this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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You'd hope, and yet I've had people on Lemmy give me shit for being overtly anti-llm
I hate that it’s being shoved into anything and everything right now, but saying you’re “overtly anti-llm” seems a bit over dramatic to me. LLMs are a tool like anything else. Used properly and in the right situation, they can be very helpful.
I'm overtly anti-llm. I don't think it's dramatic at all to be so.
Enough has come out about how much power and water datacenters used to train and run it consume, people being driven insane by it, investors hoping to displace jobs with it, how over reliance on it diminishes your mental faculties, people from minors to adults using it to create deepfake porn of minors (literally it's on lemmy rn https://lemmy.ml/post/32581009), its use in overt misinformation (particularly from our modern warzones and disaster areas), overt theft of writing and artistry to train these things, and last but not least: limitless spam.
I'm affected by most of those things indirectly, but the spam affects me daily. Can't search for something on the net anymore without being served f-tier LLM-produced garbage.
So what are the good parts? Doesn't seem like they outweigh these bad parts, whatever they are.
I don't see a material difference vs the f-tier human-produced garbage we had before. Garbage content will always exist, which is why it's important to learn to how to filter it.
This is true of LLMs as well: they can and do produce garbage, but they can and are useful alternatives to existing tech. I don't use them exclusively, but as an alternative when traditional search or whatever isn't working, they're quite useful. They provide rough summaries about things that I can usually easily verify, and they produce a bunch of key words that can help refine my future searches. I use them a handful of times each week and spend more time using traditional search and reading full articles, but I do find LLMs to be a useful tool in my toolbox.
I also am frustrated by energy use, but it's one of those things that will get better over time as the LLM market matures from a gold rush into established businesses that need to actually make money. The same happens w/ pretty much every new thing in tech, there's a ton of waste until the product finds its legs and then becomes a lot more efficient.