I'm not going to go so far as to say that the only possible problem with LLMs is how they're marketed and pushed into everything, but I do think this is a striking example of how capitalism expresses every new technology in its most harmful and malignant form.
The way that the tech industry has manifested this technology is the vast majority of the problem. Any new technology is going to create some issues, but none of this was inevitable. The push to make LLMs the next big growth play was a deliberate decision. Under different circumstances, LLMs would just be yet another computer science advancement, but because the tech industry needed to manufacture the next hypergrowth market, a bunch of grifters convinced everyone that they needed to invest all of the money in the world into making it a reality.
The rise of cryptocurrency is another example of the same phenomenon. Blockchain technology isn’t magic, but it is something, and at a moment when the tech industry was out of ideas and needed another avenue for growth, it was shoved down everyone’s throat until it turned into a going concern (although may be reaching its endpoint now).
The tragedy of LLMs in retrospect is going to be that we had a totally viable and modestly valuable technology that would have incrementally improved a bunch of things over time, and the powers that be decided to go all-in on it to a degree that is, without hyperbole, unprecedented in human history. It will likely end up settling into the niche it was always meant to occupy, but not before it uses up an ungodly amount of resources to build crumbling infrastructure for a market that doesn’t exist.
Something like AI dungeon is a perfectly good use case for this technology, and if the industry could have just been slightly normal about it, we’d all be able to actually benefit from it instead of having it turn into a combination of gigantic surveillance network and brain-melting psychosis machine.