LLMs, as well as other recent outcomes of ANN technologies, are undoubtedly very impressive. Especially for the wide audience. But I feel like impressiveness is the only practical feature they have. When I talk to a support call centre chatbot, I feel like the only useful thing the robot could do for me is to guide me through the verbal user interface in a very verbose way. And I find it lesser convenient and reliable than just clicking a few buttons. ChatGPT can give me encyclopaedic knowledges through a verbal interface too, but I think that googling a Wikipedia article is more straightforward and, again, more reliable.
I think the lack of reliability was the reason why people eventually gave up on the previous generation of these technologies as a form of computer interfaces. The same fate awaits the new generation too, in my opinion. And the LLMs can't offer anything new rather than just a new form of interfaces. They are very bad in true reasoning. Which is why, I think, they are too far from what I would call AGI.
The author of the article is talking about new risks brought by AI. I personally don't see any new risks here, but I see a lot of risks in more traditional technologies no one is talking about. Modern Internet, smartphones and the way the modern computer interfaces designed in general are, in my opinion, already brought a lot of risks to us.
We are slowly loosing control over computer systems. When I open YouTube I would like to organise and control the information that I consume. But instead Google prefers to choose what I should watch. They are slowly removing explicit control functions that I can use directly in favour to suggestions semi-automatically generated by them. And it's not just Google, it's a common trend. Facebook, Windows or Twitter are not exceptions. The control over the users attention as a way to influence, is a main value for big tech and for the people who control these corporations. And I think this is the risk for the humanity we are currently facing.
Will the ANNs, LLMs anyhow advance this harmful trend? I don't know. I doubt so, but it doesn't really matter, because LLMs themselves is not a root of the threat. The root threat is that we, the users, are loosing control over computers that we use.