This current iteration of "AI", by which I mean LLMs, seems only good at enabling generative spam and disinformation.
I think regulations are exactly what's required.
I think regulations are exactly what's required.
And you want to wield that awesome power for some trivial problem like spam on the Internet? This is exactly the kind of overreach the founding fathers intended to prevent.
The government could stop all theft if people couldn't leave their homes except with police escort. Obviously this is a ludicrous idea. Ergo we have collectively (and correctly) decided that tolerating some level of bad actors is better than melting away all freedom.
LLMs are actively harmful to society and in a way that individuals cannot combat, and spam/fraud is merely the obvious way.
That seems overly pessimistic. They're pretty good at generating summaries of text, simple machine translation, generating alternative prose, turning unstructured text into table-like data, providing a text interface over a corpus of facts, and probably a bunch of things I'm not thinking of.
They're not, though. For these tasks they are mediocre at best.
For generating alternative prose, what I mean is using a prompt like: given this sentence/paragraph give me 3 alternatives that capture a particular mood/theme/style. Doing that is a great way to try to rewrite flat or repetitive prose or to shake up a bit of writer's block. It's excellent for turning some strung together facts into an email that I can quickly edit into my own voice a bit then send. You may not find that valuable, but I assure you that other people do.
Summaries also work pretty well in my experience and for my purposes. I don't need 100% perfection for every big document I come across sometimes I need a paragraph that hits the main idea(s) It's good enough for that and why wouldn't a text prediction tool be good at that?
This doesn't seem to make sense. Although it uses the word "disinformation", so perhaps an LLM wrote it.
LLMs aren't intelligent and the hallucinations problem is fundamental to the technology, and cannot be solved.
Therefore definitionally an LLM will never be fully trustworthy.
But it's great at generating plausible-sounding stuff, which makes it great for propaganda and disinformation.
Saying LLMs are not useful for anything but generating spam is objectively wrong, as to disqualify your commenta from serious discussion about the topic.
There are many issues with GenAI that are worth discussing, saying they are generally useless is not the way.
That you said it was only good for those things. You changed it in this message, as I'm sure you're aware.