“Before LLM’s there was_____” I see this whenever an LLM’s impact is assessed. We know. The issue is scale and the ability for smaller and smaller groups (down to individuals) to execute at scale.

LLM’s are pouring massive amount of gasoline on existing issues and people just keep shrugging. Fake news always existed. Now one dude in India can flood multiple sock puppet media accounts with right wing content/images (actual example from a few months back) at a scale previously unimaginable.

People could always die crossing a street. Still, cars changed the discussion about pedestrian safety pretty materially. People didn’t simply throw up their hands and go “people have always been able to die crossing the street.”

> The issue is scale

A guest on a podcast said, in response to open source and community websites being flooded with AI scrapers, "the internet has always had people scanning websites; get over it".

I still respect the podcast, but that was such a shitty take. The difference between before and now was that those websites started closing their doors instead of paying the increased hosting feeds.

I'll get over it when we stop giving people a pass for the damage they're doing just because they're a corporation.