To all who’re criticizing itself the mounting criticism of LLMs and who'd rather like to emphasize these models can also be used for good:

POSIWID (aka The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does) is very much applicable here, i.e. there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”.[1]

For the moment (and I don’t detect _any_ signs of this changing), LLMs conceptually and the way they’re handled technologically/politically, are harmful, more than anything, regardless of other potential/actual use cases. In a non-capitalist, solarpunk timeline this all might look very different, but we’re _absolutely not_ in that world. It’s simply ignorant and impossible to only consider LLM benefits anecdotally or abstractly, detached from their implementation, their infrastructure required for training, the greed, the abuse, the waste of resources (and resulting conflicts), the inflation, disinformation, and tangible threats (with already real impacts) to climate, energy, rights, democracy, society, life etc. These aren't hypotheticals — not anymore!

A basic cost-benefit analysis:

In your eyes, are the benefits of LLMs worth these above costs?
Could these benefits & time savings have been achieved in other ways?
Do you truly believe a “democratization of skills” is achievable via the hyper-centralization of resources, whilst actively harvesting and then removing the livelihood and rights of entire demographics?
You’re feeling so very productive with your copilot subscription, how about funding FLOSS projects instead and help building sustainable/supportive communities?
How about investing $500 billions into education/science/arts?

Cybernetics was all about feedback loops, recursion, considering the effects of a system and studying their influence on subsequent actions/iterations. Technologists (incl. my younger self) have made the mistake/choice ignoring tech’s impact in the world for far too long. For this field to truly move forward and become more holistic, empathetic and ethical, it _must_ stop treating the above aspects as distracting inconvenient truths and start addressing them head on, start considering secondary and tertiary effects of our actions, and use those to guide us! Neglecting or actively denying their importance and the more-than-fair criticism without ever being able to produce equally important counter examples/reasons just make us look ignorant of the larger picture... Same goes for education/educators in related disciplines!

Nothing about LLMs is inevitable per se. There’s always a decision and for each decision we have to ask who’s behind it, for what purposes, who stands to benefit and where do we stand with these. Sure, like any other tech, LLMs are “just a tool”, unbiased in theory, usable for both positive and negative purposes. But, we’ve got to ask ourselves at which point a “tool” has attracted & absorbed a primary purpose/form as a weapon (incl. usage in a class war), and any other humanist aspects have become mere nice-to-have side effects, great for greenwashing, and — for some — surfing the hype curve, while it lasts. We’ve got to ask at which point LLMs currently are on this spectrum and in which direction they’re actively accelerating (are being accelerated)...

(Ps. Like many others, for many years I’ve been fascinated by, building and using AI/ML techniques in many projects. I started losing interest shortly after the introduction of GANs and the non-stop demand for exponentially increasing hardware resources and obvious ways how this tech will be used in ever more damaging ways... So my criticism isn’t against AI as general field of research, but about what is currently sold as AI and how it’s being pushed onto us, for reasons which actually have not much to do with AI itself, other than being a powerful excuse/lever for enabling empire building efforts and possible societal upheavals...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does