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LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

arxiv.org

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Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#251

Post by ragequittah »

dspillett wrote: post #236
ragequittah wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just find it such a fascinating technology. It's finally fun to be a nerd again! For me it's the same feeling as when I was on the internet in the early '90s and was trying to tell people how useful it would be. I don't hold a grudge against anybody who held out until the iPhone came around or whatever it was that got them to finally realize the usefulness, but I still question why it was so hard to convince so man…

> As is the typical "but it uses so much water!" as the person orders a hamburger. As is going on about the water thing being somewhat over-blown, while quietly ignoring the other environmental issues: • The use of energy meaning greater carbon output because that side of the power industry can initially spin up more quickly (in part by using resource that we'd previously decided not to use in favour of other options…

These companies are going too far too fast like we always do as humans, and I agree the negatives aren't going to be pleasant. But there are industries and products out there that we all use currently that have way worse externalities that we just shove to the side in our minds because they've been around since before we could yell on twitter about them. The beef industry is a nutty thing to exist in its current form. Oil and plastics what the hell are we even doing? My guess is if you put your head down and did the research AI doesn't even rank in the top 10 of problematic things that people use daily.

Air travel, everyone having a nice green super watered lawn / golf courses, air conditioning in every home, fast fashion. A single person using AI for their work doesn't even register on the list of offences if you compare it to these things. Driving an ICE car every day for more than 30 minutes is wild. Hell it probably doesn't even use as much power as playing a video game on a good graphics card for 2 hours.

The thing I've resigned myself to is very few people will change anything at all for the greater good of society that gives them even a minor inconvenience. See: COVID restrictions. My honest take is we're absolutely doomed as a species unless we come up with novel solutions to the problems we're facing. And guess what AI is showing itself to be extremely good at in various fields [1][2][3]? It's a pipe-dream hope, but the hope is there. And AI when compared to the decades (sometimes centuries) of oil, beef, coal, whatever else won't even be a pixel on the screen of reasons why climate change is happening for some time yet. And it will highly incentivize mass production/adoption of the cheapest power sources which also happens to be renewables. I understand it doesn't look like that right now as people like Elon make their disgusting data centers, but over time I'd bet on it only because the financial incentive is there.

The discussion is far more nuanced than "AI bad". I understand the horrific aspects of it, but there is plenty of good to be found there too. Accessibility, translation, help with learning disabilities. The list of good outcomes goes on for a long while. It's a powerful tool that can be used for good or ill. In my opinion we need more people with the principles you speak of to be using powerful tools for the benefit of those principles.

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2025/using-generative-ai-researchers-de...

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2

[3] https://www.ipd.uw.edu/2025/12/rfdiffusion2-efficient-enzyme...

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#252

Post by mailonce »

left-struck wrote: post #169
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#253

Post by burnt-resistor »

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

This is the key danger of worshipping LLMs as false gods or oracles. They do not have superior answers, only random noise generated to appeal to simplistic, expedient deference of lazy people. All answers thus generated fall victim to an implicit appeal to authority fallacy.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#255

Post by SllX »

andai wrote: post #210
SllX wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! You are correct. I frequently do this with religions & specific ideologies which seem to root themselves in people the same way that religions do & it certainly isn’t intended to be a charitable framing. The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to repli…

>The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield. This is also how I was made, I think.

Slightly different process but it’s in the ballpark… down the street, playing a different sport. lol

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#256

Post by dagss »

SllX wrote: post #208
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…

> Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! You are correct. I frequently do this with religions & specific ideologies which seem to root themselves in people the same way that religions do & it certainly isn’t intended to be a charitable framing. The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to repli…

The point was that when you do this you participate in name-calling/slurs, not making an argument.

Many things that you personally think are good (I don't know you but say for instance ideas around democracy or liberty) can also be described as viruses in the same way.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#257

Post by breezybottom »

ragequittah wrote: post #249
breezybottom wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of strawmen and false equivalencies here is crazy. I bet you can't name one person who refused to get Internet because photos don't load fast enough.

There was a whole gaggle of people who refused to get it for that and a few other "user friendliness" reasons. And I completely understand it. >Across all groups of users, taking too long to download pages (i.e. "speed") is the most commonly experienced problem with the web (64.8% of respondents). >Online retailers especially should take note: 53% of respondents reported that they had left a web site while searching…

I understand that internet adoption wasn't universal in 2000. You're saying they refused to get it because photos took too long to load. That's an absolutely absurd statement.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#258

Post by fallingfrog »

aurareturn wrote: post #185
fallingfrog wrote: post #144

There will be no reason to study math when an LLM is better than every human mathematician, or physics when an LLM is better than any physicist, and likewise for every other field that requires discipline and work. We who went to college before AI are quite possibly going to be the last generation of competent, educated humans. AI will take over every job requiring education and talent, including yours, and then we w…

This is a very pessimistic look at things. There will be some growing pains for some, yes. But overall, I think it will ultimately create more jobs than ever. History is full of examples where people thought a new invention leads to catastrophic job loss, then the Earth had more jobs than ever. We have enough jobs in 2026 to keep most of the 8.3 billion people employed somehow.

That's an unbearably naive way to look at things. You wave your hands and say "oh it will be fine" without understanding any of the systems at play.

Food, housing, and other resources are only obtainable under capitalism if you have the leverage to demand them- in other words if you are difficult to replace. AI will make you extremely cheap to replace. On what basis do you expect to be able to negotiate a wage that you can live on?

Or another way to look at it: some people point to the historical parallel of farriers being put out of business by the spread of the automobile. But yet, the manufacture of cars ultimately provided more jobs than were lost when they replaced horses. Won't AI be the same?

But like all analogies, this one is imprecise and in an extremely important way. In this analogy, you, dear reader, are not the farrier. Nor are you the factory worker.

You are the horse.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#259

Post by Muromec »

scotty79 wrote: post #245
Muromec wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a big if actually.

Do you feel like a significant number of humans would commit genocide if given the tools? Well, it's not really that hard to imagine, especially if we allow for influence from an insistent and charismatic individual.

It's not about tools, it's about the framing. Given certain events happening (or believed to happen) and being framed in us vs them, genocidal behavior emerges quite often. Then of course people who do it also say they act in self-defence, were provoked, it isn't really a genocide and it was deserved if it was.

With both Christianity and Buddhism explicitly calling this for the last 2k years and people who say they are believers still proudly doing so, no, I don't think we can teach people to not genocide. Charismatic individuals aren't even that important, but they are useful to put the blame on someone personally, otherwise the punishment for genocide would be more genocide.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#260

Post by Terr_ »

dzink wrote: post #126

When a person spends time with other people, they outsource some of their thinking organically. That’s the efficiency gain in teams. Marriage leads to couples becoming two halves of a shared brain - one person takes on some cognitive load (finances, kids education, etc), while the other takes on another (maybe house issues, taxes, you name it). The load that can be carried with one brain is limited, so merging with o…

Hmm, so rather than a virus, a flawed version of some resource or assistance which resembles the real thing.

Like food with no essential vitamins, or carbon monoxide.

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