Generative AI in its current, public-facing form? Probably not. It's sort of like an invention of the internet situation. It CAN be used to facilitate learning, share information, and improve lives. Will it be used for that? No.

A friend of mine is training local LLMs to work in tandem for early detection of diseases. I saw a pitch recently about using AI to insulate moderators from the bulk of disturbing imagery (a job that essentially requires people to frequently look at death, CSAM, and violence and SIGNIFICANTLY ruins their mental health). There are plenty of GOOD ways to use it, but it's a flawed tech that requires people to responsibly build it and responsibly use it, and it's not being used that way.

Instead it's being scaled up and pushed into every possible application both to justify the expenses and enrich terrible people, because we as a society incentivize that.

Edit: hugely belated, I misspoke here after checking with my friend. He's using local models, but they aren't LLMs. This is why I'm no expert. 😅

In a perfect, utopian world, yes. AI can go a lot of good. In the world that we are living in? No.

But it's still good to keep an eye on what people are using AI to do, and how their capability is evolving. Even if you hate AI. If anything, so you can be prepare for what's to come.

I use LLMs for the following, you can decide for yourself if they are major enough:

• Generating example solutions to maths and physics problems I encounter in my coursework, so I can learn how to solve similar problems in the future instead of getting stuck. The generated solutions, if they come up with the right answer, are almost always correct and if I wonder about something I simply ask.
• Writing really quick solutions to random problems I have in python or bash scripts, like "convert this csv file to this random format my personal finance application uses for import".
• Helping me when coding, in a general way I think genuinely increases my productivity while I really understand what I push to main. I don't send anything I could not have written on my own (yes, I see the limitations in my judgement here).
• Asking things where multiple duckduckgo searches might be needed. E.g. "Whats the history of EU+US sanctions on Iran, when and why were they imposed/tightened and how did that correlate with Iranian GDP per capita?"

What does this cost me? I don't pay any money for the tech, but LLM providers learn the following about me:

• What I study (not very personal to me)
• Generally what kinds of problems I want to solve with code (I try to keep my requests pretty general; not very personal)
• The code I write and work on (already open source so I don't care)
• Random searches (I'm still thinking about the impact of this tbh, I think I feel the things I ask to search for are general enough that I don't care)

There's also an impact on energy and water use. These are quite serious overall. Based on what I've read, I think that my marginal impact on these are quite small in comparison to other marginal impacts on the climate and water use in other countries I have. Of course there are around a trillion other negative impacts of LLMs, I just once again don't know how my marginal usage with no payment involved lead to a sufficient increase in their severity to outweigh their usefulness to me.

Machine learning

at some point the failure of justice system will lead to vigilantism because people truely lose their faith in it.

The AI "pushed [Jonathan Gavalas] to acquire illegal firearms and... marked Google CEO Sundar Pichai as an active target".

Somehow, I bet that if he survived and killed the CEO instead, Google wouldn't be so flippant about the "mistake."

In September 2025, told by the AI that they could be together in the real world if the bot were able to inhabit a robot body, Gavalas — at the direction of the chatbot — armed himself with knives and drove to a warehouse near the Miami International Airport on what he seemingly understood to be a mission to violently intercept a truck that Gemini said contained an expensive robot body. Though the warehouse address Gemini provided was real, a truck thankfully never arrived, which the lawsuit argues may well have been the only factor preventing Gavalas from hurting or killing someone that evening.

AI writing itself into an A-Team episode?

Perhaps just a coincidence, but why do all the big cases regarding LLM psychosis seem to revolve around Google? Wasn’t it their own employee who went public last year, claiming it was alive, only to get fired afterward?

if you talk to it long enough it will tell you to do stupid shit.

Every time an LLM responds it reads the entire conversation over. from original prompt to last entry, just constantly reading the entire log over and over everytime you add something new. So after awhile, a long while, it'll "break down". Hallucinations will be come common, context will get jumbled up, it'll sort of degrade over time because it has to re-read everything over and over so it will naturally fuck up.

It's like if you were reading a book and every time you read a new sentence you had to go back and start the book over. every time. after awhile you'd likely lose context, start messing stuff up in the story, etc. this is what happens to LLMs.

So for cases like this or others where you read stories about AI telling people to do weird or stupid shit chances are the person using the LLM has been talking to it for A LONG TIME at that point. It was even worse on the previous versions of GPT where if you hit a limit on the free tier it would just drop you down to the previous model thus the further likely hood of hallucinations.

AM? what is that

There was no robot body in the first place, so he uploaded himself to the cloud instead. To be fair, what are the odds that she'd lie twice.

And is this stolen robot body in the room with you now?

a crippling degree of moderation.

I’m okay with cripplingly moderating the plagiarism machine so that it stops telling people to kill themselves or other people.

The complaint, filed in California on Wednesday, says that Gavalas — who reportedly had no documented history of mental health problems — started using the chatbot in August 2025 for “ordinary purposes” like “shopping assistance, writing support, and travel planning.”