by d-lisp | 2025-12-12 17:48:46+00:00
I wanted to reflect a bit on this.

I have hard time to imagine why non-tech people would find a use for LLMs, let's say nothing in your life forces you to produce information (be it textual, pictural or anything that can be related to information). Let's say your needs are focused on spending good times with friends or your family, eating nice dishes (home cooked or restaurant), spending your money on furnitures, rents, clothes, tools and etc.

Why would you need an AI that produce information in an information-bloated world ?

You probably met someone that "fell in love with woodworking" or idk, after having watched youtube videos (that person probably built a chair, a table or something akin). I don't think stuff like "Hi, I have these materials, what can I do with it" produce more interesting results than just nerding on the internet or in a library looking for references (on japaneese handcrafted furnitures, vintage ikea designs, old school woodworking, ...). (Or maybe the LLM will be able to give you a list of good reads, which is nice but somewhat of a limited and basic use).

Agentic AI and more efficient/intelligent AIs are not very interesting for people like <wood lover> and are at best a proxy for otherly findable information. Of course, not everyone is like <wood lover>, the majority of people don't even need to invest time in a "creative" hobby and instead they will watch movies, invest time in sport, invest time in sociability, go to museums, read books; you could imagine having AIs that write books, invent films, invent artworks, talk with you, but I am pretty sure that there is something more than just "watch a movie" or "read a book" when performing these activities; as someone who likes reading or watching movies, what I enjoy is following the evolutions of the authors of the pieces, understanding their posture toward its ancestors, its era-mates, toward its own previous visions and whatnot. I enjoy to find a movie "weird" "goofy" "sublime" and whatnot, because I enjoy a small amount of parasociality with the authors and am finally brought to say things like "Ahah, Lynch was such a weirdo when he shot Blue Velvet" (okay, maybe not that type of bully judgement, but you may be understanding what I mean).

I think I would find it uninspiring to read an AI written book, because I couldn't live this small parasocial experience. Maybe you could get me with music, but I still think there's a lot of activity in loving a song. I love Bach, but am pretty sure also I like Bach the character (from what I speculate from the songs I listen). I imagine that guy in front of his keyboard, having the chance to live a -weird- moment of extasy when he produces the best lines of the chaconne (if he was living in our times he would relisten to what he produced again and again and nodding to himself "man, that's sick").

What could I experience from an LLM ? "Here is the perfect novel I wrote specifically for you based on your tastes:". There would be no imaginary Bach that I would like to drink a beer with, no testimony of a human reaching the state of mind in which you produce an absolute (in fact highly relative, but you need to lie to yourself) "hit".

All of this is highly personnal, but I would be curious to know what others think.