Last week I posted about having engaged with junior people in the tech field during smaller conferences, and how I encouraged people to be open-hearted but compassionate when talking to them.
Well, this week one of those people I talked to reached out to me to get more details on why I believed that the use of LLMs was harmful. We had a few back and forth messages, and in the end he thanked me for being passionate about my beliefs, and that it was refreshing to have someone to talk to with a position that was not just "This is how our company is using LLMs, buy our product!"
This made me think that there's a lot of parallelisms between socials stances about LLMs and past social stances about minorities. People used (and in some places still are) to be afraid to speak up for women, people of colour, nonbinary/LGBTQIA+, neurodivergents, etc. It's essentially a variant of the Chilly Climate problem that @grimalkina talks about in her book (The Psychology of Software Teams): People are afraid to say anything negative about LLM use because they are bombarded with so much pro-LLM messaging that they feel like an outlier, and that expressing any dissent might turn them into a pariah. However, in actuality it is the opposite - providing a strong opinion backed with evidence against a torrent of propaganda will not sway those who bought into it, but it does provide a strong anchor and fertile soil for the seeds of further questioning to take hold and sprout.
I feel like I must therefore reiterate the mission I stated in my previous post - if you can afford it then get out there, then get yourself noticed and let the younger generations know that they are not alone in questioning unchecked/unscrupulous LLM use. It doesn't need to be in large conferences - in fact, local events allow for more private one-on-one conversations and thus lend themselves to better diversity of opinions. Who knows - today's doubtful kid may be tomorrow's activist; They may just need that one little nudge of encouragement.