LLM Mindset Myth # 3, Part 2 - AI is a REPLACEMENT

Continued from yesterday…

Because as noted previously, “writer” is not simply a vocational identifier for me - it’s a part of how I understand who and what I AM. So instead of hearing “Hey - there’s a robot that can do some of what you do,” and going “Huh. Interesting. I’d be interested to see how.” I get immediately so defensive that what I HEAR is “Hey, loser, this machine is here to DISPLACE and ERADICATE you.” The former is something rational-ish “Welp, my line of work just got a little tougher, I guess,” whereas the latter is existential, is closer to the triggered adolescent insecurities that writhe inside all our brains: “I am futile and dumb and gross and everyone is right to hate me.” So I slam the door of my mind and crank my old punk records and rock back and forth panic-eating a tube of raw cookie dough.

So isn't it possible, maybe even likely, that at least SOME portion of the alarmist rhetoric around LLMs is rooted in this kind of existential panic?

The chorus of dystopian voices breathlessly warning us all that Skynet is seconds away from sentience and will be launching the nukes to eradicate us later today may mean well (or they may, some of them, stand to profit from stoking our fear.) In either case, it’s worth pausing to consider the motivations of any such dystopian voice (“Are they weaponizing my AI fears to sell me something?”) and to “check the math” of their thinking (“Are they overestimating, intentionally or not, the capabilities of AI in terms of what it can do and deliver?”) Pushing any such rhetoric and thinking through the twin sieves of What’s In It For Them? and Are They Just Plain Wrong? Can spare us all a lot of needless Chicken Little-ing.

It’s also instructive and helpful to note where doomsayers are right, which they sometimes are.

Alarmists are right, for instance, in cautioning about the real perils of permitting artificial intelligence into too many areas of our command and control systems, our communications, etc.

But the broader notion that Large Language Models are some kind of invasive species with A) some inborn ability to replicate or improve upon human expressive capacities, which they do not, and B) that this - again, nonexistent - replication capacity will grow more sophisticated at a galloping, exponential rate, and will take over entirely. At the core of such alarmist rhetoric are a pair of great whopping fallacies - A) the Fallacy of Grade Inflation, and B) the Fallacy of Misdiagnosis.

The Fallacy of Grade Inflation holds that if something is newish and seems pretty great, we’ll wrongly imbue with a swelling list of capabilities it does not have; the Fallacy of Misdiagnosis is rooted in our tendency, where our emotions run high, to misunderstand the nature and implications of a given problem.

Succumbing to these fallacies represents a fundamental failure to comprehend what AI is, in terms of its capability, and its purpose, which is to augment and accelerate human activity. LLMs are not generative in any way that we would recognize; simply put, they do not create. Broadly speaking, AI is here to help, not to overtake or displace - it is not competent enough to do so, and that’s not what it was born to do.