Nice balanced perspective there at the end:
"as such [LLM-coded interactive] supplements are not mission-critical to the core of the paper, I again feel that the downside risk of using guided interaction with LLM agents to generate such visualizations is acceptable."
It's a tool. Good for some things but not others and generally not to be trusted.
I don't understand what trust means in this context. Even if I were able to hire Donald Knuth to write all my code, I wouldn't "trust" it to be bug-free, let alone to be the right fit for my needs.
> and generally not to be trusted
There are many AI bulls who adamantly disagree and cite Tao’s statements about LLMs for mathematical proofs as an example of how advanced and autonomous these systems already are
> It’s a tool. Good for some things but not for others and generally not to be trusted.
I agree completely you always need to check the work of LLM agents, but it does strike me as a tiny bit funny to anthropomorphize AI by using ‘trust’ while warning against anthropomorphizing the AI by using unchecked output. ;) Generally speaking, “trust” in AI has been going up very quickly as the models & harnesses improve, and as people figure out effective workflows.
I trust my hammer with nails but not screws… does that mean the hammer should generally not be trusted? The problem with AI is we don’t know the difference between nails and screws. (This may be where my analogy breaks down. :P) But I feel like saying don’t trust it isn’t as helpful as saying something like you should expect to spend more time planning and iterating than before, and you should expect tot spend more time reviewing and checking output than before, and learn how to use skills and context and subagents, and learn to use AI on some non-production low-consequence projects first. Saying ‘generally not to be trusted’ implicitly suggests not using AI, and doesn’t leave the reader with how to use AI. The goal is to build trust by building good workflows and by understanding what works well and what doesn’t, right?