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Have you ever considered whether there may be chemical differences between using ChatGPT and heroin?

Network effects are the mechanism of power. Perhaps a little memetic social unrest is good, actually. It's like an immune reaction. The body is inflamed so the disease may be purged. It seems to accomplish more than the Social Media Era strategy of nudging folks towards alternatives, at any rate.

The answer is never. I tried in vain to teach people that they're failing to address disinformation and actually furthering it with their tribalist displays. They don't care, save your breath and just accept that humanity is doomed.

Show me when we have harm reduction for social media and maybe I will believe that this is an argument that deserves any acknowledgment.

Is this rant supposed to be ironic in that way, or is it just frustration?

Could you elaborate on the tactics that would replace condescending rants? Explained for a hypothetical someone who might not know any. I think maybe part of the problem is some folks don't know other paths.

LLMs and codegen are pretty central to my job, these days. Seems central to most other semi-relevant jobs I've looked at lately, too. Responding to condescending rants doesn't pay my mortgage, so I'm just more careful and less enthusiastic about where I try to talk about what I'm doing these days.

What the hell are we supposed to do, then? You keep saying we should try some other tactic. There is no other tactic available to us! Most of us aren’t friend with power brokers in Silicon Valley. We do not have the levers that you have. What should we do?

In my job, I am the lone anti-ai voice in what we develop for our business. I demand ROIs, and call out when benchmarks aren't met for the next project that wants to add it. All for our devs using the free tools, but so far nothing that was promised when we signed a check has paid off

People who want to see *less* LLM use are not going to join you in encouraging *more* LLM use, and repeatedly using the word "condescending" as you do is very much a pot/kettle situation. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and getting all stroppy just because you got ratio'd.

This is fair enough, I agree scolding is not the answer, but I don't see how harm reduction education will get through to individual users who, as you point out, are often experiencing LLMs through bundling by established providers.

Other tactics that folks are trying include: * Lawsuits; * databases of AI harms; * pushing for regulation; * sharing info about AI harms, lack of ROI, plagiarism, etc; * sharing how-tos and resources I cover this sort of thing in my newsletter if you're interested buttondown.com/aiweek

It’s not for lack of criticism. It’s the total lack of information about what any tech actually does. People think LLMs are just more of the same; unaware that it’s explicitly not, explicitly incapable of fulfilling the label “AI”. The tech info sphere is dominated by corporations & grifters.

I don't buy the wokescold idea; if this was any other social issue, this thread would be quite gross. It's quite clear at this point you can't talk people out of doing harmful things, but there's also no other form of action that seems to work either.

I think focusing on the impact of the thing rather than the thing itself is useful in critique. e.g. A climate communicator (forget who) said he's given himself a rule: don't say "climate crisis" w/out providing an example within 6 words. Similar thinking for AI would help. Examples are plentiful.

“At what point are folks going to try literally any other tactic than condescending rants” is pretty evergreen and broadly applicable on here, and well stated.

💯

There is little to nothing about achieving meaningful security with LLMs , probability is not good enough compared to solid logic and regulators know this. Stacking LLMs just make the problems worse and harder to understand.

this a shit take, bro nobody goes rightwing who wasn't already aimed in that direction blaming that on any pushback which is less than *perfectly polite* is tone policing and respectability politics, writ large I'd expect a *journalist* to know the fucking difference

Someone becoming friendly with the racist/fascists who are nice to them because the left is mean to them is literally meme images.dailykos.com/images/57480...

👆 well there's some irony there seeing scolding has been a method for parents teaching their little humans for millennia which may be why most of us too often make piss-poor choices 😎

Yeah again, by screenshotting this person you are in fact scolding them with moralizing about their choices

Or do teachers sometimes use YouTube videos AT THEIR OWN DISCRETION for learning purposes? Do you really not care at all that this is being forced on everyone in desperate attempt to make it pay just bc you like it?

If a whole industry has become committed to its proliferation, there's really little people without the cash needed to make alternatives can do apart from saying it's a piece of shit. You can tell folks about sensible uses, but it's sure not what the service providers are constantly pushing.