Technology

Can’t search for something on the net anymore without being served f-tier LLM-produced garbage.

I don't see a material difference vs the f-tier human-produced garbage we had before. Garbage content will always exist, which is why it's important to learn to how to filter it.

This is true of LLMs as well: they can and do produce garbage, but they can and are useful alternatives to existing tech. I don't use them exclusively, but as an alternative when traditional search or whatever isn't working, they're quite useful. They provide rough summaries about things that I can usually easily verify, and they produce a bunch of key words that can help refine my future searches. I use them a handful of times each week and spend more time using traditional search and reading full articles, but I do find LLMs to be a useful tool in my toolbox.

I also am frustrated by energy use, but it's one of those things that will get better over time as the LLM market matures from a gold rush into established businesses that need to actually make money. The same happens w/ pretty much every new thing in tech, there's a ton of waste until the product finds its legs and then becomes a lot more efficient.

Most of these arguments were made for computers back when they were gaining popularity fyi.

The people outsourcing their thinking to LLMs weren’t gonna do much thinking in the first place. And honestly once you use them for a while you quickly realize what their good uses are and what are their limitations and thinking is not its strong suit. But it’s great at sorting large data and making it digestible. Or writing corpo copy that was devoid of meaning anyways.

Remember that a hammer can kill a person just as well as it can build a house.

Now I agree that it is annoying that it is being shoved into everything without any good reason, but the market will sort that out. What you are seeing is everyone rushing into a nascent market before it ossifies and shakes everyone except one or two winners. In 10 years I’m sure LLMs will be more like you have one that you plug into every service you use and it will be provided by one of a handful of companies who are the only ones capable of profiting from this because of the economies of scales it requires to work. Ergo not very different from every other tech rush that has happened in history.

LLMs are tools, simple as. Being a Luddite, screaming and kicking and crying over them is not gonna make it go away any more than boomers crying over computers have managed to make computers go away.