[timidger]

I have no doubt these technologies will improve, but there's another argument to be made. The tech will get better and we'll be all the worse for it.

Stoll argued the tech will not be good enough, but paid little thought to the ramifications of the technology succeeding. The arguments against LLMs like Bard and ChatGPT that I have seen are assuming they'll be successful.

They'll become less stupid, but the problem is not that they are wrong but that they are, at present at least, unassailable. You cannot fact check through most of the normal means. You can not research the publication or the author or the date the words were written because that has all been stripped away.

You could check other sources (eg old fashion google) and put in the leg work, but as these get better that will feel less necessary - potentially exacerbating this problem.

That's not to say they aren't useful. I used Chat gpt the other day to get some work done and was impressed. However this was work easily verifiable because it was technical and had immediate feedback when the ai inevitably gave me slightly incorrect code. The same can not be said for facts, figures, and arguments of thought.