The Four Horsemen of the LLM Apocalypse

A critical essay argues that large language models (LLMs) are causing widespread harm across the internet, drawing parallels to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Death, and Pestilence, with a fifth Horseman, Conquest. The author describes relentless bot attacks on GitLab servers, forcing measures like cookies and network blocks. LLM-driven demand has led to hardware shortages, with Dell refusing quotes until August, Western Digital's 2026 hard drive production sold out, and server prices quadrupling. Security vulnerabilities discovered via LLMs, such as remote code execution in Nginx and Apache and privilege escalations in the Linux kernel, have been released without coordination, threatening the disclosure process. The author warns of copyright death as LLMs train on pirated material, and of cognitive decline from over-reliance on AI. The piece concludes that LLM companies are a bubble whose collapse could trigger a global financial crisis, and calls for resistance through poisoning bots, building local communities, and going low-tech.