Yup, LLMs are wonderful.
They provide anyone with access to knowledge that only about half the time is misleading in some way, but is just as persuasive as an expert explanation of the truth.
By automating writing, coding, and data analysis, LLMs remove any need for humans to understand how to express nuanced thought, how to clearly and safely execute a technical process, or how to extract insights from large amounts of information.
By automating customer‑service tasks, LLMs remove the last vestige of a human who can understand why a corporate process is failing a customer and find a way for the system to meet their needs. And as a bonus the LLM can confidently declare ‘facts’ that aren’t true.
LLM‑driven tools can assist clinicians with literature summarization (reinforcing training-data bias, eliminating the actual point of scientific papers, and making lots of errors), patient communication (eliminating any human contact and care towards vulnerable patients), and preliminary triage (with extra training data bias and distracting the doctor from reading the not-written-down actual human presenting symptoms in front of them)
Artists, writers, musicians, and game designers use LLMs as co‑creators, generating drafts, ideas, or entire works that rehash old works and remove any pesky ‘artistic expression’, as the LLM is much faster at making a polished-looking end product, and it’s not like people ever come up with new insights during the revision process.
Advanced multilingual models translate and transcribe minority languages, ensuring that no one ever need learn the language of their cultural heritage, as they have an English approximation that’s totally good enough.
And the best part is this can scale to billions of people, meaning that no one will ever need to be knowledgeable, or know how to write, code, analyze data, do customer service, read a scientific paper, talk to a patient, observe someone to understand their current state, or have to learn anything about other languages or cultures. Just trust in the often wrong but-who-cares-stop-complaining LLM!
Nah, sadly (?) that’s not how it works. People’s desires come first, and then they find a way within their belief system to justify their actions.
The people I’m hurting aren’t human.
They’re bad people.
They would do the same to me.
I’m only doing it because I’m a bad person.
I was hurt, so now is my chance.
That’s just how the world works.
Et cetera. Sometimes if the conflict between their beliefs and their actions gets too great they change their beliefs.
But for the most part, people don’t want to kill, steal, rape, etc. So they make up a reason to not do it, like “God will punish me if I do that” or “It’s morally wrong” or whatever, and then they don’t do it and move on with their lives.
(And those who do that stuff come from literally all belief systems; the only real differences being social environment - acceptability, expectations, protection from consequences, etc)