitiously steer things towards responsible implementations. I suspect also competence correlates pretty strongly with intellectual honesty--narcissists and other personality defectives generally aren't terribly capable of the kind of introspection necessary to learn deeply. With the deluge of LLM slop, it's much harder for even a responsible manager to differentiate the competent from the incompetent, and now the dishonest, unethical folks have more leverage.
So now the problem is highly visible. There's only one solution I can think of, and that's to hold individuals (not corporations) responsible for professional malfeasance.