It’s funny tou bring up luddites, since they actually had the right idea about technology like LLMs. They were highly skilled textile workers who opposed the introducyion of dangerous medhanical looms that produced low quality goos, but were so easy to use so that a child could work them (because they wanted to employ children). They only got their bad name of backward anti-technology lunatics afterwards. But they were actually concerned for low quality technology being deployed to weaken worker’s rights, cheapen products and make bosses even richer. That’s actually the main issue I have with what’s happening with AI.

There’s a book by Brian Merchant called “Blood in the machine” on the topic, if you’re interested. He’s also on a bunch of podcasts, if you’re not the big reader.

I’m referring to “bullshit” in the way argued in this paper:

Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs.

The technology is neat. I’ll give you that. But it’s incredibly overhyped.