URL: https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/keeping_up_appearances
Looking at LLM usage and promotion as a cultural phenomenon, it has all of the markings of a status game. The material gains from the LLM (which are usually quite marginal) really aren't why people are doing it: they're doing it because in many spaces, using ChatGPT and being very optimistic about AI being the "future" raises their social status. It's important not only to be using it, but to be seen using it and be seen supporting it and telling people who don't use it that they're stupid luddites who'll inevitably be left behind by technology.
Rather, the only reason that LLMs took root in the first place was because our societies in the anglosphere have already developed cultures solely devoted to gaining status and keeping up the appearance of doing things rather than actually doing them.
LLMs are a technology that are fundamentally parasitic on this attitude. When people playing status games are hit with the inevitability of having to actually do a thing, they will very often do the easiest, most half-assed possible thing that might count so that they can get back to fighting for status.
So, what's one to do when you're a professional who doesn't like LLMs and thinks they're harmful? Material or technical arguments aren't going to work here, at least not in the way we'd like: as we've established, the people who hold the purse strings are willing to absorb considerable amounts of material harm in order to keep playing their status games. We're therefore going to have to win the cultural fight, and that means being able to maintain some status one way or another.
- We need to be able to win some kinds of status game in order to survive in our society and earn money;
- Winning the kinds of status games that everyone else is playing is morally destructive, will make us hate ourselves and probably won't work in any instance;
- We cannot by ourselves rewrite an entire country's culture, therefore;
- We need to find status games that exist in our current society that we can compete at effectively.
Fortunately, I think a form of status game that works for LLM dissidents does exist: we need to compete on prestige.
Prestige as a concept is subtly different from status. Where status is something akin to "being the most famous or the most powerful", prestige works more along the lines of being the best at a given thing: being so good that you cannot be ignored.
Prestige is completely antithetical to the LLM ethos. Where an LLM presents something that's good enough for some purpose or other, prestige emphasises the exactly right tool for the right job.
In a world where people are almost illiterate and certainly can't write, being able to consistently produce a 3,000 word essay almost every week and being able to demonstrate that you're extremely well-read is a highly prestigious thing to be able to do.
We might not be able to bloviate like the LinkedIn people or talk out our asses by the executives, and we might often do things the slow, old-fashioned way, but we can certainly be the best people in the field. We can be the people that those in the know work with: the people whom you go to when you want only the best and won't compromise on anything.
The first thing we can do is write. Being properly literate is already a prestige marker, and as LLM use continues to gut literacy in the general population even more than it already has, being able to write well and being able to hire people who write well is only going to get more and more impressive.
If we write, we need to demonstrate that we can output good writing on a consistent basis, and while we obviously can't compete with LLMs on sheer volume, we need to demonstrate that we can compete with them on volume of actual quality work.
When enough of us do this consistently enough, capitalism will catch on, and as we know, capitalism has a wonderful way of co-opting counterculture and absorbing it into itself. This is a massive political problem for me, but here, fortunately, it's actually a good thing. People will see this, they'll absorb it into their self-image, and before too long we'll be seeing people post about working without AI being the trendy, fashionable new thing. People will see our work as novel, desirable and the thing to copy, and a whole lot of people will doubtless try and copy it badly, bringing our skills into even sharper relief.