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

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.

@cstross "spicy autocomplete" has been one of my favorite descriptions of it.

@virtualbri @cstross
I feel like "spicy" has too much of a positive connotation. I struggle to come up with something better than the simple "big autocomplete"

@cstross LLMs are replacing every aspect of civilization - institutions, process knowledge, organizational competence - with civilization fan-fiction.

@cstross Put another way: LLMs have revealed a zero-day exploit in human consciousness and culture: if you can manufacture plausibility at scale, you can bypass all of the accumulated wisdom of centuries of skepticism and critical thinking. Any fact-using profession is potentially vulnerable to this attack.

@talin @cstross

we already had that, with the so-called "gish gallop"; this is, however, a way to automate bad-faith horseshit at scale.

this requires new patterns by those of us trying to uphold reality; reactionary argumentation doesn't work when the other side is able to out-scale your ability to respond.

I've found that taking control of the conversation by saying their arguments are based on faulty premises and reaffirming some aspect of reality that undermines their class of arguments is reasonably successful.

@cstross Love your fiction, can't agree on this take. Spam does not help with writing code, whereas LLM's can be extremely helpful.

LLM's are not generally intelligent. They can be immensely problematic, but to dismiss them as merely spam generators as you have, or "parrots" as others have is simply incorrect.

@ViennaMike
They're not "intelligent" at all. They generate a probable series of tokens based on a training corpus.

And they are used to generate a lot of spam code that maintainers now have to deal with.

If we weren't in the middle of one of the most hellacious hype cycles in history, LLMs would be neat, but they have become a real scourge and their damage across a multitude of categories far outweighs any utility they have.

They are spam generators. That is all.

@cstross

@jbowen @cstross "overengineered"? "techbro autocomplete"?

@virtualbri @cstross
I'll take "techbro autocomplete!"

(I have a soft spot for "overengineered" things which can withstand many thousands of times the abuse necessary for the job)

@jbowen @cstross Hmm, never considered that overengineered, but also I can't think of a better work for it either :)

@virtualbri @cstross
Like a tardigrade :)

@ViennaMike You're using code generators. Not the same thing, frankly. Stop generalizing your experience as a developer to the public at large, who only see magic talking box.

@cstross
@ViennaMike

If you like, put another way, you're taking the "good guy with a gun" side of the argument.

I mean, feel free, but own it. Intelligent well-informed adults frequently take opposite sides in this.

@n_dimension
@cstross

I'm told Turing also thought 30% convincing was enough to be noteworthy, presumably because some humans barely pass that.

@cstross

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, hoon squads, concentrationcamps, 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-firms

https://www.semafor.com/article/11/07/2025/uae-says-its-invested-148b-in-ai-since-2024

@cstross LLMs are in some way a reverse-turing-test - one we're frequently failing.

@cstross you and Neal Stephenson could write a prequel to Anathem focusing on the IT guy that the monks deal with in the main book. ;p

@VictimOfSimony @cstross If you want to debate whether or not, as a whole, LLMs are a net positive or net negative, I agree. Intelligent people can legitimately disagree. One cannot, based on the evidence, legitimately claim that they only produce spam.

@ViennaMike

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.

@jbowen @virtualbri @cstross I prefer Artificial Incompetence

@Pionir @virtualbri @cstross Oh I love it! I'll definitely be making use of it :)

@cstross @JohnSullivan

It's "intelligent."

"Yes, thank you." I now know what pan of the bell-curve you sived out of.

@talin @cstross

Another thing that Douglas Adams invented but we don't actually want (along with GPP : Genuine People Personalities™)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/dirkgently/gordon_way.shtml

@cstross @ViennaMike

There is some real utility under the hood, but goddamn.

The pushback from higher utility bills and GenAI diarrhea is justified, and a huge black eye for practical use.

@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 @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.

@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.

@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.

@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!

@cstross @NefariousCelt

A product where the target demographic is Kevin J Anderson.