Martin Fowler: I Don't Like LLMs
Martin Fowler wrestles with mixed feelings about AI and LLMs: fascination with their productivity potential, fear of their dangers, and a visceral dislike of interacting with them. He finds their grating voice, confident bullshit, and fake remorse off-putting. He compares avoiding LLMs to his life-hack of avoiding people he doesn't trust, and worries about the Silicon Valley brogrammer subculture that shapes them.
I don’t _like_ them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human. They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it.
- serf
>One of my most successful life-hacks is to avoid people I don’t like or don’t trust.
following this advice would have made most of my professional life impossible, what a luxury it would have been to be able to.
- SillyUsername
Love the totally conflicting statements in that post.
- When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize
- ...my visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretense of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from.
So he's anthropomorphised the LLM as being like a human himself (rather than forcing it to act as a machine via its prompt for example).
Maybe he should have had an AI check his post :D
- droidjj
In some ways I miss the early LLM days before RL and system prompts (I assume this is the difference) made them all sound the same. They would say weird stuff. They got better at being useful and worse at being fun.*
*This sadly also describes me as a 31 year old man.
- marcuskaz
> I’m fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure, designing bio weapons
The attitude that AI is doing things all on its own is so pervasive. These are all set off by human operators, giving them instructions and tools to do whatever it is that are doing. The "AI has a mind of its own" attitude is just wrong.
The fear of bad people using AI to do bad things is very different then AI agent swarms attacking and taking over.
- causal
I have noticed that my interactions with AI tend to raise stress more than lower it. Even when it's doing useful things for me. Have wondered if this is fundamental to the interaction, or a sign of user error, or something else.
- saadn92
LLMs have helped me a ton and have allowed me to replace all my apps that I was paying for. They're internal, so they don't have to be perfect, but man they've saved me money. That's just my experience.
- GuB-42
The difference between working with LLM you don't trust rather than with people you don't trust is that you have no social obligations with LLMs.
If you want to work with untrustworthy people, you not only have to double check everything, which may be tolerable but you may also need to do some social gymnastics, as people usually don't like be told they are full of shit.
LLMs don't mind, you can correct them, kill the conversation and open a new one with a clean context, even insult them if it makes you feel better with no negative consequences.
In fact LLMs love to be corrected, and it is a common trap, as they will happily use your correction as fact and build around it, without pushing back even if you are wrong. So if there is a negative consequence to tell them they are wrong, that's it, LLMs won't hold a grudge against you like people do, but it may trigger more hallucinations.
- Retr0id
I don't like LLMs in terms of "personality" either, and while I frequently find it annoying it's ultimately ok with me because they are not in fact people. Computers frequently do things that annoy me, but I use computers nonetheless.