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Comment by ozgung | Hacker News Reader

These examples show that we have a serious social issue, and it's not limited to teachers. People misuse LLMs. We engineers understand that LLMs are products under development. They only work correctly under certain circumstances, and they have limitations and non-perfect evaluation metrics. Regular people (non-engineers) treat them as finished products or magic wands. They ignore the warnings in the page saying LLM can make mistakes. And there are billions of those people. This may create huge social problems that engineers can't fix.

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> We engineers understand that LLMs are products under development. They only work correctly under certain circumstances

Looking around me, engineers do not understand that. Instead, they have exactly same overblown expectations and actively push for LLM everywhere. They will call you ludite if you say anything else.

That's also because of seeing them as technology under development. The overblown expectations are because of their potential in the future. The glass is half full today. It was almost empty just a few years ago. The water level is rising with an unprecedented rate. But we shouldn't forget it's still half empty right now. More importantly, we are bad at predicting how actual people use the technology.

Wear that Luddite badge with honor. They were not anti technology[0], they fought for worker rights during an age of rapid rise of new technology.

[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/rethinking-the-l...

"Ludite" "low-IQ" "meat LLM" "you will be left behind"

The behavior of the boosters is basically the opposite of how to make friends and influence people. I've been through plenty of hype cycles, and this is the first one where they seem to need to insult and threaten everyone.

I don't get it. And I don't feel any need to entertain it.

I have a bunch of coworkers who paste various LLM outputs to every chat while discussing issues in production.

- "LLM X told that we should try to add this into configuration file – SOMETHING_SOMETHING = false."

- "There is no SOMETHING_SOMETHING configuration option, you have a full source, grep for it."

- "But should we try at least?"

Correct, and the root cause is it’s been sold to the public this way.

Marketing to the consumer instead of informing and educating the user. That makes sense in terms of incentives.

I think it's a grey area - on one hand, it's been sold as a source of truth, but on the other hand, there's a strong element of confirmation bias and/or simple laziness from users (of course, to varying degrees).

A friend of mine states that the market rates for their position are wrong, because ChatGPT gave higher numbers: this is an example on the far end of the spectrum of confirmation bias - it matters little whether it was sold as source of truth or not.

Engineers are not uniquely immune to this phenomenon. Just look at all the commenters in this board claiming AI makes them 20x more effective.

> "Social problems that engineers can't fix"

Sounds similar to social media.

Otherwise, yes, I am very concerned about society's use of LLMs -- particularly young people (students).

But now the very teachers themselves... Frankly, not surprised.

I've been using it to make me a much better tutor/mentor. But the cases outlined in (I'm assuming) the public education sector are very, very worrisome.

Normal product release cycles bring testable quality measures before the product is released. Do LLMs go through such tests?

If there are serious societal issues that it can cause at the moment I wonder why it was released before being perfected, but then, what does perfected even look like? The product is darn good at the moment.

These products are basically public beta. Some features are even experimental. They are released to the public because (1) companies have to gain early market share (2) they need actual user data. Sam Altman firing drama from last year was related to this issue.

I think its more capitalism problems. The constant squeeze for everyone to output more for less pay or die of starvation. No one could ever choose good in these circumstances.

It is hilarious though that humans are just ready to slurp up any opportunity to just start shitting all over their work and their coworkers and students. Less time spent and caring?! yes please! then they become full time salesmen of it to everyone else, and then the social interaction problems just explode. Tribal standoffs, create entirely new tribes, plotting and deception to continue getting what they have a taste of.

Infighting distractions are so convenient as the government guts everything they work under

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