[rfv6723]

This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals.

Similarly, today's critics, often from within the very institutions they defend, frame AI as a threat to "expertise" and "civic life" when in reality, they fear it as a threat to their own status as the sole arbiters of truth. Their resistance is less a principled defense of democracy and more a desperate attempt to protect a crumbling monopoly on knowledge.

[phoe-krk]

> a desperate attempt to protect a crumbling monopoly on knowledge

More like a war on the traditional, human-based knowledge, leveraged by people who believe that via coveting the world's supply of RAM, SSDs, GPUs, and what not, can achieve their own monopoly on knowledge under the pretense of liberating it. Note that running your own LLM becomes impossible if you can no longer afford the hardware to run it on.

[terminalshort]

Better that I'm forced to rent an LLM from a tech monopolist for a few dollars than be forced to hire a member of the lawyers cartel for $500 an hour.

[intended]

Come now. You mean the highly regulated, more competitive world of law? That too, as it is practiced in America? The once capital of economic competition?

That “cartel”?

Vs the leaders of an industry that built their tools through insane amounts of copyright infringement, and have forced the coining of “enshittification” to describe all pervasive business strategies?

The same industry which employs acqui-hire to find ways to cull competition?

[terminalshort]

The industry where you can be a paralegal for 20 years, but not allowed to even attempt to take the bar exam because you haven't paid your $250K and 3 years lost earnings to get your degree from the lawyer's cartel? That "competitive" industry?

[wrqvrwvq]

Yes, it's very competitive. If you were in the unfortunate position of needing a state-appointed attorney to represent you against fallacious claims, you would appreciate the scrutiny and regulation that by and large provides fair representation to all. The legal profession believes that 3 years of study is required for all lawyers to fully immerse themselves in the study of law, and without that, something could be lost. Many lawyers think the third year is probably overkill, but these are also amongst the smarter lawyers that also recognize that many people will come to the profession with no prior interest, and that overall, it's preferable to enforce high standards. You could somehow test for whatever it is law school transmits to its pupils, and offer the exam that guarantees that lawyers have been exposed to and in some sense understood all the various aspects of the degree, but then the exam just becomes more difficult and law school becomes even more of a prerequisite. Lawyers are like airline pilots in that lives are always in the balance, and even more critically, they are foundational pillars of a just society and allowing "just anyone, even a smart test taker" to become a lawyer is less favorable than trying to improve on the current system.

[hojofpodge]

The current bubble's effect on hardware is alarming but if they think they are going to create a permanent economic manipulation they are deluded. The US' hold on controls is eroding at a faster rate and China will be making good enough all the faster if its price/spec ratio is absurdly high.

Crypto currency makers can have artificial limits but no amount of limiting gpt-next access is cutting access to good enough.

[wartywhoa23]

Surely we'll all beat monopolies by running our own local LLMs, storing whole blockchains on our local storage, building our own atomic power plants, flying our own airlines and launching our own satellites via our own rocket fleets. And producing our own trillion-transistor silicon in our own fabs.

We just have to start printing our own money and buying us some pocket armies and puppet politicians first.

[__loam]

It's so ridiculous to make this argument when the people who stand to benefit the most from this technology are the massive corporations that can subsidize the compute and capital costs of this technology. Is it democratization when Google pulls something your wrote on your website then runs it through an LLM so they can serve it directly to a user? You say people see this as a threat to their status but the reality is this is a massive consolidation of the information economy of the internet in the hands of a few corporate interests.

[terminalshort]

The people who stand to benefit are you. If I have to pay a lawyer $1000 to review a contract, or spend $10 in tokens, I win. OpenAI may make $9 off of those tokens, or they may make $1. But that doesn't matter at all to me. I care about the $1000 vs $10, not the $9 vs $1.

[__loam]

$10 until the contract is voided in court because you didn't know the law.

[chrisjj]

Does the quality of the work matter at all to you?

[terminalshort]

It certainly does, but that's not guaranteed with humans either. Nor is it the only factor that matters. It's a cost benefit tradeoff. If I am on trial for a crime, obviously I will pay for the quality. If I want to know what some language in a simple contract means, I will ask a LLM.

[embedding-shape]

If what you say was true, why are people from not within those institutions also try to warn others about the potential downfall of "expertise" and "civic life"? Are they just misinformed? Paid by these "institutional defenders" or what is your hypothesis?

[terminalshort]

In most cases those people are members of the upper class who hold credentials issued by those institutions, and often are in professions protected by state enforced cartels where the ticket for entry is one of said credentials.

[embedding-shape]

> In most cases those people are members of the upper class who hold credentials issued by those institutions

Right, but in my comment I'm explicitly asking about the ones that don't have any relation yet seem to defend it anyways? "Don't people don't actually exists" isn't really an argument...

[boelboel]

So you're saying codemonkeys are mad they don't get seen as the 'cool guys', we have to kill the jobs 'cool guys' have. The codemonkeys will never be cool, just accept it, there's no way to fix it. These cool guys will for the most part be 'cool' even if you take away their jobs right now.

[raincole]

> Are they just misinformed?

Not all of them, but given the same questionable or outright false assumptions (e.g. AI companies are doing interference at a loss, the exaggerated water consumption number, etc) keeping getting repeated on YouTube, Reddit and even HN where the user base is far more tech-savvy than the population, I think misinformation is the primary reason.

[rfv6723]

The alarm isn't coming from outside the institutions; it's coming from a wider, more modern clergy. The new priestly class isn't defined by a specific building, but by a shared claim to the mastery of complex symbolic knowledge.

The linguists who call AI a "stochastic parrot" are the perfect example. Their panic isn't for the public good; it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing their decades of grammatical theory. They are watching their entire intellectual paradigm—their very claim to authority—be rendered obsolete.

This isn't a grassroots movement. It's an immune response from the cognitive elite, desperately trying to delegitimize a technology that threatens to trivialize their expertise. They aren't defending society; they're defending their status.

[intended]

The first weakness of your claim is that it is inherently one of the elite.

You read the works of the cognitive elite, when they support AI. When most people sing its praises, it’s from the highest echelons of white collar work priesthood.

AI is fundamentally a tool of the cognitively trained, and shows its greatest capability in the hands of those capable of assessing its output as accurate at a glance. The more complex the realm, the deeper the expertise to find value in it.

Secondly, linguists are not the sole group espousing the concerns with these tools. I’ve seen rando streamers and normal folk in WhatsApp groups, completely disconnected from the AI elite hating what is being wrought. Students and young adults outright wonder if they will have any worthwhile economic future.

Perhaps it is not a “movement”, but there is an all pervasive fear and concern in the population when it comes to AI.

Finally, position is eerily similar to the dismissal of concerns from mid level and factory floor job workers in the 80s and 90s. It was forgivable given the then prevalent belief that people would be retrained and reabsorbed into equivalently sustaining roles in other new industries.

[raincole]

> Their panic isn't for the public good; it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing their decades of grammatical theory.

It's some wild claim. Every linguist worth their salt had known that you don't need grammatical theory to reach native level. Grammar being descriptive rather than prescriptive is the mainstream idea and had been long before LLM.

If you actually ask them, I bet most linguists will say they are not even excellent English (or whichever language they studied the most) teachers.

Plus, "stochastic parrot" was coined before ChatGPT. If linguists really felt that threatened by the time when people's concerns over AI was like "sure it can beat go master but how about league of legends?" you have to admit they did have some special insights, right?

[rfv6723]

You've mistaken the battlefield. This isn't about descriptive grammar. It's about the decades-long dominance of Chomsky's entire philosophy of language.

His central argument has always been that language is too complex and nuanced to be learned simply from exposure. Therefore, he concluded, humans must possess an innate, pre-wired "language organ"—a Universal Grammar.

LLMs are a spectacular demolition of that premise. They prove that with a vast enough dataset, complex linguistic structure can be mastered through statistical pattern recognition alone.

The panic from Chomsky and his acolytes isn't that of a humble linguist. It is the fury of a high priest watching a machine commit the ultimate heresy: achieving linguistic mastery without needing his innate, god-given grammar.

[raincole]

> LLMs are a spectacular demolition of that premise.

It really isn't. While I personally think the Universal Grammar theory is flawed (or at least Chomsky's presentation is flawed), LLM doesn't debunk it.

Right now we have machines that recognized faces better than humans. But it doesn't mean humans do not have some innate biological "hardware" for facial recognition that machines don't possess. The machines simply outperform the biological hardware with their own different approach.

Also, I highly recommend you express your ideas with your own words instead of letting an LLM present them. It's painfully obvious.

[adrian_b]

I do not see how it can be claimed that "LLMs are a spectacular demolition of that premise", because LLMs must be trained on an amount of text far greater than that to what a human is exposed.

I have learned one foreign language just by being exposed to it almost daily, by watching movies spoken in that language, without using any additional means, like a dictionary or a grammar (because none were available where I lived; this was before the Internet). However, I have been helped in guessing the meaning of the words and the grammar of the language, not only by seeing what the characters of the movie were doing, correlated to the spoken phrases, but also by the fact that I knew a couple of languages that had many similarities with the language of the movies that I was watching.

In any case, the amount of the spoken language to which I had been exposed for a year or so, until becoming fluent in it, had been many orders of magnitudes less than what is used by a LLM for training.

I do not know whether any innate knowledge of some grammar was involved, but certainly the knowledge of the grammar of other languages had helped tremendously in reducing the need for being exposed to greater amounts of text, because after seeing only a few examples I could guess the generally-applicable grammar rules.

There is no doubt that the way by which a LLM learns is much dumber than how a human learns, which is why this must be compensated by a much bigger amount of training data.

Seeing how the current inefficiency of LLM training has already caused serious problems for a great number of people, who either had to give up on buying various kinds of electronic devices or they had to accept to buy devices of a much worse quality than previously desired and planned, because the prices for DRAM modules and for big SSDs have skyrocketed, due to the hoarding of memory devices by the rich who hope to become richer by using LLMs, I believe that it has been proven beyond doubt that the way how LLMs learn, for now, is not good enough and it is certainly not a positive achievement, as more people have been hurt by it than the people who have benefited from it.

[chrisjj]

> "stochastic parrot" was coined before ChatGPT.

But not before LLMs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot

[chrisjj]

> it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing their decades of grammatical theory.

Rehashing text in a language is not mastering that language, and no, is not feared by linguists.

[dgb23]

It was the same clergy (or rather parts of it) that used the printing press to great success.

Martin Luther used it to spread his influence extremely quickly for example. Similarly, the clergy used new innovations in book layout and writing to spread Christianity across Europe a thousand years before that.

What is weird about LLMs though, is that it isn't a simple catalyst of human labor. The printing press or the internet can be used to spread information quickly that you have previously compiled or created. These technologies both have a democratizing effect and have objectively created new opportunities.

But LLMs are to some degree parasitical to human labor. I feel like their centralizing effect is stronger than their democratizing one.

[terminalshort]

Martin Luther was clergy, but he was absolutely not "the same clergy."

[bugglebeetle]

Everyone who tells the story of the reformation leaves out that Martin Luther also used this new technology to widely disseminate his deranged anti-Semitic lies and conspiracies, leading to pogroms against Jews, a hundred years of war across Europe, and providing the ideological basis for the rise of Nazism.

[dgb23]

You're right that later in his life he spread antisemitism and other terrible opinions as he was extremely elitist towards the peasantry. Definitely not a fan of that sort of thing.

But I didn't want to make a value judgement about Martin Luther's ideological legacy, but wanted to introduce some nuance into the narrative about disruptive innovation.

[mawadev]

I think this could be applied to most fields where LLMs move in. Let's take the field we are probably most familiar with.

Currently companies start to shift from enhancing productivity of their employees with giving them access to LLMs, they start to offshore to lower cost countries and give the cheap labor LLMs to bypass language and quality barriers. The position isn't lost, it's just moving somewhere else.

In the field of software development this won't be a an anxiety of an elite or threat to expertise or status, but rather a direct consequence to livelihood when people won't be hired and lose access to the economy until they retrain for a different field. So a layer on top of that you can argue with authority and control, but it rather has economic factors to it that produce the anxiety.

In that sense, doesn't any knowledge work have a monopoly on knowledge? It is the entire point to have experts in fields that know the details and have the experience, so that things can be done as expected, since not many have the time nor the capabilities to get into the critical details.

If you believe there is any good will when you can centralize that knowledge to the hands of even less people, you produce the same pattern you are complaining about, especially when it comes to how businesses are tweaking their margins. It really is a force multiplier and equalizer, but a tool, that can be used in good ways or bad ways depending on how you look at it.

[energy123]

This is a criticism of the author's backgrounds rather than the content of the article.

[terminalshort]

"Oxycodone is Not Addictive" by employee of Perdue Pharma.

It absolutely makes sense to criticize the author's background.

[gabaix]

True. I myself try to read articles without looking up the authors.

It is hard though. When someone makes an extraordinary claim I feel the urge to look them up. It is a shortcut to some legitimacy to that claim.

[NoboruWataya]

Most of the comments here are. HN hates lawyers.

[boelboel]

Many on HN are sad that even with tech workers/businesses having extreme wealth they're still not seen as better than the 'old elite'.

[anonymous908213]

It is funny watching people debate at length with your LLM word-vomit. I'm not sure whether you yourself are convinced that the soup you've copypasted across multiple replies means anything, but apparently some people are convinced enough to argue with it, so this is pretty great satire in one way or another.

[b65e8bee43c2ed0]

it feels good to watch the aforementioned clergy kvetch about AI while multiple multi-trillion dollar corporations backed by a friendly administration continue to run their bulldozers :)

[fatherwavelet]

The printing press was also used to print witch hunting books and caused 200 years of mass hysteria around witches and witch trials.

Before the printing press, only the clergy could "identity" witches but the printing press "democratized knowledge" of witch identification at larger scale.

The algorithmic version of "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so" is going to cause huge trouble in the short and medium term.

[DarkNova6]

An institution is worth nothing without the spirit, humanity and exchange of knowledge among the humanity behind it. The fostering of real expertise is difficult, but without this expertise you are doomed to believe whatever your Corporate AI is telling you.

So is the AI better?

No. It's quicker, easier, more seductive.

[archievillain]

This is a good analogy, but you made it backwards. The "Clergy" fears the "Printing Press", as it acts as a tool of decentralized information spreading. But LLMs are not decentralized and thus are not the "Printing Press". LLMs are what the "Clergy" (say, for example, all the AI companies led by billionaires in cahoots with the west's most powerful government) uses to suppress the real "Printing Press" (the decentralized, open internet, where everybody can host and be reached).

[toofy]

this is much much closer to going in reverse back to when the church were the deciders rather than liberating knowledge the way the printing press did.

the church did the thinking for the peasants. the church decided what the peasants heard, etc… this is moving absolutely in that direction.

the models now do the thinking for us, the ai companies decide what we get to see, these companies decide how much we pay to access it. this is the future.

[7952]

Isn't that just an ad-hominem against the writers? A threat to the status quo is still a threat to people and could have negative consequences.

[ruraljuror]

Is that what happened? In Nexus, Harari looks at this exact same situation: the invention of the printing press, and shows how clergy used it to stoke witch hunts (ahem, misinformation) for decades--if not centuries. It was not for hundreds of years until after the invention of the printing press that we had The Enlightenment. What gave rise to The Enlightenment? Harari argues it is modern institutions.

It's not so simple that we can say "printing press good, nobody speak ill of the printing press."