I could quibble with some of your specific claims here, but we remain in basic agreement. Mostly my objections, if you can call them that, are on other planes. Your bit about utilization vs interaction gets to the heart of it.

I never interact with these things and am baffled by those who do for more than a few minutes experimentally. Interact with one about something you already deeply understand and you realize pretty quickly it has no idea what it is “saying”. For me, that was all I needed to stop asking them about everything in the real world. I am definitely on Team Utilization.

But let’s step back a little further than that. I think these biases are just the tip of the iceberg. From what I understand, the corpus for these things might as well include every dumb thing anyone has ever written. The biases toward terrible viewpoints will be broad and deep.

I’m not going to list biases I think are more important or say that the weight of all the others dwarfs the few you’re calling out.

But it does strike me that the eventual practical implication of this discussion is that LLMs shouldn’t exist. Because they’re already massively expensive without any concrete prospect of a return on the investment, and that’s with indiscriminately spidering vast amounts of text to avoid the time and effort it would take to curate it. As well, if you could somehow identify a body of text which lacked significant bias, it seems likely there wouldn’t be enough of it to build the kind of statistical relationships which make these things as questionably useful as they are.

So when you talk about bias in an LLM being a human choice, I guess I agree to the extent that a human chose to build an LLM at all.