See Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.
If LLMs are judged by some specific metric meant to track their negative impact, they’ll adapt to make the metric look good without improving the underlying impact.
Great example of Goodhart:
I used to work at a Verizon store, and we were rated by the amount of accessories we could sell with each phone. In order to boost that number, everyone tried to add on a bunch of cheap phone accessories (clearance items and screen protectors) to drive that number up.
Our goal was more than three, but once we figured out how to sell 5 or more for less than $20, they changed it to total cost of accessories per phone.
It’s too late to record a baseline, so any metrics will need to work retrospectively anyway.
There’s still a bunch of us that refuse to use it.
We should but ive been tracking people I know who are addicted to it and I saw a mental decline instantly. It doesn’t take a lot of experimenting to show it makes you an idiot, not using your brain will do that.
I’ll be the old man yelling at cloud who refuses to use it while the rest of the world straps on bezos vision for 79.95 a month to go to work typing prompts.
There are a lot of things we should urgently do for our own good. So no, we’re not going to
Maybe in the past when science was still a thing. It’s all money and power now.
How would they avoid the brain damage enough to understand it?
