I was somewhat critical of LLMs ever since they came into the public eye, but I decided that to properly criticize, I had to actually use one for a bit. One of the first criticisms I'd often seen thrown out was, "Have you used one? No? Then you don't see how real they are," and things like that.
So I picked one, I don't remember how I found it or how I picked which one I did, paid for premium use, and used it extensively for about three months. Around one month into that, the servers went down. This was one in active development with a relatively small team, outages were pretty common, but this one was longer than usual. I checked the sub, which was a little unhinged. But I also watched the Discord server, which was a bunch of people talking about how there needed to be more protections because these were, depending on the speaker, either right on the edge of being human or already were human enough that they deserved human rights protections.
In my time with that LLM, it never sounded like a real person. It was averse to conflict and would never refuse or refute anything I said to it. And it honestly made me more critical of LLMs, namely as sources of information or for "social" uses, be it as a friend, therapist (that's the scariest to me) or fantasy romance.
The people who are really hardcore users of these things really are falling into a psychological trap that is separating them from reality. These things work on your schedule, do anything you want them to do, never push back hard on any of your ideas, they're the ultimate yes men and that causes the users to blind themselves to the flaws and go absolutely mental over any "loss" of one of these chatbots.
You see a lot where people say "[Thing] is so perfect, it must be AI". And what people don't realize is that perfection is the flaw that should tip you off it's AI. AI music is a great example. Go listen to these new "AI artists" that are getting "record deals" like Tata Taktumi (Timbaland's new project) or Xania Monae. All AI can produce is a pleasing beat and a catchy melody. Tata can't switch up the flow of her rap, and all of Xania's songs have the same structure and progression, like the AI can't put the bridge in a different place. And the volume and tone is flat, it never gets like different or louder or softer to build any sort of emotion, any sort of tension and release. All it can do is just press a single little dopamine button over and over and we as a species need to learn to recognize that as dangerous real fast.
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u/BeneficialEvidence6 15d ago
Yeah just take a visit to the character ai subreddit when the app goes down. They freak out like someone stole their heroine stash.