LLMs are spam generators.
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@ThePowerNap @cstross I don't disagree. I think part of the path going forward will be to push more to the edge, as we've seen with other types of AI, using less powerful, but good enough, models for many applications. Models that don't require as much energy to run.
Those are my bread and butter
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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.
It's "intelligent."
"Yes, thank you." I now know what pan of the bell-curve you sived out of.
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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 That just makes me wish the singularity was people all over the planet bursting into song.
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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.
It is not even the good spam, it tastes terrible
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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.
"The spamularity"! You win the internet today! <3
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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 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
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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 Only if you use it or use search engines that allow it.
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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 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. -
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