So you take the output of an LLM, which is obviously impossibly to guarantee correct, and use that to choose a tool and execute it. Like, send an email or whatever. And you take the input for that LLM not only from prompts, and various files, but also your system and random stuff you download from the internet.

I am telling you people, this is lunacy. No good can come of this.

This is not the beauty of writing. Everyone's writing needs editing. The "raw unedited emotions" are not something anyone wants to read, and this article is no exception.

The author tells us that English is their fourth language, which is certainly impressive. However their writing is messy and poorly constructed. It's difficult to read, and not at all enjoyable. The choice is not between doggerel like this, and LLM empty perfection.

It's too late in any case, the Internet as we know it will eat itself. It will be destroyed by AI, and AI agents from without. And it will be destroyed from within by stupid laws such as the ones under "discussion" in this AI-edited and AI-illustrated nothingpiece.

By which I not mean the infrastructure. I mean the current crop of social media websites. The infrastructure will remain, and perhaps something better will come along to use that infrastructure.

I've had three long and very memorable conversations on internaltional plane flights in the past, with three extremely interesting and intelligent people. I don't tend to take those flights anymore, they were for work and the novelty of international travel for work wore off. Now I get out of it whenever I can.

But those three conversations have stayed with me.

Fortunately, the vast majority of the internet is of no real value. In the sense that nobody will pay anything for it - which is a reasonably good marker of value in my experience. So, given that, let the AI psychotics have their fun. Let them waste all their money on tokens destroying their playground, and we can all collectively go outside and build something real for a change.

My laptop has been up for 43 days, not very long in a server world, but excellent for a personal device that I use for development, hardware design and audio production. The last time it restarted was probably for an OS upgrade, but I can't recall.

My work linux laptop is also pretty reliable, but this is only because I never upgrade anything on it and only use it for development. Its battery life is terrible, so I only use it plugged into the wall. My work linux desktop has issues with bluetooth audio and graphics, neither of which I can be bothered to fix.

It would be magnificent if this is satire. Wonderful.

And yet, nobody would argue that a blind person is any less intelligent that a sighted person. And so the amount of data a human ingests is not correlated with intelligence. Intelligence is something else.

When LLMs were first proposed as useful tools for examining data and proving answers to questions, I wondered to myself how they would solve the problem of there being no a-priori knowledge of truth in the models. How they would find a way of sifting their terabytes of training data so that the models learnt only true things.

Imagine my surprise that not only did they not attempt to do this, but most people did not appear to understand that this was a fundamental and unsolvable problem at the heart of every LLM that exists anywhere. That LLMs, without this knowledge, are just random answer generators. Many, many years ago I wrote a fun little Markov-chain generator I called "Talkback", that you could feed a short story to and then have a chat with. It enjoyed brief popularity at the University I attended, you could ask it questions and it would sort-of answer. Nobody, least of all myself, imagined that the essential unachievable idea - "feed in enough text and it'll become human" - would actually be a real idea in real people's heads.

This part of your answer though;

"My paper and pen version of the latest LLM .... My paper and pen version of the latest LLM"

Is just a variation of the Chinese Room argument, and I don't think it holds water by itself. It's not that it's just an algorithm, it's that learning anything usefully correct from the entire corpus of human literary output by itself is fundamentally impossible.

"...let some random person you’ve just met in the bathroom try on the necklace around your neck that is equivalent to the heart of the ocean"

Like you I always look for signs of AI in writing I see online, and it's incredibly disappointing how often it's there. There's no personality, no charm, nothing unique - just the same flawless grammar and overuse of cliche. This piece is filled with the quality of humanity that we once took for granted. This is what we are losing.

LLMs are trained. While they are training, they are not doing anything useful. Once they are trained, they do not learn.

That's the distinction.

Checks

Oh my god. 11/10.