Yes, I’m still struggling with the implications and ethics of LLM use.
Small LLM’s you can run at home or offline, on your machine, in your browser, or on your phone feel intuitively less evil. But, they’re just small distillation spawn from a much larger LLM – built from hoovering an internet of data, all social media sites, literally destroying old books for even more data, building hundreds of data centers, consuming power and water, churning out waste and noise. If I can’t justify using a big AI company services, shouldn’t I also refrain from using their derivatives as well?
I am still using frontier AI, just not paying for it in the normal sense of sending them money. But, I’m under no illusions that any time I’m using their services, I’m helping shovel content into their machines and train SkyNet. Since small models can be run entirely offline, they don’t have the same “you’re the content” problems.
One of my goals is to bootstrap my way out of using these things. I’m still very much a Linux newb and still working on my Python skills and what little programming abilities I have are all self-taught. StackOverflow used to be a reasonably reliable source for finding discussions on how to overcome a given technical problem, but now it’s a ghost town. If I can’t turn to something like StackOverflow… the options these days are asking on Mastodon and hoping a mutual replies, asking / searching on Reddit and hoping the answer isn’t a ‘bot, or just asking a ‘bot directly.
It’s still the same problem – and I honestly can’t tell if I’m trying to rationalize my LLM use or if there are any legitimate uses. Certainly OCR and interpreting MRI and other radiological reports to help save lives are reasonable and beneficial uses. I guess part of my struggle is that I literally cannot avoid interacting with stupid AI when they’re everywhere, in everything, ads in media and billboards, spam emails/texts, website chatbots, preliminary phone / chat bot screenings, and even shoved into the products I’ve owned for a while.1 If I’m already forced to interact with an LLM to (perhaps) benefit other people / companies, why shouldn’t I feel comfortable using them to (a) filter out their AI garbage (b) assist me with minor tasks?
Possibly unrelated, both of my kiddos are facing AI nonsense in school. The eldest receives constant warnings at university about what uses are permitted / not permitted – and then the university has students submit their work through an AI port to determine whether the students are using AI. 2 The younger one has teachers saying their work will be graded by AI – in junior high?!
I refuse to believe these students’ work aren’t being used to train the next generation of AI education software.
I know I’m rambling. I recently sent a picture of a basket of baby otters to some family members – who thought it was probably AI. I had seen it on Mastodon and based on the context, I felt it was likely real – but I had to question it. Performing an exact match image search didn’t work – since the same image has been spammed across the internet in the AI era of post-2023. I narrowed the search to only those results prior to 2020 and was able to locate a copy of the image from roughly 11 years ago.34 This made me think – since current Google searches have become complete AI slop / summary garbage, why not narrow all internet searches to only those results prior to 2023?
I think where I’m leaning on this entire ethical morass is … this stupid AI nonsense is everywhere around me, my own work and thoughts are going to be fed into the giant provider AI machines willingly5 , begrudgingly6 , or unwillingly,7 and I don’t have a big problem using similar technology to build systems to filter out AI garbage and teach me further skills.
Project Jarvis- Building a Jarvis-inspired voice activated LLM powered virtual assistant
- Building a Home PC Lab
- Secret Agent Man
- Rambling again
- Little Desk Voice Assistant
- I’m crowded, roll over…
- Navel Gazing
- There’s an app that works with my bluetooth earbuds that suddenly offered me the ability to act as a translator?! Get out of here! [↩]
- Barf. [↩]
- It was mirror flipped in those earlier versions, for some reason. [↩]
- An image from 11 years ago doesn’t mean it wasn’t actually fake, just that I’m reasonably sure it wasn’t generated by AI. [↩]
- By clicking through EULA’s [↩]
- Technically, anyone can record in public and by going out in public I’m consenting to the possibility my actions and likeness will be fed into the giant data machine. Even so, still Flock + Palantir + Meta/Google/etc is about as offensive as big brother / big data gets [↩]
- Assuming all human knowledge and the entire of the internet is fed into LLM’s, they’ve digested the thousands of blog and social media posts I’ve created. robots.txt. What a joke. [↩]