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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   9494 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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Shouldn't that incline us to skepticism regarding everything else boosters and hype men say about these bots?

I mean, yeah. It does. My personal experiences with LLMs (both at work doing programming and reading people's LLM-generated essays) have been profoundly unsatisfying. Therefore, I have extremely low expectations for them doing anything else well. But I think the people you see hyping up LLMs are not meeting your first criterion. For example, self_made_human has been pretty consistent in his opinions that he finds LLMs to be impressive at all the various tasks he sets to them, including writing. So it makes perfect sense that he is upbeat about their prospects in other areas. And I think the same goes for our other posters who are LLM fans - they find the models to be super impressive and therefore think they will continue to impress in the future.

I suppose my bafflement needs a top-level post at some point. It's easy to read something like this and start to feel nervous, and then I interact with an LLM for ten minutes and I am cured. These things are garbage.

Maybe it's just a matter of different fields, or different priorities. I'm looking for creativity, insight, and personality, whereas some the people worried about them are looking for... I don't know, writing computer code? Maybe in five years I'll be turned into a paperclip all while continuing to sneer that the best these systems can do is beige idiocy. LLMs don't need to be worthwhile to be a threat, and maybe garbage will destroy me one day.

Also @ChickenOverlord, please keep in mind that the cheap consumer AI you use to do your white-collar work for you or to compose an email is not the same as the one being developed by multibilliondollar companies to push the limits of technological possibility and/or conquer the world.

At the same time,

something like this

reads like a bunch of hot air about a bunch of hot air. I can't take those alignment people seriously.

I can echo that bafflement. Just started a new job and, like the old job, LLM usage is mandatory. And I can't just melt into the crowd like O could back at my megacorp. Every day I alternate between "this is nice and convenient" and "how did it make such a simple and obvious mistake?" It helps/hurts that most of what I'm doing is Python backend and Typescript frontend, both of which I don't care for, so I assume there's some Gell-Mann amnesia going on too. Though I'm still working on what is essentially a basic bitch CRUD app, I've yet to try it on anything truly complex.

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