Its not that it is intrinsically good but that a lot of people consuming things from their own agency has to mean something. You coming in the middle and suggesting you know better than them is strange.
When billions of people watch football, my first instinct is not to decry football as a problem in society. I acknowledge with humility that though I don't enjoy it, there is something to the activity that makes people watch it.
> a lot of people consuming things from their own agency has to mean something.
Agree. And that something could be a positive or a negative thing. And I'm not suggesting I know better than them. I'm suggesting that humans are not perfect machines and our brains are very easy to manipulate.
Because there are plenty of examples of things enjoyed by a lot of people who are, as a whole, bad. And they might not be bad for the individuals who are doing them, they might enjoy them, and find pleasure in them. But that doesn't make them desirable and also doesn't mean we should see them as market opportunities.
Drugs and alcohol are the easy example:
> A new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) highlights that 2.6 million deaths per year were attributable to alcohol consumption, accounting for 4.7% of all deaths, and 0.6 million deaths to psychoactive drug use. [...] The report shows an estimated 400 million people lived with alcohol use disorders globally. Of this, 209 million people lived with alcohol dependence. (https://www.who.int/news/item/25-06-2024-over-3-million-annu...)
Can we agree that 3 million people dying as a result of something is not a good outcome? If the reports were saying that 3 million people a year are dying as a result of LLM chats we'd all be freaking out.
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> my first instinct is not to decry football as a problem in society.
My first instinct is not to decry nothing as a problem, not as a positive. My first instinct is to give ourselves time to figure out which one of the two it is before jumping in head first. Which is definitely not what's happening with LLMs.