They are bad *because they are useful*, if they didn’t work they wouldn’t be fucking so many things up. - ThreadSky

opinionhaver.bsky.social • 5 days ago

They are bad *because they are useful*, if they didn’t work they wouldn’t be fucking so many things up.

There are a lot of critiques of LLMs that I agree with but "they suck and aren't useful" doesn't really hold water.

I understand people not using them because of social, economic, and environmental concerns. And I also understand people using them because they can be very useful.

Thoughts?

Comments

errantv.bsky.social•5 days ago

Disagree. They're dangerous because they're **superficially** useful. But they produce garbage and factually wrong outputs so frequently that for competent people they're a net negative. For others that are too lazy and/or incompetent to recognize + correct the errors they're a seven alarm fire.

stillprolix.bsky.social•5 days ago

imo it’s worse than that bc a lot of the time they aren’t even useful so much as they have the *appearance* of being useful, given how often they pass on complete hallucinations as objective fact

pogtastic.bsky.social•5 days ago

They remove work from the person who uses it, but they create additional work for everyone else who has to check that person's work. That's very useful to that person, but it sucks for everyone else!

christosilvia.bsky.social•5 days ago

I don't think people talk about AI use cases like "I need help with cmake, I use AI to help me with cmake, I am now unstuck".

C++ developer tools deserve all the heavy artillery pitted against them because they suck so much

nonlocallia.bsky.social•5 days ago

they are bad because they can seem more useful than they often actually are in practice and people are easily fooled into thinking they work better than they do

werrrp.bsky.social•5 days ago

also, performing just passable but subpar work very cheaply can be genuinely useful! in some contexts perfection and precision are important, and in other contexts just-good-enough will do

walmsley.bsky.social•5 days ago

this was the basis of the industrial revolution, in fact!

maxell-xlii-dreams.bsky.social•5 days ago

still don't even know what I'm supposed to do with a AI as a random joe blow on the internet.

grungehamster.bsky.social•5 days ago

You are going to find out as they attempt to force Gemini on every device I guess.

n0v0w3ls.bsky.social•5 days ago

I use it to translate other languages and to copy flattened text from images.

n0v0w3ls.bsky.social•5 days ago

Oh and I've used it to help identify plants and animals that I took a pic of.

dasdoak.bsky.social•5 days ago

Eh, they're bad because they *appear* to be useful.

They work well enough to convince you at first glance that they're working properly, and then you don't notice when they've shat the bed because it, superficially, looks like it's working properly.

dasdoak.bsky.social•5 days ago

Kinda like a particularly dumb script kiddie intern; you run his code and it works, you glance at it and it looks ok, and you completely miss the wicked problems he's introduced into your database because he doesn't know that the format code for month is MM and not mm.

mandatorytopic.bsky.social•5 days ago

A lot of people clearly get use of out them, not sure why everyone if your comments finds that so implausible

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