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Comment by wasting_time | Hacker News Reader

The era of LLMs is similar to when Magic was discovered in the 1400s.

The layperson may be able to get ahold of a spellbook, but without Understanding it comes with high risk of turning your niece into a frog.

Whereas Wizards can cast increasingly powerful spells that build on each other, and make Art.

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And that worked for maybe, what... half a decade? But eventually the Illuminators all transitioned to being Arcane Scribes, the cost of spells plummeted due to increased supply, and in the end only Wizards who had invested in Arcane Sanctums had anything to show for it 50 years later.

Real Estate, it always boils down to real estate.

Knowing someone's true name in the wizarding world meant to hold power over them. Though if you know someone's account name on Reddit or only fans or Snapchat, it's kind of the same thing.

I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.

I think he’s wasting time.

Well good for him

I have actually thought something similar but more in terms of divination. There’s some people who might compare LLMs to something like Tarot or automatic writing (think Ouija) because there’s a sense of randomness with LLMs too.

Both LLMs and divination methods also have the danger that someone could kind of drive themselves into madness with it. I don’t know too much about what how or why people can drive themselves crazy by chatting with an LLM, but with divination, I heard it can cause distress to ask the same questions about yourself many too frequently and also they ask about outcomes instead of methods.

The obvious difference is LLMs are real and divination is bullshit.

Well LLMs also spout a lot of bullshit sometimes. I had a conversation with one just recently where it couldn’t do arithmetic too well with a challenge involving coins of a foreign currency. I think maybe it got tripped up because the convo got a bit too long or maybe it didn’t like that I was using the dollar sign.

You can also make LLMs agree with your own biases for some reason. For example, the people who use them to plan shady stuff.

I think they're being silly, but it's a pretty common trope: comparing the weird, sometimes highly idiosyncratic syntactical constructs of programming languages to a series of magical incantations.

Lev Grossman wrote an entire book that hinged on this idea of melding magic with technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel)

tf are you saying, magic isn’t real

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