The Rise of Whatever

I feel it. We can debate AI over and over and over but my ultimate problem is not even the tech itself but the "whatever" part.

I'm a bit annoyed with LLMs for coding, because I care about the craft. But I understand the premise of using them when the end goal is not "tech as a craft" but "tech as a means". But that still requires having some reason to use the tech.

Hell, I feel the "tech as a means to get money" part for people trying to climb up the social ladder.

But for a lot of people who already did get to the top of it?

At some point we gotta ask what the point of SEO-optimizing everything even is.

Like, is the end goal optimizing life out of life?

Why not write a whole app using LLMs? Why not have the LLM do your course work? Why do the course work at all? Why not have the LLM make a birthday card for your partner? Why even get up in the morning? Why not just go leave and live in a forest? Why live at all?

What is even the point?

You need to take a break from your “craft” if fancy autocomplete makes you question reason to live.

And do what, given that AI-as-marketed optimizes out having relationships with people and enjoying art/cinema/music?

Touch grass all by myself?

I think calling me delusional for trying to understand the hype might be a bit much. It's not my own life I was describing.

On a more positive note, LLMs (or their successors) could be used to create a perfect tutor. Taylored for every individual, automatically adjusting learning material difficulty, etc.

But yeah, first we'll go through a few (?) years of the self-defeating "ChatGPT does my homework" and the necessary adjustments of how schools/unis function.

Oh yeah, it's going to be really interesting when the hype dies down and we start seeing the actual good use cases get homed in.

So you suggest training a model for each individual student? Because LLM "inference" sure as hell isn't capable of tailoring anything to anything, or change in any way.

And also, how is personalized bullshit better than generic bullshit? We'd need to solve the bullshit problem in the first place, which is mathematically guaranteed NOT to be possible with these types of architectures.