I feel like in a few years we will look back on this whole era and realise that our politicians and business leaders fell for a not so elaborate scam. LLM usage will be severely curtailed because of the scammy stank on them and they will slowly migrate back into the niches they should have been confined to in the first place.
Rightly or wrongly people got scared off widespread nuclear after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, LLMs will be much the same. The damage they have done to economies will take decades to resolve and it will be interesting to see if the US public can muster the unity and wherewithal to hold the oligarchs, kleptocrats and their enablers responsible.
Even more interesting if some laws can get put in place to limit the powers of the executive and or introduce some safeguards with teeth to prevent this sort of catastrophe again.
Imagine if worldwide we treated the criminals with power and money like criminals.
I fear we will have a generational loss of intellectual from people who have rapidly learned to farm all their higher cognition off to the liar box, and then got excited and cheered about the liar box getting better at lying. But hopefully we can move past this.
Of course the other scenario is that China waits until the US economy is so intrinsically linked to LLMs that there is no extrication, then they start pulling investment. I guarantee you the Chinese government will remain in control of their population longer than the US government controls theirs once an economic freefall kicks off towards a recession that makes the great depression look like a blip in the accounts books.
It’s too late for that scenario. LLMs are already widespread on millions of computers.
On my old 4060 Ti 16GB I can run Qwen3.8:14b and that’s actually good enough for loads and loads of things. It’s actually overkill for a lot of stuff too which is why tiny models are all the rage right now (e.g. 0.8b models).
Let’s say the government banned LLMs. Are they really going to want to halt pharmaceutical and biomedical research like that? Are they going to start inspecting/requiring everyone’s computers be scanned regularly for AI models?
No. It’s unrealistic to think they can do anything at all to stop AI. If we ban it in the US, the world will just use AI services offered from other countries and then the US won’t be able to compete because those countries will become vastly more productive.
As much as everyone on Lemmy believes all AI output is “slop”, it really does do useful stuff! It’s just most of the useful stuff doesn’t make the news. It’s boring things like checking if an uploaded image is NSFW or if an uploaded document has everything it’s supposed to have or follows the correct format.
AI/LLMs are also checking the grammar of basically everything that gets published. Anyone who’s not using AI for that is an idiot. It’s just way too fucking good at spotting grammatical errors, incorrect word use (often innocent typos that normal grammar checking tools miss), and similar problems.
There’s fucktons of super useful, good ways to use AI. We’d be stupid to just ban it and pretend it isn’t good for a lot of things.
We can regulate its use but that’s not really “regulating AI” as much as it is “regulating capitalism” or “regulating people”. Because the AI isn’t just going out on its own to spam misinformation or mislead consumers with generated product photos. Someone told it to do those things.
What we need isn’t “AI regulation” is regular regulation that prevents companies from behaving badly.
I feel like in a few years we will look back on this whole era and realise that our politicians and business leaders fell for a not so elaborate scam. LLM usage will be severely curtailed because of the scammy stank on them and they will slowly migrate back into the niches they should have been confined to in the first place.
Rightly or wrongly people got scared off widespread nuclear after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, LLMs will be much the same. The damage they have done to economies will take decades to resolve and it will be interesting to see if the US public can muster the unity and wherewithal to hold the oligarchs, kleptocrats and their enablers responsible.
Even more interesting if some laws can get put in place to limit the powers of the executive and or introduce some safeguards with teeth to prevent this sort of catastrophe again.
Imagine if worldwide we treated the criminals with power and money like criminals.
I fear we will have a generational loss of intellectual from people who have rapidly learned to farm all their higher cognition off to the liar box, and then got excited and cheered about the liar box getting better at lying. But hopefully we can move past this.
Of course the other scenario is that China waits until the US economy is so intrinsically linked to LLMs that there is no extrication, then they start pulling investment. I guarantee you the Chinese government will remain in control of their population longer than the US government controls theirs once an economic freefall kicks off towards a recession that makes the great depression look like a blip in the accounts books.
It’s too late for that scenario. LLMs are already widespread on millions of computers.
On my old 4060 Ti 16GB I can run Qwen3.8:14b and that’s actually good enough for loads and loads of things. It’s actually overkill for a lot of stuff too which is why tiny models are all the rage right now (e.g. 0.8b models).
Let’s say the government banned LLMs. Are they really going to want to halt pharmaceutical and biomedical research like that? Are they going to start inspecting/requiring everyone’s computers be scanned regularly for AI models?
No. It’s unrealistic to think they can do anything at all to stop AI. If we ban it in the US, the world will just use AI services offered from other countries and then the US won’t be able to compete because those countries will become vastly more productive.
As much as everyone on Lemmy believes all AI output is “slop”, it really does do useful stuff! It’s just most of the useful stuff doesn’t make the news. It’s boring things like checking if an uploaded image is NSFW or if an uploaded document has everything it’s supposed to have or follows the correct format.
AI/LLMs are also checking the grammar of basically everything that gets published. Anyone who’s not using AI for that is an idiot. It’s just way too fucking good at spotting grammatical errors, incorrect word use (often innocent typos that normal grammar checking tools miss), and similar problems.
There’s fucktons of super useful, good ways to use AI. We’d be stupid to just ban it and pretend it isn’t good for a lot of things.
We can regulate its use but that’s not really “regulating AI” as much as it is “regulating capitalism” or “regulating people”. Because the AI isn’t just going out on its own to spam misinformation or mislead consumers with generated product photos. Someone told it to do those things.
What we need isn’t “AI regulation” is regular regulation that prevents companies from behaving badly.