Ask HN: Are we as society going to let LLM companies take all the values?

I am not that young, but I'm not that old. I used to be a child, and thought that the adults already figured things out and I can be at peace.

One of my realization of me getting older is the realization that there are no adults in the room anymore, or that I am now, an adult, who, also the same like other adults, we actually don't know shit about anything, none of us do.

I think LLM is a useful technology. But since the dawn of LLMs, I've been trying to imagine what the world will look like if we take LLM to its logical conclusion. It seems to me, despite of all its benefits, LLM is a sword too sharp for all of us to handle. Its not gonna be sunshines and rainbows.

A couple things I'm thinking about below, and these are all just societal impact, not even environmental ones:

- Young people lost their career ladders. Capitalism doesn't work anymore. We have permanent underclass. And maybe worldwide scale societal unrest, in which violence will be the norm.

- People stop creating music, stop writing blogs, stop doing experiments or any other cool stuffs and share it on the internet because LLM companies can just pirate the shit out of it without paying anything back.

- Mediocrity in everything. We have this Suno shit claiming that people don't like the process of creating music because its so tedious so lets just prompt it away. Berklee has a class to make AI music. Yup. People claim that its okay to consume mediocre stuffs, because we don't need the highest grade of codebase, of design, of music for our day to day life.

- People stop socializing and connecting to another human beings. For example, art is a way for people to connect to other's art. Software engineering is a lot of communication, discussing tradeoffs with other engineers. But now you can just prompt your way away, even things as simple as writing emails.

- All the values (measured by money) created in this world is sucked by the LLM owners/producers. Oh you have a beautiful music you just created? Too bad, its mine now. Oh, you just created an art? Its my art now, and I will charge society money to recreate this art that I just acquired. Oh, you have a land somewhere? I can just buy it, money is cheap for me, after all I suck all the values that society created. There are no other values worthy of monetary compensation other than LLM training/research. These "researchers" don't need to practice music, don't need to practice art, don't need to practice law, don't need to practice coding, they can just be an LLM researchers/producers/owners and they get all the values that the other professions created.

- All the above caused economic stagnation. People don't feel the need to pay other human beings, because everything is just a prompt away.

- All the above caused stagnation of progress, or even winding down of progress.

What else?

If truly this is the logical conclusion of LLM, then it seems to me that the mission of this generation is to destroy AI as Ronnie Chieng said is not really off the mark.

Maybe I am an LLM doomer, but help me out here HN, because I'm just a dumb adult.

[flagged]

I'm not sure what you're getting on about here. Are you complaining that your post received a downvote? IME it's pretty normal for posts to receive downvotes. I also think it's somewhat cowardly to downvote and move on - at least tell me why you did it!

For what it's worth, I upvoted GP because I think it's something worth it to think about. I didn't either up or downvote P because, well, it's not adding much and is just confusing.

[dead]

I believe it is possible for us - all - to adapt regarding the cultural impacts, changes to Art, and decoupling of practice from creation (for things like music, drawings, movies, etc.). In a crude but useful analogy, people still run marathons despite the invention and widespread adoption of cars, bikes, etc. So people will still make Art. People will still appreciate it.

The problem is that art-making-as-a-job is doomed; so are, in the long run, many other 'knowledge worker' jobs, although we can't for certain tell which ones are going to be replaced fully by AI first.

So the hardest problem is not the one relative to creative activity (for pleasure, self-expression, or catharsis), but economic activity. In your words, "Capitalism doesn't work anymore". We can discuss to what point whatever replaces our previous system will still be 'capitalism', but it is apparent that - if it works - it will be very different in many of the aspects we take for granted.

My personal (and likely naive) opinion is that a large part of the political discourse will shift towards trying to define what is -necessary- vs what is -luxury-, as the rewritten order will shift to ensure that all people receive all that is "necessary" and work (whatever it looks like) will be for "luxuries". I don't like it, but I guess that this will be ultimately the question dividing "left" from "right" for a large chunk of this century.