• Noxy@pawb.social
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    2 days ago

    If I found out I’m paying thousands of dollars in tuition just for my instructors to be learning the very subject matter they’re teaching from LLMs I would be so upset that I might drop out and seek refunds.

    I expect better from a university instructor.

    • Beej Jorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 days ago

      Well, it’s hardly the only place I learn things. But if you can verify a fact that an LLM gives you, it’s still a fact.

      Another fact: there’s a pile of human shit out there, too. So you get the truth by hook or by crook.

      • Noxy@pawb.social
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        2 days ago

        if I can verify a fact an LLM gave me I’m still:

        1. wasting my time needing to verify something from an inherently and unfixably untrustworthy source
        2. contributing to and encouraging the environmental destruction that LLMs cause
        3. reinforcing to big tech that LLMs are worthwhile
        4. increasing my mental dependence on LLMs

        Sure, humans still lie and manipulate and fuck up all the time. That doesn’t excuse or explain the many flaws of LLMs.

        • Beej Jorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org
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          2 days ago

          Look, if I had a magic button that eliminated LLMs from the planet, I’d have already pressed it. About the best I can do is keep losing Anthropic money with every prompt I give. Hopefully they crash out and we can all run local models once RAM gets cheap enough to buy.

          But the fact is that LLMs are actually useful for getting to accurate answers more quickly than slogging through SEO crap, much of which was written by LLMs anyway.