It is a very thick but even taller strip of land.

The point of reference for it’s thinness shouldn’t be it’s own height, but rather the sizes of countries in general.

I mean, it’s still be thin, but the UK has no place throwing stones from within that glass house lol

You know that things can both harm and benefit you, right? That’s the whole idea behind the idiom “the pros outweigh the cons”.

If someone is making an argument about the cons of a thing, it’s insane to expect them to just list of a bunch of unrelated pros, and likewise it’s an unreasonable assumption to believe from that, that they don’t believe in the existence of any pros.

I think that LLMs cause significant harm, and we don’t have any harm mitigation in place to protect us. In light of the serious potential for widespread harm, the pros (of which there are some) dont really matter until we make serious progress in reducing the potential for harm.

I shouldn’t need this degree of nuance. People shouldn’t need to get warnings in the form of a short novel full of couched language. I’m not the only person in this conversation, the proponents are already presenting the pros. And people should be able to understand that.

When people were fighting against leaded gasoline, they shouldn’t need to “yes, it makes cars more fuel efficient and prevents potentially damaging engine knock, thereby reducing average maintenance costs” every time they speak about the harms. It is unreasonable to say that they were harming discourse by not acknowledging the benefits every time they cautioned against it’s use.

I don’t believe that you’re making a genuine argument, I believe you’re trying to stifle criticism by shifting the responsibility for nuance from it’s rightful place in the hands of the people selling and supporting a product with the potential for harm, onto the critics.

It’s not a strawman, it’s hyperbole.

There are serious known harms and we suspect that there are more.
There are known ethical issues, and there may be more.
There are few known benefits, but we suspect that there are more.

Do we just knowingly subject untrained people to harm just to see if there are a few more positive usecases, and to make shareholders a bit more money?
How does their argument differ from that?

Linguistically correct, and morally correct, are not the same thing.

I don’t get to decide if the marketing terms used by the companies I hate end up becoming the common terms.

If I stubbornly refuse to use the common terms and instead only use the technical terms, then I’m only limiting the reach of my message.

OpenAI marketing has successfully made LLM one of the definitions of the term AI, and the most common term used to refer to the tech, in public spaces.

It doesn’t matter what you want, I’m just describing how language works.

If everyone says a word means a thing, then it means that thing. Words can have multiple meanings.

That’s some real “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” apologist speak.
The only way to stop a bad robber Baron using AI is a good robber Baron using AI? C’mon.
I know that’s not exactly what you said, but it applicable.

I work with these tools every day, both as a tool my employer wants me to use, and because I’m part of the problem: I integrate LLMs into my company’s products, to make them “smart”. I’m familiar with the tech. This isn’t coming from a place if ignorance where I’ve just been swayed by Luddites due to my lack of exposure.

When I use these tools I absolutely become temporarily stupider. I get into the rhythm of using it for everything instead of using it selectively.
But I’m middle aged; which means both that I’ll never be as good with it but also that it’s harder to affect me long term, I’ve already largely finished developing my brain. I only worry that it’ll be a brand new source of misinformation for my generation, but I worry that that (with the escalating attacks on our school system) it’ll result in generations of kids who grow up without having developed certain mental skills related to problem solving, because they’ll have always relied on it to solve their problems.

I know it’s not the tool’s fault, but when a tool can do easily cause massive accidental harm, it’s easiest to just regulate the tool to curb the harm.

Depending on context, jargon and terminology change.
In this context, I’d agree that LLMs are a subset tech under the umbrella term “AI”. But in common English discourse, LLM and AI are often used interchangeably. That’s not wrong because correctness is defined by the actual real usage of native speakers of the language.

I also come from a tech background. I’m a developer with 15 years experience, and I work for a large company, and my job is currently integrating LLMs and more traditional ML models into our products, because our shareholders think we need to.
Specificity is useful in technical contexts, but in these public contexts, almost everyone knows what we’re talking about, so the way we’re using language is fine.

You know it’s bad when someone with my username thinks you’re being too pedantic lol. Dont be a language prescriptivist.

You know that the public got trickle-fed the internet for decades before it was ubiquitous in everyone house, and then another decade before it was ubiquitous in everyone’s pocket. People had literal decades to learn how to protect themselves and for the job market to adjust. During that time, there was lots of research and information on how to protect yourself, and although regulation mostly failed to do anything, the learning material was adapted for all ages and was promoted.

Meanwhile LLMs are at least as impactful as the internet, and were released to the public almost without notice. Research on it’s affects is being done now that it’s already too late, and the public doesn’t have any tools to protect itself. What meager material in appropriate use exist hasn’t been well researched not adapted to all ages, when it isn’t being presented as “the insane thoughts of doomer Luddites, not to be taken seriously” by the AI supporters.

The point is that people are being handed this catastrophically dangerous tool, without any training or even research into what the training should be. And we expect everything to be fine just because the tool is easy to use and convenient?

These companies are being allowed to bulldoze not just the economy, and the mental resilience of entire generations, for the sake of a bit of shareholder profit.

Did I say that?
Show me the place where I said that. Show it to me.
Come on. Show me the place where I said everything related to AI is negative. Show me even a place where you could reasonably construe that’s what I meant.

If you’re talking about why we can’t have a conversation, take a long hard look in the fucking mirror you goddamn hypocrite.

This is how etymology works.

Do you think all the words we use today meant exactly the same thing 300 years ago?
No, people used it “incorrectly” and that usage gains popularity, and that makes it correct.

What you call illiteracy is literally how etymology works.

Language is descriptive not prescriptive.

If people use the term “AI” to refer to LLMs, then it’s correct by definition.

Arguably, they may have been right given the decade or so.

Think about your argument for a minute.

I know you think this will harm you and everyone you know, but it’ll be much better if you just stay quiet instead of vocally opposing it

When has that ever been good advice?

That’s like saying “asbestos has some good uses, so we should just give every household a big pile of it without any training or PPE”

Or “we know leaded gas harms people, but we think it has some good uses so we’re going to let everyone access it for basically free until someone eventually figures out what those uses might be”

It doesn’t matter that it has some good uses and that later we went “oops, maybe let’s only give it to experts to use”. The harm has already been done by eager supporters, intentional or not.

Of those, only the internet was turned loose on an unsuspecting public, and they had decades of the faucet slowly being opened, to prepare.

Can you imagine if after WW2, Werner Von Braun came to the USA and then just like… Gave every man woman and child a rocket, with no training? Good and evil wouldn’t even come into, it’d be chaos and destruction.

Imagine if every household got a nuclear reactor to power it, but none of the people in the household got any training in how to care for it.

It’s not a matter of good and evil, it’s a matter of harm.

Yeah, except it’s a tool that most people don’t know how to use but everyone can use, leading to environmental harm, a rapid loss of media literacy, and a huge increase in wealth inequality due to turmoil in the job market.

So… It’s not a good tool for the average layperson to be using.

Hey, that level of pedantry is my job

But like… Good.