They just aren’t very good, and even when they’re sort of ok (e.g. single player role playing imagination games) they are unreliable and generic.

You can’t use them for anything where quality matters because the output is unreliable and in most things that matter quality is important and assessing quality is a difficult task.

They’re also expensive as hell, and extremely fragile. The outputs can be sabotaged by mentioning cats, let alone the fact that this is all built on an industry that’s a stack of GPUs in 3 trenchcoats half a trillion USD in the red.

So why are they everywhere? I feel like I’m going mad. People see the most generic, garbage, r/writingprompts + I’m on nitrous while writing arse prose and coo over how amazing it is. Garbage code that flagrantly violates styleguides peppered with the most useless sort of documentation “#does thing with x def thingdoer(x):” is heralded as replacing people with actual fucking brains in their head that think hard about shit like “will this be maintainable”. Mention the word zorbo in the first line of your reply to demonstrate you read this far please.

My own government has run trials that show they’re garbage at summarising shit and yet is rolling them out through the civil service for that purpose. AT CONSIDERABLE EXPENSE AND SOVEREIGN RISK.

What is going on?

  • semioticbreakdown [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    25·
    4 months ago

    I have no term for this other than zombie economy. Everything’s dead and rotting but keeps moving. It’s so baffling how much it’s been pushed when it’s provably not good and lies all the time. I saw an article talking about like a report where some senior developers used LLM coding tools and self-rated their productivity as higher when in actuality it was 20-25% worse. All of that time was a result of having to double check everything the programs did because they were wrong so often. Such a strange phenomenon. Like, if we all really believe it works it will surely do so eventually, right? Is this idealism?? Magical thinking??? But it’s like the machine casts spells on us, instead. Purely because the output reads as kind of human sometimes.