LLMs are demonic

[boccaderlupo]

Conjured intelligences of questionable human provenance and ever more inscrutable intent, to which more and more people are deferring questions that would typically be handled by a person's intellect, will, and imagination...not good.

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

Some very interesting material here to consider, particularly your thoughts on them as "subhuman" (do they then dehumanize, I wonder?) and the idea of love of self drawing one away from the path.

I have to interact with these systems daily, so it's interesting to see the reaction of others who also employ them. It's a disquieting accommodation to the technology, but then I guess it can be argued such adaptation is typical of all technology. Yet it's the direct access, as it were, of language into one's intellect that troubles me. At what point does the prompter become the prompted?

[sdi]

I'm sorry that you have to interact with these things daily.

To your question, yes, I think subhuman things dehumanize us to the extent that we feed them (cf. 1 Tim. 6:10–11). But I don't think LLMs are special in that regard; it is true whenever we cease to do our best. (Certainly, offloading our capacity to think to a machine is a particularly egregious form of this, but so is any other kind of laziness, intellectual or otherwise!) Euripedes has a good line, here:

[...] ἢν δέ τις πρόθυμος ᾖ,
σθένειν τὸ θεῖον μᾶλλον εἰκότως ἔχει.
[...] Remember, when one is zealous,
the gods likewise have more strength.
(Orestes speaking. Euripedes, Iphegenia in Tauris 910–1.)

Or, a bit more loosely, "the more one strives, the more the gods strive for them." The word I translated "zealous" is πρόθυμος pro-thumos, "forward in spirit" or "engaged," the exact thing I mean when I quote my angel saying, "do your best."