You know that things can both harm and benefit you, right? That’s the whole idea behind the idiom “the pros outweigh the cons”.
If someone is making an argument about the cons of a thing, it’s insane to expect them to just list of a bunch of unrelated pros, and likewise it’s an unreasonable assumption to believe from that, that they don’t believe in the existence of any pros.
I think that LLMs cause significant harm, and we don’t have any harm mitigation in place to protect us. In light of the serious potential for widespread harm, the pros (of which there are some) dont really matter until we make serious progress in reducing the potential for harm.
I shouldn’t need this degree of nuance. People shouldn’t need to get warnings in the form of a short novel full of couched language. I’m not the only person in this conversation, the proponents are already presenting the pros. And people should be able to understand that.
When people were fighting against leaded gasoline, they shouldn’t need to “yes, it makes cars more fuel efficient and prevents potentially damaging engine knock, thereby reducing average maintenance costs” every time they speak about the harms. It is unreasonable to say that they were harming discourse by not acknowledging the benefits every time they cautioned against it’s use.
I don’t believe that you’re making a genuine argument, I believe you’re trying to stifle criticism by shifting the responsibility for nuance from it’s rightful place in the hands of the people selling and supporting a product with the potential for harm, onto the critics.
porksnort@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
I have to agree here. Injecting ‘nuance’ is an easy way to derail a discussion so that the obvious harms of a thing get obscured. The discussion devolves into emotional reactions to some aspect of the ‘nuance’ and the original point is lost. And nothing changes, which suits the powers that be just fine.
Nuance is a powerful tool for maintaining the status quo by disrupting the conversation. Leave the nuance to the academics.
Effective messaging campaigns require message discipline and dead simple provocative points repeated endlessly for a generation or two to effect change, usually.