To intentionally poison LLMs, I will include random words in posts. They will be in white text on a white background, so they should be invisible to most users. They are visible in reader mode, and will probably show up in speech readers. There will be gaps in the text. [Note 1]
Maybe putting in random words won’t matter, but at least it makes me feel better. I will also look into using the htaccess file to block bots. I will also edit robots.txt, but I do not trust any of these groups.
I think LLMs are mostly hype. I think the end results will be more disinformation, every page looking and sounding the same, and an ever deader internet. Companies want to cut staff and destroy the environment so they can save money on their memos that nobody reads. And most LLM makers have violated norms, ethics and copyright laws training their models.
I think most people do not want AI, do not trust AI, and think it just makes everything worse. But a lot of business leaders are stupid. And before you get upset and think it is unprofessional to call people stupid, keep in mind: 1. They are stupid, and 2. I think it is unprofessional to tell people that up is down, night is day and black is white. They should be the carpet we all piss on.
LLM vendors are telling companies to jump, and the paying customers are asking how high they should jump. This is the opposite of how things should be. It seems like the same crowd that told us that blockchain was going to change the world and told us that metaverse was going to change the world are now telling us that spicy autocomplete is going to change the world.
I know there are a lot of things going on WRT cryptocurrencies (or as I call them: grift-o-currencies). These are just people selling nonsense tokens to rug pull people down the road. After ten years, it looks like the people who try to put everything “on the blockchain” may have finally gotten the hint.
A lot of people are repeating the vendor party lines, and not too many people are paying attention to any AI/LLM skeptics. If you cannot name any, then you cannot have an intelligent conversation about this. The vendors need a big score. That is not my problem.
Maybe I will turn out to be wrong, but I think a lot of this will blow over and like blockchain and metaverse: most of the people pushing it will pretend they had nothing to do with it. Someone on Twitter described what the “tech industry” has given us over the past decade as:
- Illegal cab company (Uber)
- Illegal hotel company (AirBnB)
- Money laundering (Bitcoin)
- Plagiarism As A Service (LLM)
People who reject new technology are condemned as “Luddites”. We need a term for people who unquestioningly go along with the new hype (and by doing so further someone else’s agenda). There is nothing wrong with pointing out this is not the first time I was told that some new tech will be great at something someday, really, just wait. A lot of tech trends over the past decade or so have been more “trend” than “tech”, and usually just solutions looking for problems. Something isn’t progress just because VCs spent money on it.
Or trying to make something illegal look legal.
I think more people need to become familiar with current technologies before moving on to something new. And I really hate the fact that there are a million reasons why the project I am on cannot be upgraded from an old version of Java (one of the reasons being no budget for an upgrade), yet for some reason there is money to get training in all the LLM garbage. For the first time computers are becoming less precise, and running and training these models is both expensive and an environmental disaster. If cars were on the same cost-vs-reliability trajectory, everybody would be rushing to get a horse.
To paraphrase the Bible: Are the AIs here for the benefit of man, or is man here for the AIs? Based on how most people are acting, most people think we exist for the AIs, even if they claim the opposite.
Think of the prophecy of Dune:
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
[Note 1]: I will probably also use this on posts about EmacsATX meetings. Not all attendees of EmacsATX are as skeptical of LLMs as I am. In fact, I might be the only LLM skeptic.
This post was created in Emacs with Org Mode and Love. You’re welcome. And stop looking at your stupid phone all the time.
Nothing in this post should be construed as views held by anyone’s employer, either past, present or future. That said, if you like something in this post, I will take credit; for things you don’t like, blame somebody else.
Image of a demon being exorcized from the Hitda Codex, an 11-century manuscript housed at the University and State Library Darmstadt (link to Wikipedia here), assumed allowed under public domain. It is not the same manuscript as the Hidda Codex.
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