Fuck AI

Yeah, that’s better.

Off-topic: what's ofk?

Yeah, but my dog can actually understand me, and has genuine emotions. These LLM's are just unfeeling self-pleasuring devices at this point.

You have no idea how rich the interlinked backstories of all my tchotchkes are. It far surpasses the MCU or Dianetics in richness.

It's baked in.

“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”

― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

Yup, literally seeing human features in random noise. LLMs can't think and aren't conscious; anyone telling you otherwise is either trying to sell you something or has genuinely lost their mind.

I love this about us.

It's just delightful how many situations our brain is willing to shrug and say "close enough" to. Oh wait the pencil has a name now? I guess it must be basically the same as me.

If I pretend an object is talking, my partner will instantly feel bad for how she's treated it.

It's not sad, it's just how brains are.

There is absolutely nothing sad about that, it's beautiful. That tendency is the only reason we have any form of civilization, so I'd say it's worth people occasionally empathizing with pencils.

It's just natural human instinct. We're programmed to look for patterns and see faces. It's the same reason we attribute human characteristics to animals or even inanimate objects.

Add to that the fact that everyone refers to LLM chatbots as humans and this is inevitable.

I think LLMs seem very human if you just accept their humanity without exploring it. You can have what appear on the surface to be deep conversations, and they seem very knowledgeable about many topics. They even claim to have feelings and thoughts of their own. Of course, all of this collapses quickly under scrutiny, but a lot of people won't do that.

Clearly you haven't been talking to enough blindingly stupid people.

You touched too much grass

Only 25% don't believe in a or multiple flying space daddy/daddies.

Elves are real tho

Sorry, but there's a risk you might disagree with me or fail to flatter me sufficiently, so off to LLM I go.

I'm afraid these gen AI "tools" are here to stay…

This is, thankfully, emphatically not true. There is no economic path that leads to these monstrosities remaining as prominent as they are now. (Indeed their current prominence as they get jammed into everything at seeming whim is evidence for how desperate their pushers are getting.)

Every time you get ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or whatever to do something for you, you are costing the slop pusher money. Even if you're one of those people stupid enough to pay for an account.

If ChatGPT charged Netflix-like fees for access, they'd need well over half the world's population just to break even. And unlike every other tech that we've created in the past, newer versions are more expensive to create and operate with each iteration, not less.

There's no fiscal path forward. LLMs are fundamentally impossible to scale and there's no amount of money that's going to fix that. They're a massive bubble that will burst, very messily, sooner, rather than later.

In a decade there will be business studies comparing LLMs to the tulip craze. Well, at least in the few major cities left in the world that aren't underwater from global warming inspired by all those LLM-spawned data centres.