> Some years ago it was briefly popular to play games with your phone’s predictive-text feature; you would type an initial phrase and then repeatedly choose the middle option of the three words suggested by your phone, and the resulting sentence was often hilarious. It would be possible to interact with a contemporary LLM this way, and the resulting sentences would be perfectly sensible, but you probably wouldn’t feel like you were talking with someone. Yet that’s essentially what an LLM-based chatbot is, except that there’s no need to manually choose the middle option when it’s the chatbot’s turn to talk. It’s still a predictive-text game, but when the process is streamlined this way, the game becomes so engaging that some people find it addictive.

This hasn’t been true for ages. Just because this guy wrote Arrival doesn’t mean he knows anything else.

When will this stupid meme die?

We need a term for someone who thinks they are well informed on a topic (and perhaps may be, compared to the general public) but still don’t know what the fuck they are talking about when compared to even a competent non-expert in the field.