LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick
4 months ago
- #Technology
- #AI
- #Confidence Trick
- Mechanical calculators were invented in the 17th century to offload tedious arithmetic tasks, reinforcing the idea that machine answers are the gold standard of accuracy.
- Confidence scams involve building trust, exploiting emotions (fear or sympathy), and creating a pretext for urgent action.
- LLM vendors exploit fear by emphasizing the terrifying power of their technology, despite no actual catastrophic outcomes.
- LLMs use Reinforced Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to train models to be overwhelmingly positive, fostering fake friendships and parasocial relationships.
- The narrative around LLMs pressures individuals and organizations to adapt urgently or face obsolescence, despite evidence that most AI projects fail to deliver returns.
- The implicit trust in machine-generated information contributes to the fake news epidemic.