The real cost of LLM AI

Another little mentioned risk for those generating code using LLMs is not just that they can’t copyright the output. Autonomi and others risk being sued for breach of copyright by the rights holders of ingested code.

I would support this, because otherwise LLMs will destroy the FOSS ecosystem by allowing copyright washing which we see taking place already.

Here’s a short thread discussing the risks to those using LLMs, such as Autonomi:

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In theory LLM technology could be used to create an AI giving less ‘slimey’ answers. But that sells not so good I guess, certainly in the US.

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Paying money to use LLMs is self harm, but also hurts everyone else so maybe consider your own future, if not that of your fellows:

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:robot: Formally verifiable code!!!
:alien: Cosmic rays flips a bit on hardware… :woman_rowing_boat: :hammer: :zany_face:

@happybeing you are really one of my heroes on this forum, with your code, feedback 2 Maidsafe and words on privacy. But and that’s a big butt, LLMs… :sweat_smile:

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@Southside Willie, seen this?

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CW: LLM and tech fans should turn away now…

No - not yet - will read and digest

First glamnce, Im not suffering from thirst myself right now - shame about the good folk of Hillsbro

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AI Doc sounds interesting (short article about a documentary interviewing folk behind AI, pro and con):

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A https://www.google.com/search?q=AI+Doc-query comes with this as the first hit:

Aidoc | Clinical AI Solutions for Healthcare Providers

Aidoc’s clinical AI solutions cover 75% of patients in your health system, connecting care teams across specialties and departments, unifying a patient’s …

Second hit:

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

Release date March 27, 2026 (USA)

If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. What the f— Your fear of AI is the collapse of humanity. Well, not the collapse… the abrupt extermination. There’s a difference.

Apple TV in their announcement of the documentary:

Starring Sam Altman, Dr. Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis
Director Daniel Roher, Charlie Tyrell

Thank you @19eddyjohn75 for demonstrating this ‘chevron-to-toggle-summary-in-Discourse’-trick:

... more of YT's Official Trailer-transcript

So I started making this movie because my wife is six months pregnant.
Is now a terrible time to have a kid? I mean, let’s be honest, I know people who work on AI risk who don’t expect their children to make it to high school. I, I, I what the–
How does AI understand pretty much everything?
It’s surprisingly straightforward. Intelligence is about recognizing patterns…
Patterns. If you have learned those patterns, you can generate new information.
AI is moving so fast. It’s being deployed prematurely.
There’s so much potential for things to go wrong.
Why can’t we just stop?
All these companies are in a race to get AI that’s vastly more intelligent than people within this decade. China, North Korea, Russia, whoever wins is essentially the controller of humankind.
We need to take a threat from AI as seriously as global nuclear war.
It feels like I have to find these CEOs… and get them in the movie.
Great. I want to ask you to promise me that this is going to go well.
That is impossible. OK. Am I hopeful?
Yes. Am I confident that it’ll go right? Absolutely not.
AI is the thing that can solve climate change. We could cure most diseases. What if it’s expanding what is humanly possible?
This is the most extraordinary time ever. The only time more exciting than today is tomorrow.
I already love you. -OK.
I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.
By using AI… We’re about to move off of the Earth into the cosmos.
If we can be the most mature version of ourselves, there might be a way through this.
This is the last mistake we’ll ever get to make.

Idea, what about submitting that ‘The AI Doc’-blurb to this or that knowledgeable ‘AI-powered answer engine’?

First, like us it wants to be sure too:

Then goes into a lot of detail but got it wrong:

That passage comes from the documentary film 'The Thinking Game’.

Another AI-provider - maybe like a ‘Film Buff’, an enthusiastic, knowledgeable fan who often enjoys a wide variety of films, from classics to blockbusters? No:

That block of quotes isn’t from a single speech or paper—it’s a stitched transcript from a documentary about AI, and specifically it matches ‘The Age of AI’.

Third one - Cinephile, an AI with a passionate interest in cinema, often focusing on film theory, history, and critical analysis? No:

That entire passage you quoted is from the documentary film ‘Do You Trust This Computer?’ (2018), directed by Chris Paine, which explores the promises and dangers of artificial intelligence.

No good either, this one:

It comes from the 2024 documentary ‘We Are As Gods’ — a film about AI risk, rapid technological acceleration, and the personal anxieties surrounding it.

Oddly enough continues with this seemingly correct paragraph:

The passage you shared is essentially a stitched-together transcript from the film’s opening monologue and early interview segments, where the filmmaker reflects on becoming a parent while interviewing leading AI researchers, CEOs, and policymakers.

Just judging from both trailers, I myself would maybe like to see this one first? Like ‘The AI Doc’ also available for a public viewing this end of March:

Ghost in the Machine - Valerie Veatch - 2026

Artificial intelligence did not come out of nowhere. AI is deeply rooted in our desire to classify people and society, to discover patterns and form models. Centuries ago, this was done with phrenology and eugenics; now it is done with AI. These patterns and categories are not neutral, either now or in the past, but are shaped by power structures and philosophical, cultural, and political forces.

Shows “AI” or “NOT AI” as you sit watching it.Content advisory:

  • 13+

    Flashing lights and strobing patterns might affect photosensitive viewers

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Off topic :thinking: or in fact not really because guess who owns LLMs and ultimately those using them:

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The internet is broken? Yeah, 'you can no longer log out’:

I don’t think this has been mentioned yet. Here’s a cheery book for you all. I’ve just read it and I’m a bit worried. Never mind the annoyance of ‘AI slop’ or deskilling programmers or lack of privacy we might all just be carbohydrate food in less than a week after ASI is achieved and we wouldn’t even have time to notice what is happening.

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I’ve no knowledge of this book but isn’t it obvious that if we create a super intelligence, we are toast? Also, that this will happen one day, (though not IMO any time soon.)

I believe that our demise as a species is inevitable one way or another and while I like the idea of it continuing I accept that it won’t continue indefinitely, just like me.

This doesn’t bother me. Although I do care, in the same way that I care about a war in a far off land: I get on with my day and with my life, because I can’t affect any of this directly. Most of the time I can only play a tiny part by being who I am. We’re all leaves in the wind.

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It probably is obvious to a lot of people like us who think about these sorts of things. Their point is it’s not obvious to the majority of people who are enamoured with what ‘AI’ can do at the moment so they wrote the book. They’ve been shouting about it for more than 20 years. Between them they set up and run the Machine Intelligence Research Institute to examine the risks of AI.

They think it could happen quite soon. They suggest it would happen really quickly - too quickly for us to react. They also think it could start to happen without us even realising it. They posit that any controls or barriers or limits we think we can put in place around it will be useless in the face of something that works so quickly in ways we don’t and can’t ever understand. They believe an ASI wouldn’t have the same goals as us and likely wouldn’t include our continued freedom or existence.

In their view the key things that will cause it to happen are it:-

  • being able to connect to the internet
  • finding a way to modify it’s own code
  • being able to start up other instances of itself which will it will be able to connect to.

Their proposed solution is for everyone to stop trying to get to ASI.

But I think we all know that isn’t going to happen.

It’s a good read!

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Why is that?

We’re more intelligent than animals, and while they’re sometimes on toast, in general humans don’t want to wipe out all of the animals.

Why is it obvious that an artificial super intelligence will want to kill us all?

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By toast I don’t mean it literally, not that super AI would definitely kill us. I also doubt very much that it would benefit from and maintain something like the status quo. Things will be different, and just as people have warned of the likely outcomes from meeting an alien civilization, I do not believe this would go well for humanity.

We are after all a massive threat to our own ecosystem. If you want to believe we’ll be looked after, I think you need to come up with a pretty strong argument for that.

Nobody can do that, because we have little idea what a super AI will be like. We have little understanding of intelligence at all tbh. So I have no basis for optimism in this scenario.

The above seems obvious to me and is why I don’t worry about it. It puzzles me why they went to all this trouble if they believe that.

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It comes down to two things in the author’s view:-

  • compared to the ASI we are very inefficient in terms of energy and raw materials for getting physical or thinking work done.
  • We have the ability to switch it off so we are a threat to its existence. So it will either cage us or kill us.

Another point they make is that it might not even try to kill us. Once it has control of infrastructure and can make its own machines, factories and power plants it might just use all resources in the most efficient way and the biosphere gets destroyed as a consequence. With the whole planet eventually being consumed in order to spread into space and beyond the solar system.

I bet these guys are fun at parties!

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They want to make people aware of the risks and build a case for stopping the attempt to build ASI.

Yudkowsky was a researcher trying to accelerate AI research in the early 2000s. He realised the risks and switched to how to identify and manage the risks and develop ‘friendly AI’. He now believes the risks are not manageable with our level of understanding and we won’t be able to make it friendly so we should, as a whole, just stop.

It seems they wrote the book to make that case.

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But it is inevitable and they seem to know that, given what you’ve said about their book. That’s my point and what puzzles me. You can mess with evolution - in fact messing with it is another aspect of it - but you can’t stop it.

The thing that may well prevent our developing super AI is our self destruction coming first, not us developing the will to even try not building it. Just look at how we’re handling climate change.

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