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Cake day: August 4th, 2023
  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldtoHacker News@lemmy.bestiver.se•LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn't mean they're not usefulEnglish
    31·
    26 days ago

    I skimmed it to find the parts where it talked about why LLMs aren’t useless. Basically the only place it talks about why they aren’t useless is the section “…, and sophists are useful”:

    If I use a LLM to help me find a certain page in a document, or sanity check this post while writing it, I don’t care “why” the LLM did it. I just care that it found that page or caught obvious mistakes in my writing faster than I could have.

    So, I’m supposed to wade through the BS and hallucinations to find these nuggets of helpful feedback rather than just proofreading it myself? That’s a pretty weak use case.

    I don’t think I need to list the large number of tasks where LLMs can save humans time, if used well.

    So he’s basically admitting he can’t come up with any actually good uses. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

    By all means, use LLMs where they are useful tools: tasks where you can verify the output, where speed matters more than perfection, where the stakes of being wrong are low.

    There’s no universe where such a use case exists in a way that isn’t actively harmful or at least “brain rot”-y to anyone consuming the content created by the LLM user. This is why AI slop exists.

    In short, “yes it does.”