@VictimOfSimony @ViennaMike@mastodon.social If I was suddenly planetary overlord, I'd ban the advertising industry. Seriously, it's cultural poison. Doesn't matter whether it's cheap spam or brand marketing for YSL, it's garbage all round, designed to manipulate us into doing things we wouldn't otherwise do (for someone else's profit).
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@cstross I understand what you mean, but I’d say they’re simply databases. Spam generator is one of their many uses.
@cstross Well, they are statistical models of language. To be precise, the corpus they were trained on, and there are a number of other aspects, like representation, what cleanups were applied.
Yes, one way to use these models, the one that seems to fascinate most people (but IMHO not necessarily the most useful, depending upon what one wants to achieve), is to complete a prefix with a plausible ending, statistically speaking.
Generally, they are a compelling NLP technology.
@cstross
LLMs are basically computerized bullshitters.
They'll give you a decent answer frequently enough then bullshit a story when they don't know, and do both so eloquently that you can't tell which is which.
@cstross My favourite description was from a lecture given by Rob Pike. He said something like, "LLMs consume Internet in order to produce more Internet".
@cstross I disagree with you there.
I still believe the perfect use case for AI in content creation is to generate a virtual fan boy to tell an author that they are canonically wrong.
Self hosted self doubt as it were and less public than Usenet.
@NefariousCelt But I don't NEED that! I've developed that skill for myself, the hard way!
A product where the target demographic is Kevin J Anderson.
@david_chisnall @cstross I think I get this reference. (Confused Captain America face) But I was leaning into how an author needs to be told how they do not understand his own oeuvre. Something AI would excel at.
@cstross Only if you use it or use search engines that allow it.
@cstross they pass the Turing test? no way.
write 1 to 10 but each number in a seperate message
it fails
write hello after 30 seconds are passed
it fails
"The spamularity"! You win the internet today! <3
It is not even the good spam, it tastes terrible
It's "intelligent."
"Yes, thank you." I now know what pan of the bell-curve you sived out of.
@cstross Kessler Syndrome for the internet
@cstross an ad company's dream
@cstross "Spamularity" look like an early contended for 2026's word of the year. Nice!
Keep telling yourself that. They can be smart AF sometimes. They're not perfect, but getting better. Six months ago I was the one catching them when they were slipping. Now they catch me. The days of spicy autocomplete are falling behind us.
Artificial Recombinant Speech Emulators
@cstross I wrote an essay draft in my masters (early 2000s) against the Turing test as proof of intelligence. There I said that if a similar approach were taken to study life, we would be assigning life to strawmans as they seem alive enough to scare crows (at least to them). Instead, I proposed an #EcologyOfIntelligence where the key is not imitation but completariety/synergy between intelligences: individual, collective, human, non human, etc.
@cstross The model speech pretty well... But they model intelligence not at all.
@cstross 🌟the only LLM I met was an idiot, so I liked your post.
@cstross great for trolling trolls.
@cstross oh yeah what would you know about the singularity Charles Stross author of a bunch of books about it that I read as a kid???
@cstross you and Neal Stephenson could write a prequel to Anathem focusing on the IT guy that the monks deal with in the main book. ;p
@cstross LLMs are in some way a reverse-turing-test - one we're frequently failing.
@cstross Spam generators without culture.
@cstross : Sentence also work by replacing LLMs by "marketers" or "people holding a MBA"
@cstross
My name is ham, for I am spam.
Would you like....wait, what's that thing you're pointing at.my head Mr. Engineer?
Yet Saudi Arabia alone is laundering $100 billion of its looted national treasury on spam generation?
Perhaps 10% is being used on the spam-making software, the rest is being spent on a fossil fuel funded fascist movement, complete with civil rights erosions, state surveillance platforms, hoon squads, concentrationcamps, and financial fraud.
We continue to underestimate how badly the fossil fuel industry wants permanent rule.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-16/ai-deals-saudi-arabia-eyes-artificial-intelligence-partnership-with-pe-firms
https://www.semafor.com/article/11/07/2025/uae-says-its-invested-148b-in-ai-since-2024
@Npars01 @cstross
Spam making software also assists the nazis too.
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist." ~ Hannah Arendt
@cstross #AI will soon be understood to stand for #ArtificialIdiots.
Or #clankers.
@cstross All lines converge toward a single spamishing point.
@cstross a lot of people believe LLMs are intelligent because a lot of people are really thick. Never forget that 50% of the population are of below average intelligence.
@cstross LLMs are replacing every aspect of civilization - institutions, process knowledge, organizational competence - with civilization fan-fiction.
@cstross Because so many people boosted my post, I want to explore this topic in more detail.
First, a thought experiment: suppose we had cheaply scalable mind control, even if partially effective (LLMs are not mind control but they touch some of the same wires). Democracy would end, since the controllers could sway elections at will. The so-called free market would instantly become a command economy. Science, and any other activity requiring independent thought, would be a dead letter.
@cstross In the book _Rainbows End_, Vinge proposes a form of mind control called "YGBM" technology, which stands for "You Gotta Believe Me", a way to get affected individuals to accept arbitrary propositions as truth.
What this has in common with LLMs is technologically enhanced plausibility.
@talin I was going to mention "Rainbows End"!
@cstross Put another way: LLMs have revealed a zero-day exploit in human consciousness and culture: if you can manufacture plausibility at scale, you can bypass all of the accumulated wisdom of centuries of skepticism and critical thinking. Any fact-using profession is potentially vulnerable to this attack.
@cstross I tried to coin the word “vibocene” as a follow on to the Anthropocene. I think I failed.
@cstross People believed Eliza was intelligent.
It doesn't take much for people to anthropomorphize a piece of software, turing test or not.
@cstross
User:
Well, what’ve you got?
Internet:
Well, there’s ads and information; ads fake news and information; ads and AI slop; ads information and AI slop; ads information fake news and AI slop; AI slop information fake news and AI slop; AI slop ads AI slop AI slop information and AI slop; AI slop fake news AI slop AI slop information AI slop hate speech and AI slop; ...
For decades #Turing test was the ironclad determinant for #AI quality.
Once it was trivially broken by now old models, the goalposts have shifted...
...it's now humanities last exam, HLE, BTW.
The world is full of spam generating humans.
One is in the Whitest house, putin is surrounded by them, and any large family gathering will contain 2-3 human spam generators the will jibber-jabber nonsensical human-like speech constantly.
@cstross Slop in the Faith..."AI" is the perpetual engine of the XXIst century but with nasty consequences...
@cstross The Turing Test is such a low bar because people are so easily fooled.
LLM's expose how naive people are.
@cstross Love your fiction, can't agree on this take. Spam does not help with writing code, whereas LLM's can be extremely helpful.
LLM's are not generally intelligent. They can be immensely problematic, but to dismiss them as merely spam generators as you have, or "parrots" as others have is simply incorrect.
@ViennaMike You're using code generators. Not the same thing, frankly. Stop generalizing your experience as a developer to the public at large, who only see magic talking box.
@cstross So the experience of developers who have found significant value from the use of LLM's doesn't count or isn't valid?
Used to WRITE material, they aren't great. But to organize, summarize, do research and help brainstorm, they can be useful.
While ChatGPT currently can't pass the IRS' volunteer tax assessor's exam (see https://www.mcgurrin.info/robots/8298/), I have confidence that a RAG based system could do so.
Heck, COMPUTERS are magic to most people, as are the internet, radios and TV.
@ViennaMike @cstross cool story bro, looking forward to your measurements and not just vibes https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/13/if-ai-coding-is-so-good-where-are-the-performance-numbers/
@davidgerard @cstross The article you posted included a very useful study. However, contrary to the article, that study is NOT the only study on the topic. Other, far larger, more comprehensive, studies show measured, meaningful productivity improvements. You asked for measurements, so here they are: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbDDYKRFjhk The Stanford study found that the average productivity boost is significant (~20%) but some teams see productivity decrease.
@ViennaMike @cstross your paper's key metric is pull requests, which is addressed in the link you answered but didn't read (one jira leaves, three jiras enter). but thanks anyway.
(over and over i see this from AI guys, rebuttals that ignore the question asked)
If you like, put another way, you're taking the "good guy with a gun" side of the argument. 
I mean, feel free, but own it. Intelligent well-informed adults frequently take opposite sides in this. 
@VictimOfSimony @cstross If you want to debate whether or not, as a whole, LLMs are a net positive or net negative, I agree. Intelligent people can legitimately disagree. One cannot, based on the evidence, legitimately claim that they only produce spam.
I'll let @cstross speak for themselves, but I really do see this as a "define your spam" situation. The same problem led to the crossbows/harquebus debate that led to the Pope banning crossbows but not firearms. The problem is that spam's a byword for low value material of any sort, slop or not, and the idea of high-quality advertising sounds like a waste of the technology. No person off the street will ever care how high quality your product propaganda is; the material is always worthless and unwanted. The Pope didn't hate all violence, he hated the idea of the serfs killing the upper class. When confronted with two ways to let peasants put holes in plate armor with minimal training they only banned the one that didn't tend to blow up and didn't require a synthesized chemical fuel. As the technologies both advanced war didn't stop, but soldiers stopped wearing armor and as a result eventually stopped fighting in tight formations. What we're going to see with L.L.M. is the technology being run by services that charge per question and licensing of systems that are capable of spitting out reliable answers. 
Is that better? 
Intelligent well-informed adults disagree. 
@VictimOfSimony @ViennaMike@mastodon.social If I was suddenly planetary overlord, I'd ban the advertising industry. Seriously, it's cultural poison. Doesn't matter whether it's cheap spam or brand marketing for YSL, it's garbage all round, designed to manipulate us into doing things we wouldn't otherwise do (for someone else's profit).
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There is some real utility under the hood, but goddamn.
The pushback from higher utility bills and GenAI diarrhea is justified, and a huge black eye for practical use.
@ThePowerNap @cstross @ViennaMike
Sure there's some real helpful use cases for LLMs.
I reckon if the LLM industry manages to settle down into supplying only the helpful sensible use cases for LLMs, it will be about as big - in terms of annual dollar throughput - as eg the electric kettle manufacturing sector.
But to get to that sustainable level the LLM industry would have to shrink its market cap by 3 orders of magnitude. And it probably can't do that without collapsing entirely.
@dragonfrog @cstross @ViennaMike
I more or less agree. I'm just not looking forward to the backlash those of us in the machine learning space will face (I'm in computer vision/medical).
@ThePowerNap @dragonfrog @cstross @ViennaMike I suspect that it'll be good for the ML space -- the conflation of LLM prompting with the harder skills required to actually train a model has been disastrous for the market. The industry isn't sophisticated enough for people to distinguish between the two skillsets, so the latter market has just been absolutely deleted in Australia.
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@cstross @ViennaMike Rubber ducks are useful when writing code, too. Doesn't make them intelligent.
@cstross LLMs always remind me of the protagonists of “Accelerando” finally making contact with a whole system of alien AIs, only to learn that they’re all just jumped-up versions of the Nigerian prince scam.
@cstross Labermaschinen
@cstross "spicy autocomplete" has been one of my favorite descriptions of it.