Honestly, I hate that I read about LLMs all the time. I hate all the marketing bullshit, but also all the critical pieces. Not because the criticism is wrong. I hate them precisely because they’re right. And I hate the feeling that I have to write yet another piece on that same topic, to collect some of the thoughts I have had over the recent months.
Machine learning isn’t anything new. Neither is calling it “artificial intelligence”. Not only pop science writers and journalists, but even more technical folk have been using the term, and I never complained. I didn’t complain about games having “AI” either. It was always clear that this is a special use of “intelligence”, one far from what animals truly possess. This changed recently.
When LLMs enabled chatbots to use human language, the misuse of the term exploded. Obviously, the marketing people loved calling it “artificial intelligence”. The media, the users and the whole IT industry followed. Even people who knew better stopped bothering. On top of that, anthropomorphisms became commonplace. LLMs could be said to be “thinking”, “lying”, “hallucinating”, to “approve” or “disapprove”, “like” or “dislike”…
Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if not for the fact that LLMs are so good at imitating human intelligence. The problem is not really how people call them. The problem is that there is a number of people who start actually believing that their chatbots are conscious. And I can see why that would be happening…
Continue reading “The pinnacle of enshittification, or Large Language Models”