> Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions …

> Adding an LLM abstraction layer doesn't make the existing laws (or social/moral pressure) go away. Isn't the "abstraction" of "the model" exactly the reason we have open court filings against stable diffusion and other models for possibly stealing artist's work in the open source domain and claiming it's legal while also being financially backed by major corporations who are then using said models for profit? Whose to say that "training a model on your data isn't actually stealing your data" it's just "training a model" as long as you delete the original data after you finish training? What if instead of Google snooping, they hire a 3rd party to snoop it, then another 3rd party to transfer it, then another 3rd party to build the model, then another 3rd party to re-sell the model. Then create legal loopholes around which ones are doing it for "research" and which ones are doing it for p…

> Hiring managers would scroll through your e-mails and make judgment calls based on their content. > Training an LLM on your e-mails and then feeding it questions is just a lower accuracy, more abstracted version of the above, but it's the same concept. Its also one that once you have cheap enough computing resources scales better, because you don't need to assign literally any time from your more limited pool of human resources to it. Yes, baroque artisanal manual review of your online presence might be more “accurate” (though there's probably no applicable objective figure of merit), but megacorporate hiring filters aren't about maximizing accuracy they are about efficiently trimming the applicant pool before hiring managers have to engage with it.

That takes way too long though. Creating/training/testing an LLM can be automated. Why do the interviews at all, why pay a hiring manager at all, when you can just do everything virtually and have an AI spit out a list of names to send offers to and how much each offer should be?

> If a company is going to snoop in your personal data to get insights about you, they'd just do it directly. Hiring managers would scroll through your e-mails and make judgment calls based on their content. This is like saying, "look, no one would be daft enough to draw a graph, they'd just count all the data points and make a decision." You're missing two critical things: (1) time/effort (2) legal loophole. A targeted simulation LLM (a scenario I've been independently afraid of for several weeks now) would be a brilliant tool for (say) an autocratic regime to explore the motivations and psychology of protesters; how they relate to one another; who they support; what stimuli would demotivate ('pacify') them; etc. In fact, it's such a good opportunity it would be daft not to construct it. Much like the cartesian graph opened up the world of dataviz, simulated people will open up sociolog…

It's less accurate but far cheaper. In even half-rational actors (and I think companies qualify as half rational) costs, not just benefits, matter.

> If a company is going to snoop in your personal data to get insights about you, they'd just do it directly. Hiring managers would scroll through your e-mails and make judgment calls based on their content. Maybe, but LLMs have incredibly intricate connections between all the different parameters in the model. For instance, perhaps someone who does mundane things X, Y, Z, also turns out to be racist. An LLM can build a connection between X, Y, Z whereas a recruiter could not. An LLM could also be used to standardize responses among candidates. E.g. a recruiter could tune an LLM on a candidate and then ask "What do you think about other races? Please pick one of the four following options: ...". A recruiter wouldn't even be necessary. This could all be part of an automated prescreening process.

No -- but what it DOES do is possibly "put the idea in someone's head." As I've always said: the thing about the big companies that suck up your data, consider any possible idea of what they could do with it. Ask, is it: - not expressly and clearly illegal? - at least a little bit plausibly profitable? If the answer is yes to both, you should act as if they're going to do it. And if they openly promise not to do it, but with no legal guarantee, that means they're DEFINITELY going to eventually do it. (see e.g. what's done with your genetic data by the 23 and me's and such)

> Training an LLM on your e-mails and then feeding it questions is just a lower accuracy, more abstracted version of the above, but it's the same concept. Less accurate, more abstracted, but more automatable . This might be seen as a reasonable trade-off. It might also be useful as a new form of proactive head-hunting: collect data on people to make models to interrogate and sell access to those models. Companies looking for a specific type of person can then use the models to screen for viable candidates that are then passed onto humans in the recruitment process. Feels creepy stalky to me, but recruiters are rarely above being creepy/stalky any more than advertisers are.