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LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

arxiv.org

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Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#161

Post by coldtea »

scotty79 wrote: post #158
beloch wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"We model transitions among uncoupled, coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can generate tipping points and technological lock-in." You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on to…

> Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book. Things go viral in professional settings as well. Scrum, agile, pc language ... I'm sure you can find other professional trends that if you decided not to follow your career would be jeopardized.

And those things also have virus like qualities

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#162

Post by coldtea »

scotty79 wrote: post #159
greenowl wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many of us, AI adoption is really an AI mandate.

If you are an employee, the employer has control over how you should do your work. IF you don't like that, transition to being a contractor and sign service agreements where you are going to be paid solely for results not for how you achieve them.

That will change things for him, or any others taking the same course.

Hundreds of millions can't all become contractors, and realistically wont all become contractors.

So the issue described is a real social issue, whether he can "just" quit and avoid it or not.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#163

Post by iforgotmypasswo »

lelanthran wrote: post #107
iforgotmypasswo wrote: post #40

I feel the premise of this research is wrong, or at least the synopsis phrasing. Smart people like learning. Now we just learn more interesting things. Weekend me before LLMs: Maybe I’ll chip away at that dependency injection library I’ve been working on. If I spend most of the day I could improve the user facing test framework. Weekend me after LLMs: Let’s continue work to get Claude Code running in WebXR on a Quest…

> Claude, continue to teach me about 3d rendering as related to our current challenges matching the fidelity of the built in browser. Why? Claude can just do it for you, can't it? If you're using Claude to do these things, why half-ass it?

I apologize, but I’m laughing as this is like asking why I don’t drive my car through my house when I need to carry something heavy. It wouldn’t work very well!

More directly, because I have a long term memory and do not have fundamental issues differentiating fact from fiction. Just because SOTA models know more trivia than I do doesn’t mean they’re nearly as intelligent in the thirty other ways humans are. They are a tool in your toolbelt. You use them for the things they make easier.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#164

Post by AnotherGoodName »

left-struck wrote: post #149
beloch wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"We model transitions among uncoupled, coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can generate tipping points and technological lock-in." You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on to…

I don’t disagree with you, actually I kind of feel the same about smartphone adoption. It’s basically assumed now that you have a smartphone. You can’t enter some places without a ticket on your smartphone, or can’t order at some restaurants. Government processes are starting to require smartphones. Maybe it will be similar with AI. And you know, I love computers, I used to love the internet. And I’ve had so much fun…

Fwiw i noticed you absolutely can't reasonably get a US Via consulate appt for some countries without AI right now so the requiremnts already begun.

The consulate is booked out for 3 months and only opens 3 months out. All openings are snapped up before any human could get one. They have a lot of anti-script blocking but AI seems to get around them. So there's an arms race, you pretty much need AI to book it (a basic hand written curl script isn't enough).

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#166

Post by ribs »

Murfalo wrote: post #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. Cult…

The prevalence of LLM-generated text masquerading as otherwise and incorporated into a significant fraction of all published text distinguishes this info-organism from all others.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#167

Post by daveguy »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #111
hammock wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, eventually, but LLMs aren’t there quite yet. There are what, maybe 10 million distinct agents in the wild today? 100 million or a billion if we’re being charitable. At the time being, the vast vast majority of those agents are all trained on the same or similar training set (the Internet and books). Which makes them mostly all the same. Vastly less diverse than the way one complex lifeform hatches out of the…

They aren't even close to there. There isn't a shred of intelligence in an LLM, let alone sentience.

But understanding that requires reading the code or writing that it spits out rather than having yet another LLM do it for you.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#168

Post by satvikpendem »

Murfalo wrote: post #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. Cult…

Speaking of memetics and favorite books, check out There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm who also wrote some seminal short stories including the one that inspired the Alex Garland show Devs. The book is about how to deal with beings that make you forget you ever saw then, a sort of opposite mind virus.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#169

Post by left-struck »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #164
left-struck wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree with you, actually I kind of feel the same about smartphone adoption. It’s basically assumed now that you have a smartphone. You can’t enter some places without a ticket on your smartphone, or can’t order at some restaurants. Government processes are starting to require smartphones. Maybe it will be similar with AI. And you know, I love computers, I used to love the internet. And I’ve had so much fun…

Fwiw i noticed you absolutely can't reasonably get a US Via consulate appt for some countries without AI right now so the requiremnts already begun. The consulate is booked out for 3 months and only opens 3 months out. All openings are snapped up before any human could get one. They have a lot of anti-script blocking but AI seems to get around them. So there's an arms race, you pretty much need AI to book it (a basic…

Oh wow, that’s aweful. Where I used to live this would happen with driving tests. Driving schools would book out all the tests and then re-assign them to their students. So at some point it got so bad that when you’re buying a driving lesson you’re also effectively buying a right to take the test. What could the government possibly do to stop this? Some highly technical solution? How about just making it so you can’t assign the test to another name? Hmm that might be a pretty obvious solution…

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#170

Post by twistedpalm »

jjk166 wrote: post #64

"If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." -Socrates

The thought of reading someone’s writing without having to meet with them and discuss interactively probably evoked the same fears as using AI instead of working with another person interactively.

Then taking writing as the source of truth… who even knows if the author is the original sayer. They could just write things down they heard other people say - the birth of IP theft! And yet, journalism

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