this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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I think you're missing the point. The issue with anthropomorphic terms is in that it reinforces an incorrect understanding of a capability, or rather, a lack thereof.
This is entirely intentional. That's why it's called "agent", "prompt", "skill", "hallucinate", "lie", "harness".
For people who understand how transformer based LLMs work, these terms are fine. But, most people don't. Heck, most developers don't.
An LLM cannot hallucinate for the same reason it cannot lie, or for that matter reason. Skills are just pre-appended prompts, and prompts are just a series of tokens that set up a parrot to give you the next likely word, and an agent is just giving that parrot a loaded gun, and harnesses is trying to vacate the room in case the parrot decides to shoot.
People who don't understand the underlying mechanisms, are then misled by the existing connotations of these words. They hear "hallucinate", and think that the rest of the time "it works without that kink". It's insane how it normalised shaking a magic 8 ball, and referring to one of the answers as "it hallucinated". And as for lying, one can only do so with an understanding of truth and reality. LLMs don't have this mechanism. Skills makes it sound like you're imbuing a capability, while it is exactly just a template input for the prompt. I could go on.
The number of dangerous uses. And I mean this in the sense of people dying, or other similar negative consequences. All stem from a public misunderstanding that LLMs can produce correct answers to questions. It cannot. That it sometimes does, is by coincidence. People have died as a result. It would be nice if the language we use can help educate the limitations of their capabilities, rather than serve as a fucking sales pitch.
Feed a picture of a mushroom to an LLM, but don't trust it to decide whether to eat it, but maybe use the suggested name to look up the mushroom in a book about it. Just make sure the book was written before 2022, because fuckwit editors have already used LLMs to generate images for books about mushrooms...