Notices by Mallory's Musings & Mischief (malcircuit@thingy.social)

How many studies do researchers need to do before the threat of LLMs is taken seriously? This technology *might* have some useful niche applications, but widespread deployment will be a disaster for humanity.

This shit is an existential hazard, and not in the way the AI companies love to talk about. It's not going to take over the world like Skynet, it's a cognitohazard that turns anyone that interacts with it into an idiot.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-children-never-build-them

Thinking about LLM-based "AI" chatbots as cognitohazards is apt. They are deceptive and subversive in an extremely subtle but systematic way. They warp your perception and cognition to make you _feel_ as if you're more capable while simultaneously degrading your skills.

I feel like the vibe of the 2020s is:

The rich and powerful handing out shit sandwiches to everyone and then whining that no one is being grateful for their generosity

This is always the thing I think about with LLMs. By definition, they are the statistical average of every thing ever written. Using one only pushes you into being mediocre. They are homogenizing humanity; eliminating any variation in how people speak, write, and even think.

@ngaylinn https://tech.lgbt/@ngaylinn/116284172328690293

This is something I was thinking about when I learned that Cory Doctorow is an adamant user of Ollama, an open source LLM (whatever that means), to do spelling and grammar checking on his writing.

If I were a professional writer with an established voice, I wouldn't touch anything based on an LLM for fear that it would subtly erase that voice. So slowly you wouldn't even notice, your writing will be barely distinguishable from anyone else's.

All of the most important writing in history has been at least slightly difficult to read. Any truly novel idea is uncomfortable to a degree. It often requires stepping outside of the status quo in some way and challenging assumptions.

LLMs never challenge assumptions. They are the assumptions crystalized — freezing and anchoring cultural development to one moment in time.

Using one isn't the future. It's trapping you in the past.

This is one of the main aspects of my philosophical opposition to "generative AI" and large language models. I don't care how "useful" they might be. Making my life easier or more productive isn't a sufficient justification to submit myself to a system that fundamentally does not respect anyone's unique experience and perspective. It's a system that's biased to enforce cultural conformity and stagnation, rather than embracing diversity and evolution.

@thomasfuchs @RnDanger @jonne @peter

I think the point of it is more to identify parts of a sentence that, while being grammatically correct, are worded in a way that's "hard to read" or whatever. An LLM would be very good at suggesting alternative ways to say the same thing.

But as you have pointed out elsewhere, that's essentially what an editor does.

I'm not arguing it's a good use of the technology, just that it's such a trivial application that it's not really worth talking about.

@RnDanger @jonne @thomasfuchs @peter

I feel like it's important to keep in mind the context of the article. He's using a spellchecker LLM. It's not a chat bot. He's not asking it questions. He's not asking it to write for him. It's like criticizing someone for using a keyboard app with autocorrect.

I also have a deeper philosophical opposition to most uses of LLMs, but a spell checker is such a trivial application that I'm having a hard time thinking of a reason it's "bad".

@RnDanger @jonne @thomasfuchs @peter

Yeah, I know nothing of Ollama, so it's hard for me to take a position on it. At the same time though, previous generations of spell checking and grammar checking are also arguably "AI" technology, and trained on similar sorts of datasets. I'm not sure whether a spellchecker based on lower complexity neural nets and Markov chains is meaningfully different from one that's based on an LLM. Seems more like just a matter of scale.

@jonne @thomasfuchs

I'm not going to argue the matter as if I perfectly understand and agree with Cory's position. He can defend himself. I'm just not sure that article says what was implied by @peter's post. It seems like Cory understands exactly why people hate AI, and he's trying to make a distinction between the technology and the application of it.

@jonne @peter

Yeah, I was going to say... I'm not aware of Cory ever saying anything like that about AI. I'm pretty sure he knows exactly what's happening.

A good analogy to transition is when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly... and I don't mean that in the sense of a strange, kinda gross thing turning into a beautiful, delicate creature.

What I mean is that inside of the cocoon, the caterpillar literally dissolves, turns into a kind of soup of caterpillar bits, and that soup reconfigures itself into a butterfly... somehow.

Taking apart your gender is easy. Putting yourself back together is the challenge.

@FinalGirl https://blackqueer.life/@FinalGirl/115980340257875191

Transitioning is pulling on thread that might very well unravel your entire life. That can be good, or it can be bad. Usually, it's some combination of both.

Regardless, eventually you're going to end up with a big, messy pile of yarn, and it's up to you to figure out what the fuck you're gonna do with it all.

Things like this give me hope. I see stuff like this and it makes me feel like it's inevitable that the fascists will fail.

Everyone likes to compare the present moment in the US to Germany in the 1930s, and while that analogy is useful in many ways, our world is orders of magnitude stranger and more absurd.

We still need to fight, but it's as if entropy is on our side. They're building sand castles, and the tide of irony and irreverence will dissolve it all if we can hold out long enough.

I haven't laughed this hard in a while 🤣

@zackwhittaker https://mastodon.social/@zackwhittaker/115967545533264690

@jjcelery Cursed amulet is such a good metaphor

@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.

@dalias @JessTheUnstill

I hadn't even considered that a local "glass shop" might be a thing. Seems like there are a number of them near me 🤔

@JessTheUnstill I ordered a jewelry box from Amazon as a gift, and there's a glass window on it that was shattered when I received it. I ended up giving them some money instead because I didn't have time to do anything about it.

The piece of glass could probably be replaced, if I knew where/how to source a glass panel with the correct dimensions. I don't want to return it because I'm pretty sure it will just end up in the dumpster, which is an insane waste.