Tom Ritchford
3 min readNov 5, 2023

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What do you see as the endgame for this? it doesn't seem good for most of humanity.

Using AI to generate a large number of posts all over social media will force everyone else to do the same thing, resulting in a more level playing field, except with a much increased firehose of social media, nearly all automated.

Given that these LLMs have cost hundreds of billions of dollars to develop, the developers are going to be looking to make a profit. it means a tiny number of huge companies are going to take a chunk of everyone's profits. LLMs will never be affordable for an regular individual or a small business to build themselves, in just the same way that designing and manufacturing microprocessors is far beyond any small business.

People without money or who are only interested in doing good writing and not at all in advertising will be completely drowned out.

In the end game that LLM developers imagine, our future "creative" work will actually only be as editors. We'll simply tell some LLM what music, book or movie we want, and then give it corrections until we decide it's done.

To me, this is like some horrible dystopic SF novel (in fact, there's a 50-year-old Damon Knight story that's almost exactly this, and it's not intended to be positive.)

That all future creative work will just be an average of all the work we've already done, with a machine doing all the actual work, and a manager directing but not ever actually getting their hands dirty on the material is so terribly sad.

Computers were supposed to save us from drudgery and leave us with time to do art. But in fact, the computer destroyed almost all the "good jobs" for people who weren't technically oriented. '

As an example, for centuries, musical people used to make very respectable livings as arrangers, music copyists, session musicians, but those jobs have almost entirely disappeared in just my lifetime.

I have known not one but two Grammy-winning drummers, drummers I am almost certain whose work you heard, who could sight-read and could play in any genre and had for decades, twenty years' difference between in age between them, both of who left the business for good in the same decade because they were essentially replaced by the drum machine.

Professional writing is another non-STEM job that has already been dramatically degraded in my lifetime, and LLMs plan to eliminate it almost entirely. Oh, sure, a few people would still make a living crafting prompts, but the whole point of AI is that it's much faster and much much cheaper than a person, so most of the money will be gone, and a lot of the rest will go to the AI.

So yes - I see what you're doing as something like automated spam, unfortunately. While no technology is black or white, I see automation and AI as being on the balance very destructive to society as a whole.

Don't get me wrong - AI and automation could have made our lives better, but the people developing it chose otherwise. AIs have simply vacuumed up all of humanity's hard work over centuries to the huge benefit of a tiny number of very rich people (and to some benefit of a small number of affluent entrepreneurs such as yourself), much like industrial capitalism has for over two hundred years.

For well over fifty years during that. time, in some Western countries a fairly large portion of the populace, the "middle class", also shared to a lesser extent in that wealth, to keep them in the game.

But we are getting to the endgame now, and the enshittification process is well under way.

The captains of industry have looted society and the economy to the point that a middle-class family lifestyle that used to be accessible to a single breadwinner with a high school education is now out of reach for two college educated parents working full time, and this happened in just two generations, and somehow people didn't seem to notice.

And AI is just the most recent stage in this multigenerational heist.

(And of course our whole contemporary existence is part of a bigger pyramid scheme yet, where for about a century, humans live far beyond our means and devastate the ecosystem, and then everyone else pays for our excess for all the rest of history. It's pretty impressive, but not in a good way.)

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