I think to some extent it's a matter of scale, though. If I advertise something as a calculator capable of doing all math, and it can only do one problem, it is so drastically far away from its intended purpose that the meaning kinda breaks down. I don't think it would be wrong to say "it malfunctions in 99.999999% of use cases" but it would be easier to say that it just doesn't work.

Continuing (and torturing) that analogy, if we did the disgusting work of precomputing all 2 number math problems for integers from -1,000,000 to 1,000,000 and I think you could say you had a (really shitty and slow) calculator, which "malfunctions" for numbers outside that range if you don't specify the limitation ahead of time. Not crazy different from software which has issues with max_int or small buffers.

If it were the case that there had only been one case of a hallucination with LLMs, I think we could pretty safely call that a malfunction (and we wouldn't be having this conversation). If it happens 0.000001% of the time, I think we could still call it a malfunction and that it performs better than a lot of software. 99.999% of the time, it'd be better to say that it just doesn't work. I don't think there is, or even needs to be, some unified understanding of where the line is between them.

Really my point is there are enough things to criticize about LLMs and people's use of them, this seems like a really silly one to try and push.

We're talking about the meaning of "malfunction" here, we don't need to overthink it and construct a rigorous proof or anything. The creator of the thing can decide what the thing they're creating is supposed to do. You can say

hey, it did X, was that supposed to happen?

no, it was not supposed to do that, that's a malfunction.

We don't need to go to

Actually you never sufficiently defined its function to cover all cases in an objective manner, so ACTUALLY it's not a malfunction!

Whatever, it still wasn't supposed to do that

The purpose of an LLM, at a fundamental level, is to approximate text it was trained on.

I'd argue that's what an LLM is, not its purpose. Continuing the car analogy, that's like saying a car's purpose is to burn gasoline to spin its wheels. That's what a car does, the purpose of my car is to get me from place to place. The purpose of my friend's car is to look cool and go fast. The purpose of my uncle's car is to carry lumber.

I think we more or less agree on the fundamentals and it's just differences between whether they are referring to a malfunction in the system they are trying to create, in which an LLM is a key tool/component, or a malfunction in the LLM itself. At the end of the day, I think we can all agree that it did a thing they didn't want it to do, and that an LLM by itself may not be the correct tool for the job.

Where I don't think your argument fits is that it could be applied to things LLMs can currently do. If I have an insufficiently trained model which produces a word salad to every prompt, one could say "that's not a malfunction, it's still applying weights."

The malfunction is in having a system that produces useful results. An LLM is just the means for achieving that result, and you could argue it's the wrong tool for the job and that's fine. If I put gasoline in my diesel car and the engine dies, I can still say the car is malfunctioning. It's my fault, and the engine wasn't ever supposed to have gas in it, but the car is now "failing to function in a normal or satisfactory manner," the definition of malfunction.

It implies that, under the hood, the LLM is "malfunctioning". It is not - it's doing what it is supposed to do, to chain tokens through weighted probabilities.

I don't really agree with that argument. By that logic, there's really no such thing as a software bug, since the software is always doing what it's supposed to be doing: giving predefined instructions to a processor that performs some action. It's "supposed to" provide a useful response to prompts, anything other than is it not what it should be and could be fairly called a malfunction.

Thank you for actual POV

Then I would steer away from arguments which are more debatable and stick to ones that are more robust and focus on the present and future than the past, and avoid anything that can get mired in debate. I'd focus on what the specific problem is (we will have fewer artists due to competition with AI) why it's a problem (cultural stagnation, lack of new inspiration for new ideas) and why alternative solutions to regulation wouldn't work (would socializing artistic fields work as they'd no longer be subject to market forces).

Haven't digital price tags been used for decades? I'm sure these will be more high tech, but I remember ones like this at least 20 years ago

Cloudflare Zero Trust is also great for that (and free for less than 50 users)

Yeah, I just did a quick test in Python to do a tcp connection to "0.0.0.0" and it made a loopback connection, instead of returning an error as I would have expected.

I've heard the sentiment that change and convenience are killing society before, and I'm sure I'll hear it again. I prefer to shop online. I get no sense of community from stores where every interaction has a hanging financial incentive around it, I get it from local organized runs, other frequent visitors of the dog park, etc. To me, that line of reasoning feels almost like lamenting how good the pipes in your house are, because you don't need to call a plumber and get to interact with them.

Shopping online gives me more options, more reviews, easier ways to look up additional technical details without feeling weird taking space in an aisle while researching on my phone. It's also more efficient in terms of total driving; one person making deliveries for everyone in a neighborhood requires less total driving than all those people making individual trips to a store. And it frees up more time for me to do things I actually want with the people I enjoy.

Half the time? Either something is wrong with that store or you need to learn how to use it properly. I have issues maybe once a year.