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Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It's worth pointing out two things: Machine translations existed decades before LLMs, and yes, machine translations are useful. However: I would never in my life read a machine translated book. Understanding what a social media post is talking about in rough terms? Sure. Literature? Absolutely not. Hell, have you ever seen machine translated subtitles? It's absolute garbage.
I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.
From what I've observed, people who claim that LLMs can replace artists don't understand art, people who claim that they can replace musicians don't understand music, people who claim that they can replace writers don't understand literature, and people who claim they can replace translators don't rely on translations. If I had a button that would erase LLMs from the world but it would take machine translations away (which is a false dichotomy anyway), I would absolutely still press it.
Technology is not inevitable. We've decided not to have asbestos in our walls, lead in our pipes, or carginogenic chemicals in our food. (If you're going to argue that it's not everywhere, where would you rather live?) We could just not do LLMs. It's allowed.
@Gargron But it seems that LLMs are here to stay. This time, it doesn't seem to be just a passing fad. There is a lot of investment involved.
Just because a bunch of drug addicts dump all their money (and that from others) into drugs doesn't make them inevitable/good/useful... 
Latest example: NFTs
@ainmosni @df @Gargron my take is: Investors will figure out it’s too expensive to be a viable business so big AI providers will fail, especially those who try to archive „general knowledge“ AI like OpenAI.
Small models will then be the focus, and integrating them on-device for AI assistance. Latest models, like Gwen 3.5-9b already show promising results and performance locally.
The question is who will invest in training small models to deploy on-device and will those models be open sourced? I hope they will.
@kevin @df @Gargron small models are well and good and hopefully will be focused on actually useful things, as I'm personally still not convinced that LLMs are really that useful at all, and are taking winds out of the sail out of other AI avenues that have been very useful, things that we would classify as machine learning.
But if we want general models... those might just take too many resources to build and I honestly think society will be better off with no new ones of those anyway, while letting stuff like ollama collect enough bitrot that it loses most of its damaging potential.
@df @Gargron alright, well, let's review:
* literally no one likes it, not even the normies who do not care about any of the myriad ethical issues surrounding it
* a bunch of very rich people dropped an unprecedented amount of cash to make it happen and now, in their desperation for that investment to pay off, are trying VERY hard to gaslight people into thinking they like it
sounds inevitable to me 
@Gargron It is a technology that humanity has been seeking for a long time. At least since the 1950s, with Turing and his colleagues.
@df No, this is marketing. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic &co want you to believe that what they're doing is artificial intelligence. My professional opinion is that LLMs are a dead end technology to creating actual intelligence. And if any of those companies did create actual intelligence for the purposes they pursue, it would be slavery, for which I cannot advocate.
@Gargron LLMs are not exclusively a product of large corporations or just marketing. Much of the research and development also takes place in open source and academic communities. The codes for these LLMs are public and can be audited or run locally. Furthermore, I argue that serious ethical reflection is necessary, but prohibition is not the way forward.
@df
Consciously not using something ≠ prohibition
Edit: Also, who cares who worked/ envisioned or works on this now? If you think about LLMs enough, you will likely see enough good arguments about the resource waste, centralization of power and multiplication of slop which describe LLMs. We lived without it before and we can live without it in future times.
@df @Gargron Academics may study LLMs out in the open, but I don't think academia has been able to produce LLMs whose outputs are sufficiently marketable compared to the current commercially available ones. Because the first "L" ("large") is - in our current, limited understanding - crucial for the verisimilitude of the synthetic text, and only corporations (and governments, but they mostly haven't gotten to this yet) have the scale to get large enough for that so far.
u.s. pause federal tax remittances @joshuagrochow and the lack of moral compass or publicly stated ethicals standards that would allow university employees to steal large enough sets. small sets of text are read and understood by humans who can, far for efficiently, apply appropriate prior written and other formats of source material to a specific use case.
programming a calculator only makes reasonable sense if the computation requires enough repetition to warrant building it, or it's a closed set without novelty... like for example a numerical calculator. ; )
@Gargron they'll never create intelligence because intelligence requires will and they do not understand will. they dont even posses one of their own: their own behaviour is driven by feelings and shaped by a commercial playbook. there is zero chance they will ever create intelligence.
LLMs are Shannon 1948 as far as the theory goes (building on Markov, but adding computer technology). With some compression techniques.
But I think you're talking about something else entirely, not purely syntactical.
Transformers are neural networks.
LLMs are transformers wrapped in some Python scripting.
Every neural network can be accurately represented as an Excel sheet, even if it ends up having billions of cells.
Since it's just addition and multiplication, the model is fully deterministic. Same input, same output. Not intelligent.
It's Python code that does probabilistic sampling of the output. It's just a few lines of well-understood math plus a dice roll. Again, not intelligent.
@patrys @df @Gargron does determinism imply non-intelligence?
If you hooked up the computer to a Geiger counter for true random noise and used that to modulate the output, would that have any bearing on its intelligence?
Or from the other side, what makes you think our brains are non deterministic, and why does that make us more intelligent than if the exact same history and sense-data always produced the same response?
@FishFace @df @Gargron If it’s deterministic, it can be unrolled into a giant lookup table. Did we kill phone books because they were on the verge of achieving AGI?
To me, intelligence implies a lot of things, like being able to form higher-order abstractions, learn, and thus remember things (no, being passed your “memories” as part of every prompt does not count). It also implies being curious.
@patrys @df @Gargron given that the lookup table would generally be infinite, I don't even see what that would have to do with anything. What about the Geiger counter?
I don't think those things are really needed for human-like intelligence, and something like curiosity can easily be simulated by a rules-based system.
@patrys a computable function can generally produce infinitely many different outputs. You're still not saying why a non-deterministic part affects intelligence.
@FishFace It generates one token at a time, which makes it impossible to formulate higher-order abstractions that are not already baked into the weight matrix. I said it in another answer, not being able to learn disqualifies it as intelligence.
@FishFace @patrys @df @Gargron
"Or from the other side, what makes you think our brains are non deterministic"
Us having free will/being non-deterministic is pretty much the base assumption we all operate on to even be able to function as humans. That of course doesn't mean that it's automatically true, but it makes the question of why do you think your brain is non-deterministic a no-brainer to answer: because we can't help but perceive ourselves as such.
@frog_reborn @FishFace @df @Gargron The very fact that you can read and mid-sentence learn something that changes your perception of the world means that you have brain plasticity that no neural network possesses. It’s deterministic AND rigid because training and inference happen separately.
@patrys you're talking about differences between brains and neural networks that exist, but still not arguing the philosophical point about why that is relevant to intelligence.
@Gargron would you know if you've seen a good outcome of an LLM? You'd somehow be able to identify when the LLM got it right?
I assure you you've experienced good LLM output and don't even know it. Because that's what good LLM output looks like. Indistinguishable from human output.
Your examples are perhaps false equivalencies. Take asbestos. We didn't abolish insulation. We developed better, safer insulation. We didn't stop dying food colors, we just developed safer dyes etc.
@Gargron ultimately LLMs like any other software is a tool. It's all about how a human uses them.
Lets take photoshop as an example. Humans generate vast amounts of garbage photoshopped images. Ever been to deviant art?
And yet the same tool is used by professionals all day every day to create stuff we like and enjoy.
The same applies to LLM use, and back to my first reply. What you lament is low quality output a human shared. Meanwhile the tool gets used masterfully to great effect elsewhere
@melioristicmarie @Gargron okay, sure, maybe my toots are slop. So...what? I should be deleted as the OP implied of LLMs? How about all those folks making mediocre art over on deviant art? Disappear them too?
That's a bit of a moral quandary isn't it? How do we get the good stuff without the bad stuff?
You stand to make the world perfect if you can figure that out. I look forward to it.
human, is fine. perfection is a scam sold by ponzi schemers who have no useful skill. second sons of the british empire looking for some purpose that makes daddy approve of their existence.
maybe... just maybe... talk to a human and ask them how you can help them, with your actual meat space body. then maybe you could find some meaning in life instead of trying to get techbros to think you are pretty.
@Tekchip my walls are full of art by humans that some would call terrible... who the fuck cares? they have love and craft and pain and power from the hands and soul of a human creator. they are beautiful. i fucking love bad art.
slop generation is the nothingness.
just write your toot from your heart, fuck the machine. being human is fine.
@Gargron
@ClipHead @melioristicmarie @Gargron which this?
"there is no value in the average."
or
"my walls are full of art by humans that some would call terrible... who the fuck cares?"
Can't have it both ways.
@Tekchip
so... is this a slop account? am i tooting with cheapgpt?
are you a human playing with toys you do not comprehend?
dear dogs, may i have the confidence of a mediocre "white" man.
so... l.l.m.s tokenize english text... and then calculate an average.
humans making shitty art is qualitatively perfection in comparison to word salad from a calculator. when you enter this into wannabe deep seek... i will be waiting with bated breath for the token response. ; )
@melioristicmarie @ClipHead @Gargron lol are you an LLM or just don't care to review my profile? Shoot even do a google search. I'm easy to find. Seems like you've lost the plot.
@Tekchip
There's no point in explaining, if you don't get "this", tbh.
There's also the problem of your essentialist thinking that decides only terrible human beings could find any value in LLMs, because use of LLMs is proof of same. QED. It's like thinking poor people must be morally bankrupt. It's a non-sequitur.
Anti-LLM posts quickly turns to deep pronouncements about the personality and motives of people who do things you don't like, not an honest discussion of the harms of the tech, because it's a purity test, not a position.
@Tekchip @Gargron The technology doesn't yet do much of what is claimed for it; and it is already expensive in terms of externalized costs: memory, energy, water. It really looks like the future of LLMs depends on mass acceptance of the "what-if" scenario - those hoped-for advances where it works better, uses less energy, and somehow doesn't wipe out thousands of middle- to low-level jobs.
@cygnathreadbare @Gargron yeah, that's a garbage way this technology has been developed. Unfortunately if we threw away every technology built on the back of people doing bad things we wouldn't have much technology, unfortunately.
I don't fault lamenting how it's come to be and even how it's used broadly. But claiming it's useless because some folks use it poorly isn't really accurate indicator of the technologies usefulness.
Let me ask you this: It's your birthday.
5 of your friends met some days before and wrote a song for you. It's not really good, the text doesn't even rhyme...but they did this for you and they had fun.
They enjoyed the act of creating.
5 other friends wrote a prompt and pressed a button to generate a song.
Which song will you remember?
@Gargron while all your examples are 100% valid, I seriously question whether we would be able to manage to do that today. With the utter shambles most democracies are in currently, multi-national Corporations can run roughshod on environmental protection, worker safety, child protection and just about everything that past generations fought hard for.
imagine for a moment, the billionaires have been beheaded and the yachts sunk into the sea. the value in the output of workers 100% reinvested into local communities. all of it. none for colonial masters far away. the 20 hour work weeks and all human workers hands full of the satisfaction their efforts are meaningful... no more busy work for shareholders to skim value out of. only meaningful work. custom artisanal everything. housewares repaired by local handicrafters. clothes sewn and tailored to each body. homes and townhomes and communal living spaces built and maintained by cooperative owners. neighboring towns and regions and nations translating with loving care between the communities of meaning... interconnected with care. 
@melioristicmarie @DJGummikuh @Gargron That's a dreamy vision. Thank you. I love it.
@mason
hanging on to the hope we can survive as a species and get to the good stuff of loving each other up, bigly. ;
@DJGummikuh @Gargron
And that lasts 1-2 generations before new people who don't understand the problems that lead their parents to create the paradise chafe under their constraints and begin changing the system to something its originators wouldn't like, this creating conflict, diversity of thought, and continuing the cycle of history.
See: reality.
