LLMs are spam generators.
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LLMs are spam generators. That is all.
They're designed to generate plausibly human-like text well enough to pass a generic Turing Test. That's why people believe they're "intelligent".
But really, all they are is spam generators.
We have hit the spamularity.
@cstross would you have imagined that back when you wrote Accelerando?
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LLMs are spam generators. That is all.
They're designed to generate plausibly human-like text well enough to pass a generic Turing Test. That's why people believe they're "intelligent".
But really, all they are is spam generators.
We have hit the spamularity.
@cstross the Regurgitron
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LLMs are spam generators. That is all.
They're designed to generate plausibly human-like text well enough to pass a generic Turing Test. That's why people believe they're "intelligent".
But really, all they are is spam generators.
We have hit the spamularity.
@cstross My favourite description is from a lecture given by Rob Pike. He said something like, "LLMs consume Internet in order to produce more Internet".
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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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@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).
@cstross @VictimOfSimony it's nice to hear we're not the only ones who've come to that conclusion (sigh)
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@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 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!
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@cstross would you have imagined that back when you wrote Accelerando?
@root42 No, but I coined "the spamularity" in Rule 34, which I wrote in 2008/09.
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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.@n_dimension @cstross "any large family gathering will contain 2-3 human spam generators the will jibber-jabber nonsensical human-like speech constantly." - I'm so glad I'm not the only one with this feeling! :D On the other hand human intelligence was never properly defined. IMO shifting goalposts here indicate that we have an improved, yet still incomplete understanding about how intelligence may be defined, rather than dismissing intelligence because we don't like the looks of it. -
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, goon squads, concentration camps, 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-firmshttps://www.semafor.com/article/11/07/2025/uae-says-its-invested-148b-in-ai-since-2024
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@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).
@cstross @VictimOfSimony also i'm pretty sure from a couple of years of observation that actually, LLM code is spam too
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@cstross @VictimOfSimony also i'm pretty sure from a couple of years of observation that actually, LLM code is spam too
@cstross @VictimOfSimony LLM code's real trick is to induce gambling addiction in its suckers, who will swear it works great just one more prompt bro https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/
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@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.
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@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 @ThePowerNap @cstross @ViennaMike i have occasionally been using an AI tool called Phind. It was basically a “help with coding” tool. It recently rewrote itself completely into a generic AI tool… and then a month later closed.
I cant help but wonder… Is this the start of the great collapse?
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@cstross Kessler Syndrome for the internet
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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.
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@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 The best purpose of a LLM system is to provide a natural language interface to a complex but not mission critical system such as home automation, media libraries and switchboards.
Machine learning on the other hand should lean into seeing without eyes (is a dramatic jump in intensity cancer?)
Both of these cases should be powered through a single IEC C13 socket and not some gW data centre.
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@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.
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@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.
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@MauroV1968
Sì, ma preferisco sempre l'idea che sia la confederazione a prendersi "cura" di noi.
Anzi se anche Francia e Germania volessero spartirci... 🤷
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@markus was meinst du mit „ich bekomme nicht Bescheid“? Wie würdest du denn gerne informiert werden?
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@mhoye please notify me in 2030 so I can laugh at Zuckerberg and those "experts" once more
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@melon what client do you use? WordPress sends the full html! let‘s improve the UI of your platform by reporting it!
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this is also an excellent illustration of the power that consumers have, when wielded collectively
no one wanted the metaverse and no one used it. now it's gone.
we could make a lotta BS go away like this too, if only...
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@mhoye It was so blindingly obvious, even at the time, that this whole metaverse thing was just a figment of Zuckerberg’s imagination and was absolutely not going anywhere. Historians will write books about this incredible silicon valley bandwagon effect. Or is it just fear of missing out? Cult of personality maybe? @bert_hubert
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@iris do what to the what?
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@mhoye "On the other hand, there are clear risks."
No shit - like no one fuckin' wanting it.
