[asylteltine]

That’s true. I thought I missed the internet before ClosedAI ruined it but man, I would love to go back to 2020 internet now. LLM research is going to be the downfall of society in so many ways. Even at a basic level my friend is taking a masters and EVERYONE is using chatgpt for responses. It’s so obvious with the PC way it phrases things and then summarizes it at the end. I hope they just get expelled.

[j0hnyl]

I don't see how this points to downfall of society. IMO it's clearly a paradigm shift that we need to adjust to and adjustment periods are uncomfortable and can last a long time. LLMs are massive productivity boosters.

[mvdtnz]

> LLMs are massive productivity boosters.

Only if your product is bullshit.

[BeFlatXIII]

Only if you don't proofread or do a cleanup pass is it dogshit.

[monkeynotes]

What's new about that? Any bullshit product is bullshit.

[spaceman_2020]

Ah, Hacker News

Never change

[bluefirebrand]

Do you remember when email first came around and it was a useful tool for connecting with people across the world, like friends and family?

Does anyone still use email for that?

We all still HAVE email addresses, but the vast majority of our communication has moved elsewhere.

Now all email is used for is receiving spam from companies and con artists.

The same thing happened with the telephone. It's not just text messaging that killed phone calls, it's also the explosion of scam callers. People don't trust incoming phone calls anymore.

I see AI being used this way online already, turning everything into untrustworthy slop.

Productivity boosters can be used to make things worse far more easily and quickly than they can be used to make things better. And there will always be scumbags out there who are willing and eager to take advantage of the new power to pull everyone into the mud with the.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> Does anyone still use email for that?

Sure. Same as in the olden days. Txt for short form, email for long form. Email for the infrequently contacted.

Even back when I used SM, I never comm'd with IRL people on SM. SM was 100% internet people.

[tavavex]

This isn't really an accurate comparison. Email and text messaging are, well, messaging platforms - they're used for direct communication and crucially, anyone can come knocking on your door. After a certain threshold of spammers begin taking over inboxes, people move onto something else.

The internet as a whole isn't that. By and large, you can curate your experience and visit only the places you want to visit. So why exactly would the mere existence of generative AI make an average high-quality website suddenly do a 180 and destroy itself?

I won't debate that garbage data will probably be easier to generate and there will be more of it, but the argument feels one-sided. People are talking like the only genuine use of generative AI is generating bad data and helping scammers, despite it opening a lot of other possibilities. It's completely unbalanced.

[monkeynotes]

> Now all email is used for is receiving spam from companies and con artists.

No it isn't, unless you are 12 maybe.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

That's not a response to GPs thesis, just an irrelevant nitpick.

[asylteltine]

It’s only a boost to honest people. Meanwhile grifters and lazies will be able to take advantage. This is why we can’t have nice things. It will lead to things like reduction in remote offerings like remote schooling or work

[monkeynotes]

I think this is hyperbole, and similar to various techno fears throughout the ages.

Books were seen by intellectuals as being the downfall of society. If everyone is educated they'll challenge dogma of the church, for one.

So looking at prior transformational technology I think we'll be just fine. Life may be forever changed for sure, but I think we'll crack reliability and we'll just cope with intelligence being a non-scarce commodity available to anyone.

[jstarfish]

> If everyone is educated they'll challenge dogma of the church, for one.

But this was a correct prediction.

It took the Church down a few pegs and let corporations fill that void. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, and this time they aren't making the mistake of committing doctrine to paper.

> we'll just cope with intelligence being a non-scarce commodity available to anyone.

Or we'll just poison the "intelligence" available to the masses.

[monkeynotes]

> But this was a correct prediction.

And yet the sky didn't fall.

> Or we'll just poison the "intelligence"

We really don't know how that will pan out. All I have is history to inform me, and even the most radical revolutions have worked out with humans continuing to move forward with increased capacity and better living conditions overall. The new boss is way better than the old.

[GeoAtreides]

> Books were seen by intellectuals as being the downfall of society. If everyone is educated they'll challenge dogma of the church, for one.

Now, let me tell you about this man, his 95 theses and a thirty years war. Europe did emerge better from it all, but the cost was high, very high.

[monkeynotes]

Yes, this is the nature of major disruption. I doubt it will be a smooth ride, but I also doubt we will suffer until we are wiped out.

[oblio]

At this rate many exams will just become oral exams :-)

[rightbyte]

Or like ... normal paper exams in a class room?

[monkeynotes]

The paradigm is changed beyond that. Exams are irrelevant if intelligence is freely available to everyone. Anyone who can ask questions can be a doctor, anyone can be an architect. All of those duties are at the fingertips of anyone who cares to ask. So why make people take exams for what is basically now common knowledge? An exam certifies you know how to do something, well if you can ask questions you can do anything.

[madamelic]

> why make people take exams for what is basically now common knowledge?

The only thing that has changed is the speed of access. Before LLMs went mainstream, you could buy whatever book you wanted and read it. No one would stop you from it.

You still should have a professional look over the work and analyze that it is correct. The output is only as good as the input on both sides (both from the training data and the user's prompt)

[freejazz]

Doctors don't just ask LLMs for answers to questions so it's really a mystery as to what you think makes these people into doctors the second they start asking an LLM medical questions... It's akin to saying someone was a doctor when browsing WebMD

[monkeynotes]

The doctor is the LLM, lol.

I don't think we can/should do this on today's LLMs, but if we continue advancing in the same way, and as-good-as-human reliability is achieved, the intelligence of a doctor is in your pocket whenever you want it.

And just like you say you know addresses because you have an address book, you'll know medicine because you have it immediately on-tap. Instead of holding all of that in your own memory, instead of having to use your own critical thinking (or lack thereof), just offload it to the LLM in your pocket.

We do this all the time with tools. Who now knows how to cut down a tree but lives in a house made of milled trees? There are so many lost skills that we defer to either other people or machines and yet each individual lives with the benefit of all those skills.

Tools make cognitive bypasses for us to benefit from. When we can make intelligence a tool, I assume we can offload a lot of our intelligence, or at least acquire new intelligence we didn't have before.

WebMD is the same whoever looks at it. An LLM can adapt to your clarification questions and meet you on your comprehension level. So no, it's not as naive as you are insisting.

[asylteltine]

Lmao do you know doctors? I mean really, do you personally know doctors? Of course they will and I guarantee you they already do. It’s not a matter of stupidity or incompetence it’s a matter of time and ease of access. Of course people will do the fastest thing available to them how could I blame them? The cat is out of the bag.

[freejazz]

I don't think you really got the point and you seem to be projecting your own personal feelings on doctors into this conversation in a fashion that I do not think is going to result in a productive conversation by continuing this discussion with you.

[monkeynotes]

Whether the doctor's data for making informed decisions is in their head, or in the computer at their desk is immaterial. Where you fetch your knowledge from, either from wet-ware, or hardware doesn't have any net difference in the real world.

The skill today is the application of that knowledge. If an LLM can provide the data context, and the application advice and you perform what it says, congrats you now have a doctor's brain on tap for your own personal usage. The doctor has it in their head, you have it in a device. The net differences are immaterial IMO.

[oblio]

That's not how knowledge works. Think of exams where you could have your textbooks and use them.

[monkeynotes]

Yes, but a textbook has fixed knowledge that cannot be queried and discussed. That's why you need the doctor to interpret and apply.

An LLM is the doctor in your pocket. It's yours to use, and whether it is in your head (like a doctor who had to take exams to prove they really had it in their head), or in your pocket makes no difference in your ability to achieve a task.

"Intelligence: the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills."

Well, if I can acquire knowledge from the LLM, and apply it using the LLM's instructions, I now have achieved intelligence without doing an exam.

Problem is, I can lose my LLM. A doctor could lose their mental faculties though.

[BeFlatXIII]

Is it a master's in an important field or just one of those masters that's a requirement for job advancement but primarily exists to harvest tuition money for the schools?