Ask HN: Are we as society going to let LLM companies take all the values?
One of my realization of me getting older is the realization that there are no adults in the room anymore, or that I am now, an adult, who, also the same like other adults, we actually don't know shit about anything, none of us do.
I think LLM is a useful technology. But since the dawn of LLMs, I've been trying to imagine what the world will look like if we take LLM to its logical conclusion. It seems to me, despite of all its benefits, LLM is a sword too sharp for all of us to handle. Its not gonna be sunshines and rainbows.
A couple things I'm thinking about below, and these are all just societal impact, not even environmental ones:
- Young people lost their career ladders. Capitalism doesn't work anymore. We have permanent underclass. And maybe worldwide scale societal unrest, in which violence will be the norm.
- People stop creating music, stop writing blogs, stop doing experiments or any other cool stuffs and share it on the internet because LLM companies can just pirate the shit out of it without paying anything back.
- Mediocrity in everything. We have this Suno shit claiming that people don't like the process of creating music because its so tedious so lets just prompt it away. Berklee has a class to make AI music. Yup. People claim that its okay to consume mediocre stuffs, because we don't need the highest grade of codebase, of design, of music for our day to day life.
- People stop socializing and connecting to another human beings. For example, art is a way for people to connect to other's art. Software engineering is a lot of communication, discussing tradeoffs with other engineers. But now you can just prompt your way away, even things as simple as writing emails.
- All the values (measured by money) created in this world is sucked by the LLM owners/producers. Oh you have a beautiful music you just created? Too bad, its mine now. Oh, you just created an art? Its my art now, and I will charge society money to recreate this art that I just acquired. Oh, you have a land somewhere? I can just buy it, money is cheap for me, after all I suck all the values that society created. There are no other values worthy of monetary compensation other than LLM training/research. These "researchers" don't need to practice music, don't need to practice art, don't need to practice law, don't need to practice coding, they can just be an LLM researchers/producers/owners and they get all the values that the other professions created.
- All the above caused economic stagnation. People don't feel the need to pay other human beings, because everything is just a prompt away.
- All the above caused stagnation of progress, or even winding down of progress.
What else?
If truly this is the logical conclusion of LLM, then it seems to me that the mission of this generation is to destroy AI as Ronnie Chieng said is not really off the mark.
Maybe I am an LLM doomer, but help me out here HN, because I'm just a dumb adult.
12 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 26.0 ms ] threadIntellectual property was always a farce. It really is as simple as that.
The problem is that art-making-as-a-job is doomed; so are, in the long run, many other 'knowledge worker' jobs, although we can't for certain tell which ones are going to be replaced fully by AI first.
So the hardest problem is not the one relative to creative activity (for pleasure, self-expression, or catharsis), but economic activity. In your words, "Capitalism doesn't work anymore". We can discuss to what point whatever replaces our previous system will still be 'capitalism', but it is apparent that - if it works - it will be very different in many of the aspects we take for granted.
My personal (and likely naive) opinion is that a large part of the political discourse will shift towards trying to define what is -necessary- vs what is -luxury-, as the rewritten order will shift to ensure that all people receive all that is "necessary" and work (whatever it looks like) will be for "luxuries". I don't like it, but I guess that this will be ultimately the question dividing "left" from "right" for a large chunk of this century.
Personally, I will continue seeking out high-quality music/art/movies/books that speak to me, and most of my friends do the same. There will always be a demand for human-created art, regardless of any plagiarism or replication by labs.
That wasn't the last time that a high-labor field was automated, much to the chagrin of current and potential future workers in the field, only for the once-expensive output to become a commodity that significantly raised the quality of life for everyone. Despite the Luddites fears of an economic collapse, it always grows.
The only reason we have desk jobs is because we've automated so much that only a small portion of us have to work on things we need to survive. Most of the tech industry is really an entertainment industry that isn't at all economically necessary. As our culture shifts around the endless entertainment possibilities available, we change what entertainment we want to throw money at, and people do more of that, and less of what they used to do, with minimal impact to the rest of us.
As long as there's enough people and machines making our food and clothing and housing, we're all going to be fine.
Granted, there are plenty of efforts to stop people and machines from growing food or building housing, but that's an entirely different problem.
You’re caught in the hype, and it’s all around you in your internet bubble.
Tune out, listen to some music, watch a movie, ring your Mum/Mom and ask how her day was.
I'm less concerned about the impact of AI specifically and more about concerned about people simply losing the will for one another or anything at all. None of this stuff in the real world will matter too much if people are getting their basic needs and desires met in a virtual one.
This isn’t necessarily true. I still write my own blog by hand and write code by hand. Sure it gets fed into the LLM meat grinder but I think a lot of people are going to fight against the LLM slop and consume real human content
Anecdotal side remark. Yesterday, while cooking, I saw a NYT interview on YT with Tucker Carlson and he - of all the people - came to the same conclusion, albeit from different premises which did nothing to soothe my worries. If people like him see economical divide as a possible precursor for a revolution things have taken a turn for the worse.
Whoever controls the model weights will just get to control information, data, and opinions of the masses going forward I guess. This is going to be my generation’s Fox News one day.
1) people assign value
2) we've grown to 8+ billion and we're not gonna stop
3) everything is made up, every rule of value and engagement beyond pick, bite, chew, shit and kill when hungry or necessary is complete nonsense and only works because we, across generations, collectively decided mostly on "ok, I can make this work for meself"
4) almost all markets grow either way, meaning whether AI corp employees give AI users more time/attention on the marketing stage as people who don't use AI or not
5) people won't stop doing anything, worst case scenario ( "objectively" ): they take pills and then do that or some other thing, despite theft or any lack whatsoever
The thing is: it doesn't matter if something is just a prompt away. prompting and so on equals time equals money. I made a website for someone via claude designer ( opus, then fable ) ... now I want to hire a web dev to iron some kinks out and polish some others. I can do it myself and I can prompt claude again, but if I had a 1000 bucks, I'd rather pay someone, EVEN IF THAT PERSON WASNT A PRO BUT ONLY TOOK THE TIME BROWSING THE WEB WITH AI TO GATHER DESIGN INSPIRATION WHICH I CAN CHECK IN THEIR PORTFOLIO.
Some peeps learned code for fun, others for profit, others because they hated MS Office. Most people didn't learn to code. Most people won't prompt an AI to build them a tool they want because the supply just isn't the right match.
The logical conclusion of LLMs is this: literally nothing changes. The economy will always have space & money for people who provide some sort of productivity. And "consumption" has been an obvious productivity metric forever, but you have to do it at least somewhat publicly. Then the ads industry can help you make some bucks, while AI helps you with SEO and stuff, ... or you hire someone or use some 10 dollar per month saas.
If human input stops, LLM training stops. "Agentic World models"? One bug and they are all just tin cans. "Why? They can self-debug!" They can, but without humans they reach dead-ends, "task done", "nothing to do here" just like MOST employees in any corp ( SO is down and the 69x dev is on vacation ).
These researchers you talk about work. Enough of them make music.
Rich peeps bought land forever. Hell, my neighbor is poor and owns some land he bought for 5k or so. Lots of wood. He recently came around and now likes AI, after years of hating without even trying to fix his time-and-motivation-dependent ( learning ) issues with AI even once.
I'm modestly certain AI will drive enough people back out there into real life. Things will balance out.
AI has created no new issues. Most young people's problems are mid-to long term results of cheap liquor, bad food, downers and blockers ( experiments, parties, hopes, sabotage, side effects ) and the psycho-cultural effects of too many lies on TV, too much fraud in the economy and politics, and too many stimulant-boosted kids in school and university. Pills can solve their issues but you'd need to check and monitor their biology and neurology very closely and we don't have the "man"power for that, yet.
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