this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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And there are 1.3 billion smokers in the world according to the WHO.
Does that make cigarettes useful?
Something being useful doesn't imply it's good or beneficial. Those terms are not synonymous. Usefulness describes whether a thing achieves a particular goal or serves a specific purpose effectively.
A torture device is useful for extracting information. A landmine is useful for denying an area to enemy troops.
No it fucking isn't! This is a great analogy, actually, thank you for bringing it up. A person being tortured will tell you literally anything that they believe will stop you from torturing them. They will confess to crimes that never happened, tell you about all their accomplices who don't exist, and all their daily schedules that were made up on the spot. Torture is useless but morons think it is useful. Just like AI.
Torture can be a useful way of extracting information if you have a way to instantly verify it, which actually makes it a good analogy to LLMs. If I want to know the password to your laptop and torture you until you give me the correct password and I log in then that works.