Post

Begging news media to stop making themselves unwitting NPCs in a weird cult's alternate reality game You do not need to breathlessly repeat claims that LLMs will end the world or create utopia with handwavy details or abstract philosophical arguments Ask follow-up questions or hire people who can

LLMs are not magic. We've been describing technical concepts with metaphor for decades; you know "garbage collection" doesn't involve a truck; stop believing "neural networks" are brains

If a startup CEO were in your DMs claiming that there was a real risk of a computer virus "jumping the species barrier" and creating a pandemic in humans, would you believe that? What if their startup sold viruses?

What if their proposed solution was that regulators treat all the present effects of viruses as "a distraction" and focus instead in preventing their sketchily-described digital pandemic?

The job of a journalist is to have some skepticism about extraordinary claims from people in power who stand to gain from public credulity