5 ms·

I'm more concerned that the people using LLM's will drive me insane. I hope that I don't get flooded with LLM-generated emails and documentation from colleagues

I'm more concerned that the people using LLM's will drive me insane. I hope that I don't get flooded with LLM-generated emails and documentation from colleagues and co-workers that don't bother to proof-read what they send me. It will be a frustrating day when I reply to them with a question and they don't have an answer because they don't even know what they sent me. Multiply that by all of the boilerplate code I'll end up reading. No pleasant abstractions that hide complexity and are reinforced by laws checked by properties or proofs; abstractions that make the problem easier to understand and communicate. Instead, endless bowls of oatmeal code: similar, bland, and laborious to read. Who knows if the model "hallucinated" this code and whether the author bothered to check it before asking for a review. Who knows how long before I get bored and worn down and stop bothering to read it myself. And then we're supposed to change our job titles to "Prompt Engineers"? How absurd is that. Nothing about what you do is creative, human, or interesting. Now your job is to feed sentences into an LLM to get it to do all that work for you... how long until that dead-end job gets replaced? Maybe this could drive us all insane from burnout and nihilism.

volkk 4y ago
i have these exact concerns. the concept of on overload of information that means very little that will get me to stop caring/reading literally anything on the internet at a certain point
- ahepp 4y ago
  I think it’s more likely human-to-human communication will adapt (dare I say improve?) than cease
geraneum 4y ago
My boss (head of engineering) loves ChatGPT and he uses it more and more in work. Recently he just wrote an crucial feedback after one of our meetings and the moment I started reading, it was obvious it's ChatGPT (confirmed by ZeroGPT later) as he does not talk like that at all. It read like all the other ChatGPT responses you read on Internet.
- prox 4y ago
  Just send him back a generated email that your chatGPT read his ChatGPT mail.
  - danielbln 4y ago
    relevant: https://i.imgur.com/D8WFIMZ.png https://i.imgur.com/D8WFIMZ.png
    - roncesvalles 4y ago
      GPT needs to be a codec!
      - marcosdumay 4y ago
        It's just an uncompression stage to facilitate transmission. Too bad it's lossy. I'm waiting for a lossless algorithm before I add it as an encoding on my web server.
- fishnchips 4y ago
  I'm not surprised at all. ChatGPT is a great empathy prosthesis.
  - consumer451 4y ago
    > empathy prosthesis This is my favorite phrase that I have learned in recent times and it appears only one other time on the internet. Thanks for that.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    Fuck. Now you have to figure out if people actually care or are just saying the words... Wait.
  - gniv 4y ago
    > empathy prosthesis. Nice. I also checked "empathy crutch" (it's the name of a band) and "empathy surrogate" (slightly more used).
wishfish 4y ago
Agree with everything you wrote. Gave me the funny thought of how ultimately the AI will just be talking to itself. Someone sends me AI-written documentation to evaluate. I'll ask the AI to respond with feedback because I'm too busy playing Civ. This cycle will go back and forth until one of the AI instances gives final approval, and then the documentation will get posted publicly without a human ever reading it. End users, when confronted with the daunting wall-of-text docs, will ask for AI summaries. The lack of human readership will continue indefinitely.
- all2 4y ago
  I had a vision in my mind while reading this of a dystopian (utopian??) future where city states are empty of people, and the country sides are sparsely populated. The people in the cities died out long ago, but no one knows that. They just see these giant glistening walled gardens, with aircraft flying around, and it all looks very busy and amazing. But the truth is its just the machine, maintaining itself, talking to itself. Eventually it will go insane.
  - FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
    There Will Come Soft Rains https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20So...
  - akiselev 4y ago
    Reminds me of the Doctor Who episode Gridlock [1] set five billion years in the future. The entire planet is covered by a city called New New York with the remainder of humanity living in a perpetual traffic jam in the dystopian bottom half of the city. A mutated virus wiped out all the people living in the utopian top half of the city while sealing everyone left alive in the bottom half to constantly drive around with nowhere to go, with systems barely maintained by the Face of Bo. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock_(Doctor_Who) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock_(Doctor_Who)
- mizzao 4y ago
  You might even get the AI to start playing Civ for you at some point!
deeviant 4y ago
Where do you get the idea GPT can't create abstractions? And do you really believe it generates more boilerplate than the average SWE? The more comments I read on HN regarding GPT stuff, the more I realize that many people are willing to put out an opinion on something they do not at all understand. While I can understand concerns about a flood of automatically generated emails, this is already a significant issue that most software engineers have the tools to address. Additionally, there isn't much difference between composing an email by hand and generating one with an LLM; both begin with a list of key ideas to convey, which are then elaborated on either manually or through automation. It was always the key ideas that are the point.
usefulcat 4y ago
Right now, these models were trained almost entirely on content created by humans, since that's what was available. Now that it's so relatively cheap to create generated content, it seems likely that in the future much if not most of the material used for training will have come from other models, not from humans. I have no idea what the implications of that will be but it seems very likely and does concern me.
- elcomet 4y ago
  I'm not sure why it's a concern to you. If it works well it's great news, and if it doesn't work, then it won't be used. Companies will not make their AIs less intelligent on purpose.
  - toss1 4y ago
    >>Companies will not make their AIs less intelligent on purpose. That sounds a LOT like saying "companies will not make their products worse on purpose". Yet it happens allt he time, and is almost inevitable once the MBAs, finance people, and marketers get involved - they seek out ways to cheapen the product that (they think) customers won't notice, they undermine "cost centers" like R&D and production, and 1000 other flaws. In internet products they deliberately skew the output to generate more ad revenue (See Enshttification" by Cory Doctorow [0]. And that is all for products that otherwise would stay mostly the same, without some kind of natural degradation. These LLMs and image generators, etc. will definitely degrade by ingesting their own output. Sort of like the jokes about clones becoming worse every generation. Just watch. Thx for provoking me to think for a few seconds and convincing me that it's inevitable... [0] https://doctorow.medium.com/tiktoks-enshittification-bb3f5df91979 https://doctorow.medium.com/tiktoks-enshittification-bb3f5df...
- oldsecondhand 4y ago
  That would doom LLMs to mediocrity, which is great news for creative people.
strangattractor 4y ago
Isn't driving us insane a way of destroying us? I think we need an EPA equivalent for the Internet or at least Social Media. People should not be able to release toxic substances directly into the Web.
- favaq 4y ago
  Why not? EPA exists because you can't "escape" the environment. But the web? If social media is full of crap, then don't visit it - that's what I do.
  - throwaway1777 4y ago
    This is beyond social media.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    Let's be real: in 2023 a significant portion of our lives is online, and that's not going to go away. I can't just not have a smartphone. My kid's baseball team only publishes schedules on FB. Local bakeries only sell their stuff, fancy cakes, via Insta. I have multiple work and personal emails and some of them get BLASTED with spam cuz of one purchase I made for replacement springs like ~5 years ago. Virtually all of my banking and stocks are online. They'll still send me paper sometimes but there is no way to do money transfers or basic life activities like paying my bills without using their app. Even if I don't look at it, my wife does. My kids do. They spread the memes, and potentially invite all sorts of shady malware into my network. Ditto for my coworkers, my employees, my bosses. Just "don't visit it" isn't an option if 95% of the population does.
  - strangattractor 4y ago
    Maybe the people growing up with all this will do a better job in the future. We still haven't even solved the health issues caused by Junk Food - why should Junk Social Media be any different.
hosh 4y ago
At some point, someone will write a LLM assistant to go through all of the LLM-generated email to be able to intelligently filter out spam, summarize the rest, and highlight the important stuff. Not that I think this is good for our society. If we go that route, at some point, it would be AIs talking with AIs, and we end up being the biomass.
- ryandvm 4y ago
  Ugh. Logging on to a Zoom meeting that the AIs scheduled for us is the hell we never imagined.
christkv 4y ago
Somebody will for sure create a HN Karma mining bot connected to chatGPT. Just a matter of time.
gniv 4y ago
> And then we're supposed to change our job titles to "Prompt Engineers"? How absurd is that. Why is that absurd? Asking good questions is a useful skill in many domains even now. As the models improve they will become better than any human in many areas of expertise. So we will have to rely on them. Being a good prompt engineer sounds like a good job in that world.
0xdeadbeefbabe 4y ago
And isn't it even more disappointing to think that it's just people destroying people, same as always.
golergka 4y ago
Documentation and code we have now is already pretty bad, and most of the people who write both are stupid, can't answer follow-up questions or come up with good abstractions. I don't see how LLMs could make it any worse.
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  Famous last words.
mattgreenrocks 4y ago
> And then we're supposed to change our job titles to "Prompt Engineers"? How absurd is that. Nothing about what you do is creative, human, or interesting. It's weird how all the discourse around AI replacing jobs never ponders the possibility of AI commoditizing management itself. (I suppose that's on the list of Illegal Ideas.)

volkk 4y ago

i have these exact concerns. the concept of on overload of information that means very little that will get me to stop caring/reading literally anything on the internet at a certain point

ahepp 4y ago
I think it’s more likely human-to-human communication will adapt (dare I say improve?) than cease

geraneum 4y ago

My boss (head of engineering) loves ChatGPT and he uses it more and more in work. Recently he just wrote an crucial feedback after one of our meetings and the moment I started reading, it was obvious it's ChatGPT (confirmed by ZeroGPT later) as he does not talk like that at all. It read like all the other ChatGPT responses you read on Internet.

prox 4y ago
Just send him back a generated email that your chatGPT read his ChatGPT mail.
- danielbln 4y ago
  relevant: https://i.imgur.com/D8WFIMZ.png https://i.imgur.com/D8WFIMZ.png
  - roncesvalles 4y ago
    GPT needs to be a codec!
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      It's just an uncompression stage to facilitate transmission. Too bad it's lossy. I'm waiting for a lossless algorithm before I add it as an encoding on my web server.
fishnchips 4y ago
I'm not surprised at all. ChatGPT is a great empathy prosthesis.
- consumer451 4y ago
  > empathy prosthesis This is my favorite phrase that I have learned in recent times and it appears only one other time on the internet. Thanks for that.
- solarmist 4y ago
  Fuck. Now you have to figure out if people actually care or are just saying the words... Wait.
- gniv 4y ago
  > empathy prosthesis. Nice. I also checked "empathy crutch" (it's the name of a band) and "empathy surrogate" (slightly more used).

wishfish 4y ago

Agree with everything you wrote. Gave me the funny thought of how ultimately the AI will just be talking to itself. Someone sends me AI-written documentation to evaluate. I'll ask the AI to respond with feedback because I'm too busy playing Civ. This cycle will go back and forth until one of the AI instances gives final approval, and then the documentation will get posted publicly without a human ever reading it. End users, when confronted with the daunting wall-of-text docs, will ask for AI summaries. The lack of human readership will continue indefinitely.

all2 4y ago
I had a vision in my mind while reading this of a dystopian (utopian??) future where city states are empty of people, and the country sides are sparsely populated. The people in the cities died out long ago, but no one knows that. They just see these giant glistening walled gardens, with aircraft flying around, and it all looks very busy and amazing. But the truth is its just the machine, maintaining itself, talking to itself. Eventually it will go insane.
- FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
  There Will Come Soft Rains https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20So...
- akiselev 4y ago
  Reminds me of the Doctor Who episode Gridlock [1] set five billion years in the future. The entire planet is covered by a city called New New York with the remainder of humanity living in a perpetual traffic jam in the dystopian bottom half of the city. A mutated virus wiped out all the people living in the utopian top half of the city while sealing everyone left alive in the bottom half to constantly drive around with nowhere to go, with systems barely maintained by the Face of Bo. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock_(Doctor_Who) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock_(Doctor_Who)
mizzao 4y ago
You might even get the AI to start playing Civ for you at some point!

deeviant 4y ago

Where do you get the idea GPT can't create abstractions? And do you really believe it generates more boilerplate than the average SWE? The more comments I read on HN regarding GPT stuff, the more I realize that many people are willing to put out an opinion on something they do not at all understand. While I can understand concerns about a flood of automatically generated emails, this is already a significant issue that most software engineers have the tools to address. Additionally, there isn't much difference between composing an email by hand and generating one with an LLM; both begin with a list of key ideas to convey, which are then elaborated on either manually or through automation. It was always the key ideas that are the point.

usefulcat 4y ago

Right now, these models were trained almost entirely on content created by humans, since that's what was available. Now that it's so relatively cheap to create generated content, it seems likely that in the future much if not most of the material used for training will have come from other models, not from humans. I have no idea what the implications of that will be but it seems very likely and does concern me.

elcomet 4y ago
I'm not sure why it's a concern to you. If it works well it's great news, and if it doesn't work, then it won't be used. Companies will not make their AIs less intelligent on purpose.
- toss1 4y ago
  >>Companies will not make their AIs less intelligent on purpose. That sounds a LOT like saying "companies will not make their products worse on purpose". Yet it happens allt he time, and is almost inevitable once the MBAs, finance people, and marketers get involved - they seek out ways to cheapen the product that (they think) customers won't notice, they undermine "cost centers" like R&D and production, and 1000 other flaws. In internet products they deliberately skew the output to generate more ad revenue (See Enshttification" by Cory Doctorow [0]. And that is all for products that otherwise would stay mostly the same, without some kind of natural degradation. These LLMs and image generators, etc. will definitely degrade by ingesting their own output. Sort of like the jokes about clones becoming worse every generation. Just watch. Thx for provoking me to think for a few seconds and convincing me that it's inevitable... [0] https://doctorow.medium.com/tiktoks-enshittification-bb3f5df91979 https://doctorow.medium.com/tiktoks-enshittification-bb3f5df...
oldsecondhand 4y ago
That would doom LLMs to mediocrity, which is great news for creative people.

strangattractor 4y ago

Isn't driving us insane a way of destroying us? I think we need an EPA equivalent for the Internet or at least Social Media. People should not be able to release toxic substances directly into the Web.

favaq 4y ago
Why not? EPA exists because you can't "escape" the environment. But the web? If social media is full of crap, then don't visit it - that's what I do.
- throwaway1777 4y ago
  This is beyond social media.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  Let's be real: in 2023 a significant portion of our lives is online, and that's not going to go away. I can't just not have a smartphone. My kid's baseball team only publishes schedules on FB. Local bakeries only sell their stuff, fancy cakes, via Insta. I have multiple work and personal emails and some of them get BLASTED with spam cuz of one purchase I made for replacement springs like ~5 years ago. Virtually all of my banking and stocks are online. They'll still send me paper sometimes but there is no way to do money transfers or basic life activities like paying my bills without using their app. Even if I don't look at it, my wife does. My kids do. They spread the memes, and potentially invite all sorts of shady malware into my network. Ditto for my coworkers, my employees, my bosses. Just "don't visit it" isn't an option if 95% of the population does.
- strangattractor 4y ago
  Maybe the people growing up with all this will do a better job in the future. We still haven't even solved the health issues caused by Junk Food - why should Junk Social Media be any different.

hosh 4y ago

At some point, someone will write a LLM assistant to go through all of the LLM-generated email to be able to intelligently filter out spam, summarize the rest, and highlight the important stuff. Not that I think this is good for our society. If we go that route, at some point, it would be AIs talking with AIs, and we end up being the biomass.

ryandvm 4y ago
Ugh. Logging on to a Zoom meeting that the AIs scheduled for us is the hell we never imagined.

christkv 4y ago

Somebody will for sure create a HN Karma mining bot connected to chatGPT. Just a matter of time.

gniv 4y ago

> And then we're supposed to change our job titles to "Prompt Engineers"? How absurd is that. Why is that absurd? Asking good questions is a useful skill in many domains even now. As the models improve they will become better than any human in many areas of expertise. So we will have to rely on them. Being a good prompt engineer sounds like a good job in that world.

0xdeadbeefbabe 4y ago

And isn't it even more disappointing to think that it's just people destroying people, same as always.

golergka 4y ago

Documentation and code we have now is already pretty bad, and most of the people who write both are stupid, can't answer follow-up questions or come up with good abstractions. I don't see how LLMs could make it any worse.

disgruntledphd2 4y ago
Famous last words.

mattgreenrocks 4y ago

> And then we're supposed to change our job titles to "Prompt Engineers"? How absurd is that. Nothing about what you do is creative, human, or interesting. It's weird how all the discourse around AI replacing jobs never ponders the possibility of AI commoditizing management itself. (I suppose that's on the list of Illegal Ideas.)