We used to have web forums for that, and they worked pretty okay without the costs of LLMs

This is a little off topic but we really should, as a species, invest more heavily in public education. People should know how to read and follow instructions, like the docs that come with Google sheets.

He says he uses it to do sexual roleplay chats, treats it kinda like a make-your-own-adventure porn story. I don't know if he's used it for images.

Why not just read the first part of a wikipedia article if they want that though? It's not the end all source but it'd better than asking the machine known to make things up the same question.

Good for you buddy.

Edit: sorry that was harsh. I'm just dealing with "every comment is a contrarian comment" day.

Sure, GPT is good at basic search functionality for obvious things, but why choose that when there are infinitely better and more reliable sources of information?

There's a false sense of security couple to a notion of "asking" an entity.

Why not engage in a community that can support answers? I've found the Linux community (in general) to be really supportive and asking questions is one way of becoming part of that community.

The forums of the older internet were great at this... Creating community out of commonality. Plus, they were largely self correcting I'm a way in which LLMs are not.

So not only are folk being fed gibberish, it is robbing them of the potential to connect with similar humans.

And sure, it works for some cases, but they seem to be suboptimal, infrequent or very basic.

Speaking of being old, just like there are noticeable differences between people growing up before or after ready internet access. I think there will be a similar divide between people who did their learning before or after llms.

Even if you don't use them directly, there's so much more useless slop than there used to be online. I'll make it five minutes into a how-to article before realizing it doesn't actually make any sense when you look at the whole thing, let alone have anything interesting or useful to say.

x 1000. Between the time I started and finished grad school, Chat GPT had just come out. The difference in students I TA'd at the beginning and end of my career is mind melting. Some of this has to do with COVID losses, though.

But we shouldn't just call out the students. There are professors who are writing fucking grants and papers with it. Can it be done well? Yes. But the number of games talking about Vegetative Electron Microscopy, or introductions whose first sentence reads "As a language model, I do not have opinions about the history of particle models," or completely non sensical graphics generated by spicy photoshop, is baffling.

Some days it held like LLMs are going to burn down the world. I have a hard time being optimistic about them, but even the ancient Greeks complained about writing. It just feels different this time, ya know?

ETA: Just as much of the onus is on grant reviewers and journal editors for uncritically accepting slop into their publications and awarding money to poorly written grants.

If a person, especially a kid, is not forced to learn and think, and is allowed to defer to the output of a black box of bias and bad data, it will damage them irreversibly.

I grew up, mostly, in the time of digital search, but far enough back that they still resembled the old card-catalog system. Looking for information was a process that you had to follow, and the mere act of doing that process was educational and helped order your thoughts and memory. When it's physically impossible to look for two keywords at the same time, you need to use your brain or you won't get an answer.

And while it's absolutely amazing that I can now just type in a random question and get an answer, or at least a link to some place that might have the answer, this is a real problem in how people learn to mentally process information.

A true expert can explain things in simple terms, not because they learned them in simple terms or think about them in simple terms, but because they have to ability to rephrase and reorder information on the fly to fit into a simplified model of the complex system they have in their mind. That's an extremely important skill, and it's getting more and more rare.

If you want to test this, ask people for an analogy. If you can't make an analogy, you don't truly understand the subject (or the subject involves subatomic particles, relativity or topology and using words to talk about it is already basically an analogy)

The thing is, some "tech" is just fucking dumb, and should have never been done. Here are just a few small examples:

"Get connected to the city gas factory, you can have gaslamps indoors and never have to bother with oil again!"
"Lets bulldoze those houses to let people drive through the middle of our city"
"In the future we'll all have vacuum tubes in our homes to send and deliver mail"
"Airships are the future of transatlantic travel"
"Blockchain will revolutionize everything!"
"People can use our rockets to travel across the ocean"
"Roads are a great place to put solar panels" "LLMs are a great way of making things"

Not all tools are worthy of the way they are being used. Would you use a hammer that had a 15% chance of smashing you in the face when you swung it at a nail? That's the problem a lot of us see with LLMs.