so you are saying that the advent of internet also deserved criticism in much the same way as LLM's?

- job displacement

- ethics

- environmental

- skill atrophy

Such concerns were present, and rightly so. Concern and critique is important to express so that we are sure new tech is useful and negative side-effects are realised and appropriately mitigated.

Job displacement: When the Internet first arrived in a significant number of non-technical lives, there were concerns about research jobs and library jobs. In fact it increased the need for that sort of thing so increased that sort of job, and even if it hadn't the access to information for the average person would have been worth that cost. As remote work grew initially, then massively in 2020, there were major concerns about that sort of thing again (people working in Manchester on London wages, going into the office very little, it being even easier to outsource jobs to countries with cheaper workforces, etc.). These concerns are still being debated today, and that is quite valid.

Ethics: Hell yes. And again, it is good that we are still refining what we think is acceptable to this very day. There have been ethical concerns almost from the start of the Internet in the public mind, and they have only increased over time as new parts of it take shape.

Environmental: That is a lot less relevant, as the Internet itself didn't directly have the sort of impact that LLMs are having. There have been local concerns though, over the building of data-centers and the power infrastructure to support them, disturbing land to lay cables, and so forth, and again these concerns are still relevant (though have somewhat folded into just being a concern about LLMs & related ATM as they are the main reason for the current rapid growth).

Skill Atrophy: The Internet never really threatened that, except maybe a small amount of concern wrt certain research roles, it increased the base level of those skills in the general population much more than it had any negative effects (but people did raise the concerns). It gave better access to training and knowledge, but wasn't actually doing things for us in the same way LLMs and the agent systems linked to them are being used, you still needed to learn from that information/training in order to complete your task.

The advent of the internet was collaborative and based on introducing shared protocols for a couple of decades. It deserved criticism when globalised capitalism got involved, and monopolies started forming, leading to rent-seeking, excessive centralisation, and enshittification.

The impact is that the internet has a fraction of the value to improve people's lives as it should have. It is a very poor free market, incredibly poor competition because of lack of standards and protocols and interoperability. People's minds are ground down by social media, search engines don't work well any more and so on.

So yes - every new technology deserves many criticisms, so they can be addressed, and as a society we can gain the benefits of that technology and minimise the disadvantages.

The printing press lead to copyright, public libraries, universal literacy... All things which are now widely celebrated. They took centuries to work out, and are all government and regulatory intervention to fix problems critics noticed and campaigned about.

AI is the same, only it is at risk of moving much faster and having a much large negative impact before society reacts.

So no, most of the criticism of LLMs are not wrong - they are correct, as are the people saying the technology of LLMs is useful to people and the economy.

Critics are friends of a new technology - without responding to every criticism in a significant way, AI will rapidly lead to a Butlerian jihad. If you like AI, you should love criticism of AI even more.

Are you assuming that I believe the advent of the Internet and LLMs are the same thing?