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I have been developing software since the late 80s, mostly CAM software for metal cutting machines, and I have been refereeing tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons since the late 70s. I get the power of LLMs, and I do find them useful. But I find them useful in much the same way I find a really good set of random tables useful, or a good set of rules for procedurally generating something like a star sector for a science fiction campaign. For my day job developing software, and for the RPG campaigns and books I run and publish today, LLMs are, in many cases, random tables on steroids. After using them for two years, even with all their improvements, I am continually reminded by the results I get that, at the heart of it, I am still dealing with what amounts to randomly generated content. Yes, I know it is more accurate to call the process probabilistic rather than random. And yes, somebody can construct a technically deterministic setup with fixed weights, fixed seeds, fixed sampling parameters, and a frozen runtime environment. But that is like saying you can recreate a rainstorm if you get a thousand butterflies to flap their wings in exactly the right way. It may be technically true, but it is not how the technology behaves in normal day-to-day use. For practical purposes, given the same prompt and the same apparent starting conditions, the result can differ each time you use a model. The outputs will often be highly correlated, and often useful, but they are not deterministic software in the ordinary sense. So far, I am failing to see how the inherent probabilistic nature of the technology can be fully overcome. I understand how we got to where we are today from older neural net technology, including the systems used for vision and sound. What we have now can be very useful. But my view is that it is being badly oversold and overhyped. Its probabilistic nature is being vastly underestimated, and that is a major reason for much of the weirdness and many of the failures we keep seeing. In tabletop roleplaying, there have been times when hobbyists relied too much on procedurally generated content and ultimately got burned by it, either through campaigns that were not as fun or products that were subpar. Each time, the lesson was the same: there is no substitute for human judgment. Any workflow or technology incorporating LLMs has to keep humans in the loop, and not merely as rubber stamps. The human has to remain the primary decision maker. |