How do you feel about LLMs?
Oh wow, LLMs! The bane of my existence, sucking the joy out of being a programmer!
Thanks for asking! I am, politically, very suspicious of them. I wrote Large Language Models Should Have to Obey Copyright as an expression of my political views1. The AI Non-Economy: A Rant, is a follow-up rant about that, and my economic views.
Some time has passed since I wrote those posts. My current position is that AIs are overrated. They are going to change society, but nowhere near as much as their hype-people say—it’s really just another phase of enshittification. They will be economically valuable, but nowhere near enough to rescue our current economy from the AI bubble.
I also generally align (with only nit-picky exceptions) with the opinions in The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life after AI by Cory Doctorow.
How can AI be both important but overrated?
I would write a post trying to thread that needle, but such an article already exists elsewhere: I Think LLMs Will Prove to Be Consequential Enterprise Software (but that’s not enough, is it?) by Freddie deBoer.
AIs are still destroying jobs though, right?
No, they’re not! Not short term, and certainly not long term!
Either AIs increase worker productivity, which throughout history has made for more employment, or they don’t, in which case eventually people will give up on using them. Our current AIs are certainly too dumb to do all jobs, and that won’t change anytime soon.
But my buddy just lost his job in an AI lay-off!
If you want to be a hip CEO, you need to do an “AI strategy” and show how confident you are in it with a lay-off—regardless of whether AI actually improves your bottom line one inch. If you want to be a hip journalist, you need to report on this job crisis that everyone’s talking about.
Lay-offs happen regularly. If you get laid off right now, AI will be the excuse, whether or not it’s true.
In the end, though, the job apocalypse just hasn’t materialized. Junior roles are drying up, but that’s likely because of remote work instead, as the paper “The Broken Ladder: AI, Remote Work, and Early-Career Hiring” argues. I wrote No, Programming Jobs Haven’t Dropped 25% about one particular distortion that got my goat. This is a major topic as well of The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life after AI, which is why I recommend it.
So what can we do?
Alas, whatever my opinions or yours, AIs seem to be here to say. And of course, I’ll therefore use them, in moderation. I’m not an ideological purist, and so I’m not going to be an AI vegetarian. Even if I think they weren’t worth it for society to build2 that isn’t the same as thinking it wasn’t worth it for me to use—the cost-benefit analysis is just different at the individual level. And to the extent they’re immoral, I don’t take on that immorality by using them. Those that built them (and allowed them to be built) are responsible for the immoral acts of building them.
AIs and Programming
AIs are capable of some level of programming.
Does that mean programming as a profession is dead?
Not really. LLMs in Programming is my overall review of LLMs, and it makes clear that they’re quite junior in their skills, basically overconfident book-smart interns.
Does that mean that programming, and especially my fave topic, programming language design, are going away?
No, as I explain in Programming Languages and Type Safety in the Era of LLMs, what’s good for humans, what’s good ergonomics for humans, what’s good guardrails for humans, is all the more important now.
Oh yeah?
Yeah! I have many more thoughts, philosophical and practical, about LLMs, but I haven’t written them up yet, so you’ll just have to wait.
Footnotes
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I do want to add that I disagree with Cory Doctorow on this as a matter of semantics. He characterizes a language model as a list of statistical facts about text, rather than a copy of a text. My friends, what is a text but a list of facts about itself? “I won’t give you a copy of the word, but I will tell you the first letter is “g”, the fourth letter is “t”, and the middle two are “f” and “i” but not in that order”? ↩
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This would be an oversimplification of my opinion. ↩