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Comment by bigbuppo | Hacker News Reader

> A human must verify everything an LLM presents as fact. Everything. If you don’t, we all pay the price. LLMs do not remove the onus of responsibility on the human being, if anything they amplify it because LLMs can generate lots more output more quickly that needs to be verified than humans can.

The sort of person that's going to offload their thinking to AI is the exact sort of person that is not going to verify anything because they've already offloaded their thinking to AI.

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For a long time I was anti-licensure in tech; now with the bar being lowered to next to nothing, it seems as if licensure is more important than ever — not to protect this trade (though it will do that, and that is a benefit), but because the sheer amount of irresponsibility in the usage of LLMs and “AI” in general begs for licensure and adoption of a regulatory body for software in general.

This is unfortunately a feeling I share. It wasn't until LLMs have become nearly ubiquitous at this point, and there has been zero realistic technological response to the dangers they present. Not to mention I suspect there may be some psychological element to being exposed to interactions with AI models and their nonsense for hours a day. Not all of it is nonsense....but you won't ever know for sure.

100%. I don't think "AI" has changed anything wrt to the responsibility of the tech industry in general. Tech has always been pretty much devoid of ethics or a sense of responsibility at the executive level (and therefore "management" more broadly). But before LLMs it was easier for ethical engineers to surreptitiously steer things towards responsible implementations. I suspect also competence correlates pretty strongly with intellectual honesty--narcissists and other personality defectives generally aren't terribly capable of the kind of introspection necessary to learn deeply. With the deluge of LLM slop, it's much harder for even a responsible manager to differentiate the competent from the incompetent, and now the dishonest, unethical folks have more leverage.

So now the problem is highly visible. There's only one solution I can think of, and that's to hold individuals (not corporations) responsible for professional malfeasance.

But as you've made clear, the root of the problem is not with the engineer.

Personally I think a corporate death penalty strikes a nice balance of holding companies and individuals responsible. If a company exercises sufficient malfeasance, it gets nationalized with no compensation for shareholders. Watch the incentives align real fast.

Yeah that sounds great! A company guillotine is absolutely something I could get behind. Problem is I don't think there's any way it could possibly happen politically. Whereas we have a really strong existence proof for e.g. the Professional Engineer certification and other professional coherence mechanisms. That seems to work, albeit not without its own inefficiencies. I doubt anyone, though, would advocate for some kind of laissez-faire situation where the profit incentive aligns with the regulatory one. Historically that hasn't gone well. A lot of people died.

PEs are demonstrably a partial solution at best. Fields with certified engineers still have financially motivated disasters (boeing goes the door plug).

For better or worse, I think we'll see more political support for increased oversight of companies on the next free decades. I only hope it manifests in a useful way instead of a self-defeating way.

It'll have to be pretty much all the ways. One way will stick. The rest will be forgotten failures.

I'm afraid this is a situation where the first halfway plausible solution will "stick" and sap the pressure to change even if it doesn't do a good job.

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