Most tech seems to be used, at least amongst other things, to further strip mine society. It's the extreme of wealth accumulation, and there's always some people wanting to do that. Microsoft uses the idea of personal computers to get a monopoly on OSes, and get as much rent with that. Google and Amazon use the internet. Apple the iPhone with the walled garden. OPEC uses oil to extract as much wealth as possible. Toyota and VW would also get a monopoly and then raise prices it if they could. Why do you think VW bought so many other car makers? Boeing now that it is too big to fail, focuses on making more money, and less safety and excellence in engineering. Everyone does it. Well, every big business.

It's a bad thing for sure, but doesn't seem specific to LLMs, and a solution would not be specific either.

It's not specific to LLMs, but the point is LLMs will make things more efficient and therefore make 'a bigger straw' to drink the milkshake.

Why will LLMs make things more efficient?

As I see it, LLMs have the potential to either reduce the amount of "bullshit jobs/tasks", reduce the amount of time programmers spend on boilerplate, etc.

But those inefficiencies are 95% human made, on purpose. Bullshit tasks are made up because middle managers want more underlings. Languages/frameworks with lots of boilerplate exist because companies would rather hire fifty average programmers rather than ten brilliant ones.

Even if LLMs have the potential to make these things more efficient, the people holding the money bags don't want the inefficiencies removed.

Consider influencers. What they post on social media could 100% be replaced by the outputs of LLMs and diffusion models. It would be vastly more efficient for companies to advertise their products by creating text and images about a pretty person using their products in an exotic location, than to pay for airplane tickets and hotels and salary for an influencer. Yet we don't see even a hint of the "influencer revenue crisis" that this would cause.

The people holding the money bags who don't want the inefficiencies removed, will have their money bags removed by people who do.

Not instantly and not perfectly though. Inefficiency can be very resistant to change as you are pointing out.

You should read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. Goes over why capitalism creates all these bullshit jobs despite theory saying otherwise. Have you considered that LLMs may increase the efficiency of bullshitization?

Is that something that didn't apply to the internet when it was invented? This is just another way of saying "LLMs are an unprecedented technological leap", which is repeated ad nauseam these days, and personally I a not convinced. Again, this is orthogonal to the "strip mine society" concern.

LLMs seem like a new and dangerous tool to scale the bullshit-generation machine to unimaginable levels. Pretty soon it will be impossible to trust any digital information, as every image, recording, video, document, etc can be instantly altered, adjusted, or completely fabricated by ungodly powerful generative AIs.

Must every other comment be "LLMs will change everything"? No, we will not "soon have ungodly powerful generative AIs". At least, it's not likely.

When we landed on the moon, people thought we would soon have Mars bases or even colonize other solar systems, yet here we are, 60 years later. It's naive to think every technology goes strictly on an exponential upward curve. Reality isn't that simple or repetitive, really.

And, no, it's not "different this time". Every time people think it is different this time, and it never is. We don't have flying cars, hypersonic jets, molecular assemblers, AGI. We won't have them tomorrow either, just because Sam Altman says so.

Bah, the only prediction I made is more bullshit on the Internet and I 100% standby this prediction.

This stood out to me too - the technology helping us move toward a ‘greed singularity’.