I meant easier to do the bad thing than to do the good thing. A hammer does not specifically make it easier to attack someone than to use it for carpentry. And hammers are rarely used to attack other people in practice.

I don’t understand why you bring guns into this argument. Like LLMs, they should indeed be banned, except for some very narrow use cases. Most developed countries do ban guns in that way.

For most people, LLMs do make it specifically easier to skip learning than to enhance learning. We can see this in practice where teachers are noticing higher grades for homework but lower grades for the final exams.

To take it to the extreme: you could say buying a lottery ticket can be both a bad and a good financial decision because it costs money, but it can also earn you a lot of money. That statement is technically true, but I hope you agree it is misleading.

When someone says “AI is just a tool” they are actually saying it can enable people to do very good or very bad things. People might respond with “AI is just a tool” if someone says AI is evil, because machine learning is not evil, it is a technology.

Saying you can do both good and bad with any tool is misleading if the tool makes it easier to do the bad thing (and I think that is one of the points of the article). Also, it is common, and in my opinion valid, to use metonymy and refer to the practice of how LLMs are made and used rather than just the LLM itself when saying “LLMs are evil”.

I when I read reports of the downtime on mastodon I checked status.codeberg.org and saw that almost everything was a red line, except for the authenticated traffic. I guess I was lucky that I still had my cookies.

Not completely down; as a signed in user I didn’t notice a thing.