Large language models (LLMs) are a polarizing technology. It seems that no matter who you talk to, they are either magical tools that will bring about machine consciousness and the end of scarcity and human labor, or a worthless autocorrect that steals the work of the world’s creators while boiling the oceans to fill the internet with regurgitated content slop. In many social spaces online, there isn’t much room for nuance between those extremes.
To my mind, both of these views are misguided attempts to influence human behavior. Those on the positive side are either uninformed about their limits or are trying to convince investors to part with their money. On the negative side are people who have associated “AI” with tech companies that have been forcing anti-features, privacy-violating spyware, and needlessly confusing redesigns into their products. In both cases, there is a nugget of truth that has been buried under propaganda, and when that propaganda becomes ideological, the truth becomes whatever fits the ideology.
In practice, the truth is in the middle. The evidence that LLMs are capable of some tasks is overwhelming and incontrovertible. For many people, they have value in brainstorming, summarizing, coding, authoring, roleplaying, natural language processing, and other jobs. But it’s also not a panacea; there are clear limits to what they can do, and questions about accuracy are not unfounded. The machines that generate and power these models consume significant energy, and tracking that consumption and the sources that power them is vital.
However, despite the plundering that led to the production of these models, the fact remains that they have been produced. There is no putting this toothpaste back into the tube; we have models, you can download them, and they cannot be eliminated. There is no value in breathlessly proselytizing about them, and there is no merit in sticking one’s head in the sand. There is real utility here. An LLM edited this very post, finding three typos and a grammatical error. We would be better served by treating LLMs skeptically and honestly, understanding how to use them, building intuitive mental models about how they work, and knowing how they might be manipulated to produce misleading or incorrect results.
That’s what I seek to do here: learn about LLMs as they are, and share my findings without prejudice about them being evil or being snake oil. For those who belong to the camp of one of the extremes, you are welcome to stay there if you like, but I am not really interested in talking someone in or out of an ideology. For those who do want to think critically about this new technology, I invite you to contribute to this effort as well and provide critique about how I approach these experiments.