by throwaway328 | 2025-07-15 10:36:19+00:00
And here's a list of stuff I've seen or that the non-computer-experts tell me they're doing with it, since the last month or two when suddenly even people who were against it are accepting it, along with people who'd never heard of it suddenly using it:

- getting the do-re-mi notes for "twinkle twinkle little star" for the piano, just written out with no rhythm or audio anything

- writing a groom's wedding speech ("the first draft", he said, but I doubt it'll be edited much)

- splitting a list of ten names into two groups, to get two teams for indoor soccer (I know, I know... The tone was one of amazement and being impressed, I shit you not. One fellow used to bring a little bag with the same amount of yellow and red lego bricks and we'd pick one from the bag)

- in a workplace, a superior added a bell that gets triggered when a door opens. The superior left, and one employee went straight to ask chatgpt how to turn off the bell, and went straight to fiddling with the alarm after the very quickest skim of the response (and got nowhere, then gave up)

- and a smattering of sort of "self-help" or "psychology lite" stuff which you'll have to take my word on because it's personal stuff, but as you'd expect: "how to deal with a coworker who doesn't respect me in xyz manner", "how to get a 6-pack", "how to be taller", "how to get in to day-trading"

- and a good dose of "news"-related stuff like matters of actual law, or contentious geopolitical topics with very distinct on-the-ground possiblities and mountains of propaganda and spin everywhere, about say the Ukraine war or Gaza. E.g., one friend asked for specific numbers of deaths "on both sides" in Gaza and then told me (I shit you not!) he'd "ran the numbers" on the conflict during his research

Anyway. All that to say not that these people are silly or bad or wrong or anything, but to say - the internet was new! This isn't. When you were brought to see that computer in the university, you were seeing something genuinely amazingly new.

New forms of communcation would open up, new forms of expression, and a whole new competitive space for the kids of the wealthy to see who could contort these new technologies to their will and come out on top dominating the space.

With LLMs, we're only getting the last one there. There's nothing new, in the same profound sense as what the internet brought us. The internet offered a level playing field, to those brave enough to slog through the difficulties of getting set up.

Put differently - LLMs are similar to the internet, if and only if we accept that humans generally are idiots who can't understand their tools and the best we can hope for is that they get faster slop-generating machines. The internet didn't start like that, but it's where it ended up.

And that's LLM's starting point, it's their cultural and logical heart. I think a large number of technologists have internalised these assumptions about humans and technology, and are simply not aware of it, it's the air they breathe.

Put differently again - if the tech industry has gotten so blind that LLMs are what it considers the next internet-sized-idea, and the only possible future, well, it's an industry that's in a myopic and inhumane rut. We'll go from a world where people click and scroll on their devices for entertainment, fundamentally detached from each other and fundamentally disempowered, to a world where people click and scroll on their devices for entertainment, detached and disempowered. How noble a vision, how revolutionary.

So to sum up, in one sense you're correct - it looks like it's going to "take over", and that that's "inevitable". In another sense, LLMs are absolutely wildly different, as this time we're starting off treating the average user like a complete idiot, in fact assuming that we can never do better, and that considering the possibility is childish nonsense.