Pylimitics

Ed Zitron’s latest overly long missive about the AI industry and its misdeeds includes this: “LLMs Are Built To Help Grifters and Imbeciles Do Impressions Of Work.” I’m sure it gets a lot of agreement. I mean, look how much grift and scamming surrounds LLMs, vendors, and many users.

But grifting existed for a looong time before anybody came up with large language models. It’s probably a good candidate for the “oldest profession” among humans. My inbox was full of spam for years before LLMs were around to generate it, which now they do.

I’m not convinced, either, that LLMs were built to help grifters. I think they were originally built out of sheer enthusiasm for a software technique that worked beyond all expectations. It was more “hey look at this” than “I can use this to cheat.” That said, many new technologies are pretty quickly adopted by grifters and imbeciles. Email certainly was, along with a sizable proportion of the world-wide web. Text messaging is up there, too.

But a curious aspect of the current technology fad is that grifters not only adopted the new gadget, but somehow managed to wind up leading the major vendors. Like, all the major vendors, with the possible exception of Google, which might not even qualify as a major AI vendor at this point. Also the people running Google…er, “alphabet”…may be just as scammy as the OpenAI and Anthropic gangs; I just don’t really know.

I think that’s a change from what’s happened in the past. Mailing list software, web servers, and even spreadsheets, for gods sake, are used by grifters, but the grifters don’t end up leading those sectors. These folks, and here I mean Amodei, Altman, Musk, and Zuckerberg, are pretty clearly untrustworthy, lying scam artists. And yet…they’re in charge of all the major LLMs.

Maybe it’s just random, made more likely by the poor way tech firms are run generally, by the investment level panic about the tech growth gravy train ending, and by the weird juxtaposition of sociopolitical, economic, and environmental factors and trends right now. But there’s still something puzzling about it. It’s like a mobbed-up lunkhead born into wealth fell into place as the US president or something…oh.

We live in strange times.