I believe the net effect of LLMs is, at this point, firmly negative, and it’s going to take years until they start making up for the mess they’ve created.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-08/school-st...
I can only imagine what it does to children whose brains are still developing.
I'm not anti AI and I don't know how to quantify the pros and cons but we need to be honest about what they are.
That's good news! The worse students perform, the less competition AI will have in the future and the less effective any resistance will be. The ultimate goal should be to abolish education except for the elite, but we can't get there in one step.
The ideal future we should be shooting for is cross between Idocracy and Elysium: a paradise for tech oligarchy and masses so stupid and dependent that can't possible challenge them.
If I am not graded on how many widgets I make in a shift and instead can focus on making the most beautiful widget, or the most novel widget, or simply the widget that is most useful to my particular life am I less satisfied?
We've somehow built a worldview based on our whole value as humans being equivalent to how good of a worker bee we are. Let's fix that part.
This is of course a much harder problem than achieving AGI, since it's a messy human problem.
We are only just now seeing the first stages of this, we are at the Facebook in 2008 stage trying to warn people about the societal fluctuations coming but many aren't listening because it is too useful.
Catching cheaters is still hard but it will keep honest people more honest.
Back in my day this was the only way!
Well, scantron cards for testing became more common near the end of school.
But we must continue because we’ll lose some sort of ideological Cold War with a country better positioned to win anyway. It’s all in the name of capitalism so the ends justify the needs.
This does not mean they can't keep developing it. But it would mean they do not release them to the general public or the public domain. The US government can continue to use and fund these models that are more powerful and use them in situations they understand and a restricted setting. The pentagon has a larger budget than any VC.
Remove the profit motive on self improving recursive models gained from retail/commercial use!
This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
This is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This mesage is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases toward a center...
AI will be a net positive unless companies start optimizing it for "time in app" or "time on site" or other "engagement" (addiction) metrics.
Every time that's been done, the result has been a nightmare for everything but those KPIs (of course). Service degrades, discourse degrades, everything becomes toxic and addictive and destructive.
Whatever an LLM can do today, will not come back as is tomorrow.
The biggest issue the LLM today: It kills all the small and niche things. The things were we fit all the other people is getting destroyed. You know the guy who makes websites, the fiverr blender person provoding some basic modelling tasks.
You will just ask AI or AI will use your tool or AI will just produce it for you.
Turning over a problem to a LLM as solved means we won't be able to do the task anymore. Because we will never learn how. We will not know that the LLM has made a mistake, and will be unable to fix it ourselves.
Right now we can correct the LLM, as the years go on we will become unable to do so.
USA forgot how to produce things.
This will not prevent us from doing it.
Most people are quite capable of understanding higher-order ideas without fully grasping the underlying details too.
(Thanks, Internet!)
If the AI transofmration takes too long, we might never overthrow capitalism
It allowed a lot of people around the planet to change things.
And we have not seen what the industry will put out on a hardware level. Optical computing is coming, onchip models too.
However, looking back, each single invention was a net positive for us as a species.
another coworker seems to be early on a similar path but has made some comments about the former coworkers ability that makes me hopeful they dont end up the same way
feels like im talking about old high school friends on a drug path or something. its only anecdotes and i imagine the "perceived damage" is reversible. point is: i think youre onto something about the net effect and were going to have popular definitions for the negative encounters were anecdotally sharing
im a "user" but make Claude interact in an educational format and require sources on assertions. looking back, ive unintentionally cast it as The Librarian from Snow Crash, except if Hiro challenged it frequently. must have been natural after reading Snow Crash a few times. maybe im kidding myself but it feels like i havent lost a step. if im not deluding myself then i could see a world where elementary schools teach responsible llm use of to preserve cognition the same way we had to learn Google boolean search
We are in the middle of a major change and it very well could be net negative, but for the most part history just keeps marching and its fine, just different.
- Asking an LLM is objectively a better learning method than reading books if the LLM is giving correct information (and I know that's a pretty big if). Cheating on homework is a workaround that only exists because graded homework is still a thing. If tests are hard enough and have unlimited retakes, kids will learn that practice is worth it and do it with way more focus than if it was forced.
- Inequality has been increasing for decades. It's an inevitable part of capitalism, when the rate of wealth increase is higher for the rich and well connected (like access to private funding rounds or portfolio managers) you get unlimited concentration. Even without that, when you have money left after basic expenses you can invest more of it than someone living paycheck to paycheck.
- Class wars are great. Hopefully we can avoid physical violence but if we can't then tough luck. Should have paid your taxes.
Wow, I haven't thought deeply since seeing this comment, but on the surface this is actually a really nice idea.
Aren’t we overdue for one anyway.
The banks and those who control them all knew where we are headed, so they got a little head start destabilizing democracy.
Once us working class get a grasp of the actual situation, we are going to be so deep in the hole, fighting back is going to be quite difficult when the "asset owners" own and control the majority of the worlds resources, all media, forms of communication, AI, technology infrastructure, mass surveillance. You name it, and they have already made massive efforts to make sure they own it.
1. When the capitalists wage class war: bussiness as usual, some murmuring about widening wealth gap by progressive, diffuse threats to democracy
2. When workers complain about the system: all hands on deck, class war immiment, please think of the children and the stability of society
We're starting to see it in discrete bursts with Mangione, the paper warehouse fire, and in other non-violent ways with farmer protests, trucker protests, etc.. which have varying levels of support from regular people depending on their wealth class, background, and inclination to agree with the government.
That was the moment that business/wealth/rich decided to turn their resources towards directly influencing and controlling government. Reagan and his made up “welfare queens” came shortly after and wealth inequality has sharply risen since. Wildly successful coup.
Outside of delusional grifty startups, the broader corporate world is only using copilot for taking meeting notes and (sort of) entertaining the notion of non-devs writing (and not maintaining) their own experimental janky apps where impact is low.
Outside of all the shit-stirrers on HN and clueless bubble social media, I don't see LLMs making a difference. In fact, the fearmongering is at this point insulting to the intelligence of the people who are supposedly helpless against big bad AI.
It's definitely changed in that time
If things have actually changed, you wouldn't be begging the question. LLMs, as popularly used, are still just a new kind of search engine for natural language answers to natural language questions. They're portable in a way, too. That's really cool tech, but not a revolution. It's pretty underwhelming compared to previous decades of change. It's a lot more error prone too, since it's a mudball of stats.
If we filter out the unsubstantiated fearmongering, all we've got left to discuss are NIMBY rants and geopolitics. At that point, we're not even talking about AI anymore.
I'm sorry, what?
I'll put it to you again, you sound like me after playing around with gpt 3.5. It was interesting, but it wasn't good. There were still questions as to whether scaling would persist. My doubts were pretty much obliterated. LLMs haven't been mere text completion for a while now. Heck, even a model small enough to fit on my 3090 is now shockingly competent and useful. Does claude sometimes go off on weird tangents making me reel it in? Yeah, but it's genuinely great in present form, and it's the worst it'll ever be.
You're welcome to your opinion. It used to be mine too, but I disagree now. I find pretty much every AI benchmark has shown forward progress, some with non public datasets, and some things have gotten scarily better.
Every time it's the same agenda: trying to keep up appearances of meaningful engagement. In reality, I'm the only idiot willing to engage anymore and the opinion has always been majority negative on practical applications of LLMs from day one. It's not like anyone who frequents HN was blindsided by the initial release of ChatGPT like the rest of the public. The negativity has only grown since then.
There are important niches for LLMs, but they don't really make money without bigger ideas. I am very happy with the results for the broader topics of natural language processing and accessibility. Software is now easier to use and write. People have more agency over technology in general.
These are massive leaps. They are still tiny hops compared to what people's expectations were. That's only a failure of marketing, and a testament to its power even when botched. The end result is the same: the public yawns big and takes the almost invisible results for granted. Talking to a computer finally works like they expected over 20 years ago. Talking to a computer still sucks though. It's an entirely new genre of computer error.