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> Does it matter? Like how does it matter?

It matters because the amount of influence something has on you is directly attributable to the amount of human effort put into it. When that effort is removed so to is the influence. Influence does not exist independently of effort.

All the people yapping about LLM keep fundamentally not grasping that concept. They think that output exists in a pure functional vacuum.


I don't know if I'm misinterpreting the word "influence", but low-effort internet memes have a lot more cultural impact than a lot of high-effort art. Also there's botnets, which influence political voting behaviour.

> low-effort internet memes have a lot more cultural impact than a lot of high-effort art.

Memes only have impact in aggregate due to emergent properties in a Mcluhanian sense. An individual meme has little to no impact compared to (some) works of art.


said works of art dont on their own really have that impact either.

its the hype oyher people make for them, fairly typically after the artist has died that makes the impact.

stealing the mona lisa is what gave it its impact, rather than than brush strokes


I see what you're getting at, but I think a better framing would be: there's an implicit understand amongst humans that, in the case of things ostensibly human-created, a human found it worth creating. If someone put in the effort to write something, it's because they believed it worth reading. It's part of the social contract that makes it seem worth reading a book or listening to a lecture even if you don't receive any value from the first word.

LLMs and AI art flip this around because potentially very little effort went into making things that potentially take lots of effort to experience and digest. That doesn't inherently mean they're not valuable, but it does mean there's no guarantee that at least one other person out there found it valuable. Even pre-AI it wasn't an iron-clad guarantee of course -- copy-writing, blogspam, and astroturfing existed long before LLMs. But everyone hates those because they prey on the same social contract that LLMs do, except in a smaller scale, and with a lower effort-in:effort-out ratio.

IMO though, while AI enables malicious / selfish / otherwise anti-social behavior at an unprecedented scale, it also enables some pretty cool stuff and new creative potential. Focusing on the tech rather than those using it to harm others is barking up the wrong tree. It's looking for a technical solution to a social problem.


> there's an implicit understand amongst humans that, in the case of things ostensibly human-created, a human found it worth creating

Yep, this is the current understanding that is being hard challenged by LLMs.


Maybe they're just trying to say that robo taxis look like the future, not bike taxis?

the words themselves have influence, regardless of who spoke them.

Well, the LLMs were trained with data that required human effort to write, it's not just random noise. So the result they can give is, indirectly and probabilistically regurgitated, human effort.

yep bingo

An overall net positive event.

yes, it is

That would make sense considering how abused OPT is. It very fundamentally decreases the unions leverage.

Because its convenient in a terminal flow to simply hot key through everything without ever touching a mouse. Most GUI programs are inherently mouse driven so if you never touch your mouse they are not very convenient.

> They're smart kids that see a loophole in the system. They will take advantage!

This is just not an acceptable cultural viewpoint. Abusing a permissive system must be discouraged.


> Abusing a permissive system must be discouraged.

Fine. Where are the doctors? Why is the debate on the students?


Both are culpable.

Should we not bring up to doctors our issues or worries?

This question lacks nuance. Where do you draw the line? I'd draw one at suicide thoughts that you can't stop on your own and before seriously considering using any kind of psychoactive drugs for self-medication. Anything else IMO needs about as much medical intervention as a low fever case of common cold.

Oh, and once these two lines are back at comfortable distance you stop.


Agreed. You have to really narrow the definition of "disabled"

Of course, anyone who fears falling outside the definition would fight that vehemently


That's how most of the people in the world are, including the dearest friends and family. Most people's only motivation in life is to find a loophole to abuse. They will even convince themselves they are something they're not to achieve it.

God have mercy on us.


Basic game theory at work right there. You only need a few bad apples to cause the entire system to devolve.

Yup, a few bad apples start things off, and then after that many others who would have never been the first to do this decide to jump on the bandwagon (lest they be left behind). If it weren't for the shameless folks at the beginning, it wouldn't happen. But once they kick things off, it's a domino effect from there.

Perhaps the fundamental issue isn't the apples; it's the barrel.

If everything is a competition, then of course people will leverage personal advantage for personal gain. But why is everything a competition?


> But why is everything a competition?

For all of human existence there has been competition for limited resources. Until all resource scarcity is eliminated competition will remain in the natural world.


That's one theory.

Counter theory: for all of human existence people have shared resources and traded among each other. Yes, for truly scarce resources trade breaks down.

So is "good housing" a scarce resource on Stanford's campus? Or is their default resource allocation schema too anti-human so it's turning something that should be a simple trade and negotiation problem into a knife-fight?


America is rooted in capitalism, so the resource allocation schema of scarce goods (e.g. nice homes to raise families in) is indeed a knife-fight.

How is capitalism to blame for local governments implementing various zoning and building code regulations that make it hard+expensive to build?

Because they have financial interests that benefit from making it hard and expensive to build. People who own property will lose property value if there is less scarcity. And government workers are hired specifically to extract money from permitting and inspections and application costs.

90% of the world was once subsidence farmers and had very little to no competition.

"Here's how to use the slop machine better" is such a ridiculous pretense for a blog or article. You simply write a sentence and it approximates it. That is hardly worth any literature being written as it is so self obvious.


This is an excellent point - LLMs are autoregressive next-token predictors, and output token quality is a function of input token quality

Consider that if the only code you get out of the autoregressive token prediction machine is slop, that this indicates more about the quality of your code than the quality of the autoregressive token prediction machine


> that this indicates more about the quality of your code

Considering that the "input" to these models is essentially all public code in existence, the direct context input is a drop in the bucket.


Can you explain javascript and cookies similarity to LLMs?


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