Hiiiiii, developer who hates LLMs here.
wavesI think I've avoided all of the LLM debate thus far, but I figure that some of my actual positions probably ought to be represented in this discussion instead of shadow-boxing.
I hate LLMs because I've had to sink a lot of hours into defending services and content that I host for myself or for others from companies that couldn't be bothered to write polite crawlers. This entirely unnecessary problem has contributed to some friction between me and a few clients as I try desperately to feather the pedal on traffic. This has subsided somewhat recently but the pain of it is still fresh.
I hate LLMs because they have taken a lot of goodwill and free labor from the creative community and turned it into a product. This isn't a new problem, it's been a point of sometimes rancorous argument in open source for decades, but this is another round of that old argument on what we owe or don't owe the people who donate labor and creativity to the commons.
I hate LLMs because I don't think Sam Altman or most of his social circle are good people and I don't want to give them more wealth and power. I believe Sam Altman is very comfortable enriching himself at the expense of humanity, and I want to still have some hope for the future of humanity. This position requires me to do whatever I can to deny any of my resources to Altman and his ilk, and to help foster the efforts of other people who want to do the same. To that end, I immediately support any protectionist efforts in the anti-LLM crowd.
I hate LLMs because they have inverted the effort it takes to generate some content versus consuming and considering that content. I am being drowned in a sea of garbage created by people in professional contexts who hand a few sparse notes to an LLM and ask it to generate a "professional email" or a "blog post" or a "technical document", and the quality on the overwhelming majority of this is terrible. It is having a severe and direct adverse effect on my ability to do work.
I hate LLMs because, after quietly observing differences between people who are at the far end of pro-LLM versus those at the far end of anti-LLM, I believe there's a consistent pattern of cognitive decline in the pro-LLM folks. I acknowledge this could just be me observing my own bias, but some literature is beginning to appear supporting it.
I hate LLMs because I love authenticity and creativity and constructive human endeavors, and LLMs are eating away at all of these and producing a homogeneous mass of superficial probabilistic crud. I have serious concerns about the future of art, creativity, and culture. They have been ever-changing and large parts of modern culture would be unrecognizable to someone 200 years ago, so this is more of a wait-and-see level of concern than a Big Hate, but so far, the Magic 8-Ball says, "Outlook not so good".
I hate LLMs because I'm strongly opposed to the idea that a few commercial companies, of whose finances I am deeply suspicious, should be made a required dependency in software development. This is an insane proposal to me. Even accounting for all of the upsides to LLM-driven development -- and I've followed all of that news just as much as all the negative takes -- it's nuts to me that there aren't more people worried about what this could mean for the future of software and technology. But, then again, I started my career during the height of Microsoft's domination of tech, so maybe that was formative for me.
I hate LLMs because I care about the environment that makes our existence possible and it's insane to me that so much of the tech sector suddenly stopped giving a shit about that. How can we, as a community, talk about the existential risk of climate change or the benefits of adopting renewable energy or cheer the development of ever-more-efficient power consumption while we also create a huge forcing function to convert as much electrical energy into thermal energy as possible? It's as if, practically overnight, everyone went from, "we need to do everything we can to reduce our demands on the environment or we're cooked" to "oooh, shiny new toy, and it only ruins everything around it, cool!"
I hate LLMs because I have been a hobbyist archivist for over a decade and a home computing enthusiast since the mid-1980s and right now I can't afford to buy a badly-needed hard drive or RAM or build out a new machine to even maybe experiment with an LLM in my own workshop because voodoo financing by everyone in the LLM ecosystem has totally wrecked the hobbyist computing economy, and there's no relief in sight.
I hate LLMs because I strongly suspect that the future they want is one of subscription computing and I will retreat back to retro computing before I go willingly into that long moonless night.
I hate LLMs because I am under enormous pressure, from many different angles, to also use them. I'm being asked -- required, in some cases -- to ignore all of my concerns about them and use them anyway because everyone else does and "obviously" they are the future. Because, somehow, all of my positions against LLMs make me unreasonable and a less valuable member of society.
LLMs could have been done in so many ways that I would have gladly and enthusiastically jumped right into. They are a really neat technology! I would love to be experimenting with them and playing with them and finding all the right ways to balance their benefits against their risks. But, I can't do that, because the way they've been developed requires me to set aside too many of the above concerns to be able to adopt them at all.
If I'm ever able to build a reasonable enough home system for the purpose, I might be able to, one day, change all the above to "I hate commercial LLMs...", but I have no idea right now how far away that day is, or if it will ever come. And, even that scenario would likely be a Faustian bargain, as it's likely that I'd be using open weights that were created under most of the same conditions as my concerns above.