In advance I’m sorry you’re the one to receive this comment, it’s not your fault, but can we please retire this joke now? It really was funny for the first ten years, but it’s on literally every post even adjacently comparing something to something else now and I think we have to at least give it a break.

Totally fair disagreement to have there. I’m extremely critical of llms for many of the same reasons as you, plus environmental and economical concerns. Having said that however for summarization, simplification, and rephrasing they don’t tend to hallucinate. Exactly as you say, they don’t know anything, but they’re instructed to always answer, so when something that doesn’t match their training data comes along they hallucinate. For this kind of task though a specialized llm is actually a pretty good fit. As long as such a tool is used responsibly and carefully I don’t see why it couldn’t exist and be moderately helpful.

Google translate isn’t the key or the answer either, it’s constantly slightly wrong, but it’s still useful because you can combine it with your own partial understanding to get the right translation.

It feels like you’re either missing or ignoring my point entirely here, I’m not saying use Google translate for the legal document, I’m giving examples of how imperfect tools can still help you get to where you need to go. You’re saying it’s completely useless because sometimes it’s going to be wrong, I’m just saying that’s an un-nuanced take. Yes if they’re signing a contract, absolutely get a lawyer if you don’t understand what you’re signing, but occasionally you just need to look up a law or accept a eula, and it would be nice to be able to have some help reading it, even if it’s from an imperfect tool.

That’s a bit extreme? In general yes they should get a lawyer but I’m not calling mine every time Facebook updates their eula or whatever. But more than that, are we going to pretend that having the answer doesn’t make solving a math problem easier? You might have gotten the wrong answer yourself but with the key you can figure out how to get there. Or with language, I have maybe an a2 reading comprehension in Turkish, but if I have the translation already I can be sure I’m remembering words correctly and suddenly I’m more like b1. I won’t trust the translation 100% if it’s Google translate or whatever but it still gets me a lot further than if I had nothing.