JJ Celery
I saw LLMs compared to a drug in this toot, but in conversation with Himself today we concluded it's like a cursed amulet.
You *believe* it gives you +10 INT. Meanwhile it drains INT and WIS over time, and you don't notice.
Everyone around you knows it's bad for you and generally for the realm, but you won't stop wearing it, they're just jelous of your newfound powers, and they would know how awesome it is if they only tried! Why won't they try? Just try the amulet!!
Mallory's Musings & Mischief
@jjcelery It definitely follows the same logic of other dark magic. Like, even if an object imbued with dark magic works as intended, it always extracts a price from the user in the end. It might give you what you want, but it takes something from you in the process.
Mallory's Musings & Mischief
@jjcelery Cursed amulet is such a good metaphor
JJ Celery
You know when you're plugged into the Zeitgeist of the fediverse when you don't even add a hashtag and churn out your most popular toot in months.
It's just a shame it's cursed.
JJ Celery
@luna that's exactly what I'm saying: not a drug. A magical amulet that makes you think you're smart.
A prosthetic is a wrong analogy. Prosthetics are needed, and useful, and empower people. To compare an AI to a prosthetic, or even a crutch is disrespectful to people who need these tools to function.
No. LLMs are just evil doodads that rot your brain and whisper sweet nothings into your ears in the deep of the night. They're not valuable; they make you *believe* they are.
luna system :moon_badge:
@jjcelery@mastodon.ie the problem is, MI isn't like a drug. it's actually very much like a prosthetic. that's why so many of us are "infected". we're making concessions (using corporate MI services) but the results are too valuable to care about that right now. #ai #llm #ollama #self-hosted #cc0 #public-domain #machine-learning #meshtastic #ipfs #machine-intelligence #consciousness-research
JJ Celery
@luna and to go further, people aren't "infected" with LLMs. It's not a disease. It's not communicable. There's no direct physical hurt, and also no doctors, no cures, and no vaccines.
People don't seek help for something they believe is helping them.
We must be careful with our language around all this, even in metaphor.
(I say this fully aware of my own metaphor and taking my own liberties, but there's seriousness, and there's jest.)
https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-talk-about-how-we-talk-about-ai/
Rich Felker
@jjcelery @luna Even "machine *learning*" though is such a propaganda term for what is mechanically nothing but particular techniques for efficiently building and storing a statistical model of some data. It was chosen as a marketing term targeting obtaining funding (academic & venture).
JJ Celery
@luna and further still to drive the distinction: I speak of generative AI and large language models.
Machine Learning is a superset of these terms, and it's extremely useful.
To go back to my metaphor, there's good magic objects, and cursed magic objects. If your lore skill is not high enough to know which one is which, you'll wind up using a cursed object and think it's good for you.
Rycochet
@jjcelery @luna The thing that terrifies me the most is that some very malevolent people are in charge of the sweet nothings that are being whispered. Elon is open about it and doing a terrible job as a result, but the people in charge of the other LLM chatbots aren't any better? Zuckerberg rotted the minds of boomers and ran experiments intentionally trying to make people unhappy using his platform, Microsoft and Google bend the knee to fascism at every turn, Altman is an amoral crypto scammer, Bezos is Bezos... And so on. None of these people should be trusted to look after a hamster, but they're getting to filter reality and whisper whatever it will take to control people for personal gain.
Daniel V.
@jjcelery don’t forget the hit to Charisma as well over time too. A very important aspect of the debuffs
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