One of my realization of me getting older is the realization that there are no adults in the room anymore, or that I am now, an adult, who, also the same like other adults, we actually don't know shit about anything, none of us do.
I think LLM is a useful technology. But since the dawn of LLMs, I've been trying to imagine what the world will look like if we take LLM to its logical conclusion. It seems to me, despite of all its benefits, LLM is a sword too sharp for all of us to handle. Its not gonna be sunshines and rainbows.
A couple things I'm thinking about below, and these are all just societal impact, not even environmental ones:
- Young people lost their career ladders. Capitalism doesn't work anymore. We have permanent underclass. And maybe worldwide scale societal unrest, in which violence will be the norm.
- People stop creating music, stop writing blogs, stop doing experiments or any other cool stuffs and share it on the internet because LLM companies can just pirate the shit out of it without paying anything back.
- Mediocrity in everything. We have this Suno shit claiming that people don't like the process of creating music because its so tedious so lets just prompt it away. Berklee has a class to make AI music. Yup. People claim that its okay to consume mediocre stuffs, because we don't need the highest grade of codebase, of design, of music for our day to day life.
- People stop socializing and connecting to another human beings. For example, art is a way for people to connect to other's art. Software engineering is a lot of communication, discussing tradeoffs with other engineers. But now you can just prompt your way away, even things as simple as writing emails.
- All the values (measured by money) created in this world is sucked by the LLM owners/producers. Oh you have a beautiful music you just created? Too bad, its mine now. Oh, you just created an art? Its my art now, and I will charge society money to recreate this art that I just acquired. Oh, you have a land somewhere? I can just buy it, money is cheap for me, after all I suck all the values that society created. There are no other values worthy of monetary compensation other than LLM training/research. These "researchers" don't need to practice music, don't need to practice art, don't need to practice law, don't need to practice coding, they can just be an LLM researchers/producers/owners and they get all the values that the other professions created.
- All the above caused economic stagnation. People don't feel the need to pay other human beings, because everything is just a prompt away.
- All the above caused stagnation of progress, or even winding down of progress.
What else?
If truly this is the logical conclusion of LLM, then it seems to me that the mission of this generation is to destroy AI as Ronnie Chieng said is not really off the mark.
Maybe I am an LLM doomer, but help me out here HN, because I'm just a dumb adult.
That wasn't the last time that a high-labor field was automated, much to the chagrin of current and potential future workers in the field, only for the once-expensive output to become a commodity that significantly raised the quality of life for everyone. Despite the Luddites fears of an economic collapse, it always grows.
The only reason we have desk jobs is because we've automated so much that only a small portion of us have to work on things we need to survive. Most of the tech industry is really an entertainment industry that isn't at all economically necessary. As our culture shifts around the endless entertainment possibilities available, we change what entertainment we want to throw money at, and people do more of that, and less of what they used to do, with minimal impact to the rest of us.
As long as there's enough people and machines making our food and clothing and housing, we're all going to be fine.
Granted, there are plenty of efforts to stop people and machines from growing food or building housing, but that's an entirely different problem.
The problem is that art-making-as-a-job is doomed; so are, in the long run, many other 'knowledge worker' jobs, although we can't for certain tell which ones are going to be replaced fully by AI first.
So the hardest problem is not the one relative to creative activity (for pleasure, self-expression, or catharsis), but economic activity. In your words, "Capitalism doesn't work anymore". We can discuss to what point whatever replaces our previous system will still be 'capitalism', but it is apparent that - if it works - it will be very different in many of the aspects we take for granted.
My personal (and likely naive) opinion is that a large part of the political discourse will shift towards trying to define what is -necessary- vs what is -luxury-, as the rewritten order will shift to ensure that all people receive all that is "necessary" and work (whatever it looks like) will be for "luxuries". I don't like it, but I guess that this will be ultimately the question dividing "left" from "right" for a large chunk of this century.
Personally, I will continue seeking out high-quality music/art/movies/books that speak to me, and most of my friends do the same. There will always be a demand for human-created art, regardless of any plagiarism or replication by labs.
You’re caught in the hype, and it’s all around you in your internet bubble.
Tune out, listen to some music, watch a movie, ring your Mum/Mom and ask how her day was.
Intellectual property was always a farce. It really is as simple as that.
I'm less concerned about the impact of AI specifically and more about concerned about people simply losing the will for one another or anything at all. None of this stuff in the real world will matter too much if people are getting their basic needs and desires met in a virtual one.
This isn’t necessarily true. I still write my own blog by hand and write code by hand. Sure it gets fed into the LLM meat grinder but I think a lot of people are going to fight against the LLM slop and consume real human content