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LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

arxiv.org

11–20 of 225 posts

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#11
post #4

Have to take commentary by non tech folks speaking about tech with a grain of salt and perspective since the tech is changing so fast both in capability and application. Research can be more of a lagging indicator than a leading indicator with AI.

I can't disagree enough with this. Not everything needs to be understood in a technical context. Technology intersects with society, and understanding its impacts on that society is vital.

Or in other words: the humanities are good.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#12

> The viral analogy does not imply that LLM-human interactions are intrinsically parasitic. The analogy doesn't, but LLMs are trained on text, or content, generated by humans, with the aim of their output being acceptable to human interlocutors. That's one parasitic aspect. A second one is the nature and behavior of the organizational entities providing and promoting the popular LLM services: Microsoft, Google, Meta,…

> with the aim of their output being acceptable to human interlocutors.

The more I use LLMs I find that their output drifts toward being acceptable to other LLMs. I find myself quite often telling the model: "this is not human readable.". Especially Opus and Fable write in such a way that it is difficult to follow. The often put sentences out of context, the context itself is fragmented. Often start with what you would think is end of a story so when you start reading you are like wtf it is about.

If think the issue might be that LLMs read text all at once whereas humans are somewhat linear. So when LLM puts out text it understands, to human it is close to random gibberish that looks like English.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#16
Ok... but are automobiles also a virus? Because we've become dependent on them? Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage?

What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#18
post #16

Ok... but are automobiles also a virus? Because we've become dependent on them? Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage? What about cooking food? We've become entirely dependent on cooking food.

> Should we also facilitate reversibility in our automobile usage

Yes?

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#19
I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from).

There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this.

Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents

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