There are ways around that. See my other comment replying to the same parent as your comment.

Catch and release fishing is all cruel, it’s not like a hook going through a mouth is not going to be painful, risk getting infected, etc. It’s not the harmless practice some try to make it to be. Just leave the fish be.

That being said I agree with you on the whole.

Thank you for taking the time to explain. Thoroughness and nuance are often leaking when it comes to discussing LLMs, worryingly especially in mostly anti-AI spheres.

Have we gotten to the point where we have to constantly be in a parasocial dialogue with our computers?

No. You don’t have to use the horrible crap from the megacorps. DuckDuckGo exists. Kagi exists. Ecosia exists. Alternatives to all this shit exists. The more people use them, the less power Google etc. have.

They are broadly the same as earlier computers.

We can use them to do certain things faster that would take horribly long by band otherwise or may not even be doable.

I know it sounds like i’m taking the piss, but i’m not. We need to start reframing things back into simple terms. Remember why we want these things, use them for what they’re good at, make sure those capacities are built with people in mind (Free and open source can help).