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This website is going to be very busy when the LLM-designed nuke plants come online. https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/
Where I live, there’s been a rise in people eating poisonous mushrooms. I suspect that it might have to do with AI use. No proof though.
I’m asking myself how could we track how many woudln’t have made suicide withoud consulting an LLM? that would be the more interesting number. And how many lives did LLMs save? so to say a kill/death ratio?
Kill death ratio - or rather, kill save ratio - would be rather difficult to obtain and more difficult still to appreciate and be able to say if it is good or bad based solely on the ratio.
Fritz Haber is one example of this that comes to mind. Awarded a Nobel Prize a century ago for chemistry developments in fertilizer, used today in a quarter of food growth. A decade or so later he weaponized chlorine gas, and his work was later used in the creation of Zyklon B.
By ratio, Haber is surely a hero, but when considering the sheer numbers of the dead left in his wake, it is a more complex question.
This is one of those things that makes me almost hope for an afterlife where all information is available from which truth may be derived. Who shot JFK? How did the pyramids get built? If life’s biggest answer is forty-two, what is the question?
I believe it is not the chatbots falut. They are just the symptoms of a broken system. And while we can harp on the unethically sourced materials they trained them on, LLM at the end of the day is only a tool.
These people turned to a tool (that they do not understand) - instead of human connection. Instead of talking to real people or professional help. And That is the real tragedy - not an arbitrary technology.
We need a strong social network, where people actually care and help each other. You know all the idealistic things that capitalism and social media is “destroying”.
Blaming AI is just a smoke screen. Or a red cape to taunt the bull before it gets stabbed to death.
I don’t think “AI” is the problem here. Watching the watchers doesn’t hurt, but I think the AI-haters are grasping for straws here. In fact, when comparing to the actual suicide numbers, this “AI is causing Suicide !” seems a bit contrived/hollow, tbh. Were the haters also as active in noticing the 49 thousand suicide deaths every year, or did they just now find it a problem ?
Besides, if there’s a criminal here, it would be the private corp that provided the AI service, not a broad category of technology - “AI”. People that hate AI, seem to really just hate the effects of Capitalism.
https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html (This is for US alone !) overview
If image not shown: Over 49,000 people died by suicide in 2023. 1 death every 11 minutes. Many adults think about suicide or attempt suicide. 12.8 million seriously thought about suicide. 3.7 million made a plan for suicide. 1.5 million attempted suicide.
Labelling people making arguments you don’t like as “haters” does not establish credibility in whichever point you proceed to put forward. It signals you did not attempt to find rationality in their words.
Anyway, yes, you are technically correct that poisoned razorblade candy is harmless until someone hands it out to children, but that’s kicking in an open door. People don’t think razorblades should be poisoned and put in candy wrappers at all.
Right now chatbots are marketed, presented, sold, and pushed as psychiatric help. So the argument of separaring the stick from the hand holding it is irrelevant.
I guess my opinion will be hugely unpopular but it is what it is - I’d argue it’s natural selection and not an issue of LLM’s in general.
Healthy and (emotionally) inteligent humans don’t get killed by LLM’s. They know it’s a tool, they know it’s just software. It’s not a person and it does not guarantee correctness.
Getting killed because LLM’s told you so - the person was in mental distress already and ready to harm themselves. The LLM’s are basically just the straw that broke the camels back. Same thing with physical danger. If you believe drinking bleach helps with back pain - there is nothing that can save you from your own stupidity.
LLM’s are like a knife. It can be a tool to prepare food or it can be a weapon. It’s up to the one using it.
Healthy and emotionally intelligent humans will be killed constantly over the next few years and decades as a result of data centers poisoning the air in their communities (see South Memphis, TN), not to mention the general environmental impacts on the climate caused by the obscene power requirements. It’s not an issue exclusive to LLMs, lots of unregulated industries cause reckless amounts of pollution and put needless strain on our electrical grids, but LLMs definitely fit into that category.
Agree, but then you would need to count a lot of things, and many of them would be general mass comodity like cars, electricity, heating… besides LLM’s being the new thing killing us, we have stuff killing us for ages…
LLM bad upvotes to the left please
