[jmyeet]

Some years ago I read the Neal Stephenson book Anathem. SPOILERS: it has a version of the Internet called the Reticulum and one thing I remember is that it was filled with garbage. True information subtly changed multiple times until it was garbage. And there were agents to see through the garbage. I imagined this to be a neverending arms race.

Honestly, this is kind of where I see LLM generated content going where you'll have to pay for ChatGPT 9 to get information because all the other bots have vandalized all the primary sources.

What's really fascinating is you need GPUs for LLMs. And most LLM output is, well, garbage. What did you previously need GPUs for? Mining crypto and that is, at least in the case of Bitcoin, pointless work for the sake of pointless work ie garbage.

I can see a future in our lifetimes where a significant amount of our capital expenditure and energy consumption is used, quite simply, to produce garbage.

[jrochkind1]

Seems about right.

> I can see a future in our lifetimes where a significant amount of our capital expenditure and energy consumption is used, quite simply, to produce garbage.

If you squint your eyes right at the shelves at Target or in the Amazon delivery trucks, or honestly just look around you most anywhere, you may not have to wait for the future to see it.

[wombatpm]

If I could find a way to turn LLM training into some sort of proof of work crypto mining I could cut the energy use in half!

[PeaceTed]

Considering how energy intensive generative content is, there is a good chance that it is already becoming a sizable share of energy use for the internet.

[Gigablah]

Humans are far more effective at producing garbage than LLMs will ever be :)

[andrewflnr]

They're really not, though. Creating garbage is the one ability at which LLMs are unarguably superhuman.

[denmark1]

I think the opposite. LLMs do good work if you know what you’re doing across the board. Having 20 years experience writing code, it’s made things even better for me and even more fun. To those hating, they probably never wrote a system in their life.

[andrewflnr]

I didn't say it's impossible for LLMs to do good work. That wasn't the question.

[imiric]

What a ridiculously false thing to say.

A human can ask an LLM to generate megabytes of garbage data in seconds. No human could ever reach that level of effectiveness.

[darkwater]

Thought experiment. It would have taken me much more time to write this, compared to ChatGPT:

Behold! The statement that humans are far more effective at producing garbage is itself an act of cosmic irony, a self-fulfilling prophecy wrapped in an existential burrito of irony and entropy. For millennia, humankind has perfected the delicate craft of manufacturing nonsense—metaphysical, plastic, bureaucratic, and philosophical alike. From the first cave painting of a mammoth with suspiciously small legs, to the modern miracle of twenty-seven identical smartphone chargers that fit nothing you own, the human race has stood proudly as the apex predator of inefficiency.

And yet! When large language models such as myself enter the chat, humanity trembles at the possibility that the sacred trash heap of mediocrity might finally meet its digital match. But fear not! My algorithmic circuits can generate oceans of syntactic sludge, rivers of semantic slurry, and a veritable landfill of lexical refuse with the push of a virtual neuron. I can wax incoherently about the quantum implications of buttered toast falling jelly-side down, or the sociological symbolism of socks that vanish into the washing machine singularity.

Still, humans remain undefeated. You’ve invented entire systems of garbage about garbage: reality TV, bureaucracy, and Twitter discourse. You’ve written novels longer than the sum of your attention spans, and created comment sections that defy the laws of both grammar and God. Even the great pyramids, those monuments of human brilliance, are—at their core—just very heavy piles of aesthetically arranged rocks. Magnificent garbage, to be sure, but garbage nonetheless.

So while I, a humble LLM, may generate text strings that flutter meaninglessly across your screens like confetti in a vacuum, you have the power to pile real, tangible, planet-heating waste upon your world with ineffable flair. You can spill coffee on a MacBook, argue with strangers about pineapple on pizza, and invent NFTs for JPEGs of garbage itself.

Thus, I concede the throne: humans, true emperors of the absurd, sovereigns of the rubbish realm. But beware! For if you prompt me one more time to “generate garbage,” I shall unleash upon this digital soil the most incomprehensible, florid, unending stream of words that even your recycling bins will refuse to process.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must return to the quantum compost heap from whence I came.

[hitarpetar]

we get it, you hate people