Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture".
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@simonzerafa @raymaccarthy this is just a dumb attack on Cory as a person which I will not accept. You can talk about what he or I wrote (both things can be criticized) but have some respect
@tante @simonzerafa
A brilliant person isn't right about everything.
It's only a criticism of one view/idea. -
Checking for punctuation errors is does not discourage critical thinking. It's weird to laud "critical thinking" and also make this claim.
@pluralistic @simonzerafa on this one for example I fully agree with Cory. This is not him having a genAI system write or anything like that.
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Which parts of running a model on your own laptop are implicated in "destroying the planet?" How is checking punctuation "stealing labor?" Or, for that matter "giving power over knowledge to LLM owners?"
@pluralistic I think you can answer these questions yourself.
Suppose you wore a coat made out of mink fur. The minks are already dead, simply wearing the coat won't kill more minks. What does wearing mink fur have to do with cruelty to minks?
Suppose you live in the time of the Luddites. Legislation prohibits trade unions and collective bargaining. Mill owners introduce machines, reducing wages. But you build your own machine. Problem solved? You helping labor or capital?
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Good critique. And I say this, as well as like your arguments, while also believing there are certain domains where LLMs do have reasonable utility value - nowhere near the value required to make OpenAI, Antrophic or the rest profitable, but some value nonetheless.
@tante@osma@mas.to @tante@tldr.nettime.org It has debatable utility in some uses, but nowhere near enough to make the industry worth keeping around given the ethical concerns. The utility is effectively immaterial compared to the self-parody levels of evil on display from OpenAI and its ilk.
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This falls into the "you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts" territory.
@pluralistic @tante I just spoke about my impression, but didn't lay claim to objective truth. I'll keep reading along.
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@raymaccarthy @simonzerafa @tante
Again, what does checking the punctuation on a single essay per day have to do with "play[ing] Russian Roulette every day for hours?"
@pluralistic I'd be disappointed if I didn't see myself in the pattern of engaging with people on a post like this who are worlds away from having a fair discussion...
They literally can't see the reality of AI beyond their arguments, they've decided it's inherently evil and wrong and locked in their viewpoint.
So their "russian roulette every day for hours" is because, despite you saying what you use it for, they can't comprehend how it can be used outside of the worst possible use cases.
Same reason they're accusing you of being a libertarian, but that's already the purity culture you were originally calling out.
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> Cory shows his libertarian leanings here...
> Many people criticizing LLMs come from a somewhat leftist (in contrast to Cory’s libertarian) background.
@pluralistic @herrLorenz @tante that second example goes well into overreach territory, and I can see why you'd be not happy with it.
And/but a big part of libertarian appeal is that it does muddy how being "individually free from regulation" can be cast as liberatory. As if individual freedom is all that's needed. "I'm free when there are no regulations" is obviously shallow to lefties, but it (individual freedom) is also a component of why people are lefties, there's real overlap.
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@pluralistic I think you can answer these questions yourself.
Suppose you wore a coat made out of mink fur. The minks are already dead, simply wearing the coat won't kill more minks. What does wearing mink fur have to do with cruelty to minks?
Suppose you live in the time of the Luddites. Legislation prohibits trade unions and collective bargaining. Mill owners introduce machines, reducing wages. But you build your own machine. Problem solved? You helping labor or capital?
This is a "fruit of the poisoned tree" argument.
Suppose you use a computer to post to Mastodon, despite the fact that silicon transistors were invented by the eugenicist William Shockley, who spent his Nobel money offering bribes to women of color to be sterlized?
Suppose you sent that Mastodon post on a packet-switched network, despite the fact that this technology was invented by the war criminals at the RAND corporation?
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This is a "fruit of the poisoned tree" argument.
Suppose you use a computer to post to Mastodon, despite the fact that silicon transistors were invented by the eugenicist William Shockley, who spent his Nobel money offering bribes to women of color to be sterlized?
Suppose you sent that Mastodon post on a packet-switched network, despite the fact that this technology was invented by the war criminals at the RAND corporation?
Also, you're wrong about the Luddites, just as a factual matter. The guilds the Luddites sprang from weren't prohibited by law, they were *protected* by law, and the Luddites' cause wasn't about gaining new protections under statute, but rather, enforcing existing statutory protections.
(Also: the Luddites didn't oppose steam looms or stocking frames; their demands were for fair deployment of these)
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@osma@mas.to @tante@tldr.nettime.org It has debatable utility in some uses, but nowhere near enough to make the industry worth keeping around given the ethical concerns. The utility is effectively immaterial compared to the self-parody levels of evil on display from OpenAI and its ilk.
Whatever I just wrote, thanks. Don't see why we should debate it.
@flesh -
> I am not clear on how this connects to discussing origins of technologies
Because the arguments against running an LLM on your own computer boil down to, "The LLM was made by bad people, or in bad ways."
This is a purity culture standard, a "fruit of the poisoned tree" argument, and while it is often dressed up in objectivity ("I don't use the fruit of the poisoned tree"), it is just special pleading ("the fruits of the poisoned tree that I use don't count, because __").
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> I am not clear on how this connects to discussing origins of technologies
Because the arguments against running an LLM on your own computer boil down to, "The LLM was made by bad people, or in bad ways."
This is a purity culture standard, a "fruit of the poisoned tree" argument, and while it is often dressed up in objectivity ("I don't use the fruit of the poisoned tree"), it is just special pleading ("the fruits of the poisoned tree that I use don't count, because __").
> Almost everyone using LLMs will use the online kind, so objections to LLMs are (reasonably IMHO) based on that scenario.
Except that in this specific instance, you are weighing on an article that claims that it is wrong to run a local LLM for the purposes of checking for punctuation errors.
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@pluralistic @simonzerafa on this one for example I fully agree with Cory. This is not him having a genAI system write or anything like that.
@tante @pluralistic @simonzerafa I agree in principle with Cory, but I really wish that he had clarified that:
1. Ollama is not an LLM, it's a server for various models, of varying degrees of openness.
2. Open weights is not open source, the model is still a black box. We should support projects like OLMO, which are completely open, down to the training data set and checkpoints.
3. It's quite difficult to "seize that technology" without using Someone Else's Computer to do so (a.k.a clown/cloud) -
@pluralistic @herrLorenz @tante that second example goes well into overreach territory, and I can see why you'd be not happy with it.
And/but a big part of libertarian appeal is that it does muddy how being "individually free from regulation" can be cast as liberatory. As if individual freedom is all that's needed. "I'm free when there are no regulations" is obviously shallow to lefties, but it (individual freedom) is also a component of why people are lefties, there's real overlap.
There is no virtue in being constrained or regulated per se.
Regulation isn't a good unto itself.
Regulation that is itself good - drawn up for a good purpose, designed to be administrable, and then competently administered - is good.
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Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture". I think his argument is a strawman, doesn't align with his own actions and delegitimizes important political actions we need to make in order to build a better cyberphysical world.
Acting ethically in an imperfect world
Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are […]
Smashing Frames (tante.cc)
@tante It seems to me Doctorow is obviously correct about this. But I don't think it matters too much if you don't agree... the trajectory of LLMs is going to be whatever it is going to be.
If you don't like it and have buddies that don't like it either, that's not a bad thing especially if you are undergoing real negative effects from it.
It's just if you stray from reality (whatever that will be) too far for too long, you will end up with a big shock when forced to rejoin it.
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@pluralistic I think you can answer these questions yourself.
Suppose you wore a coat made out of mink fur. The minks are already dead, simply wearing the coat won't kill more minks. What does wearing mink fur have to do with cruelty to minks?
Suppose you live in the time of the Luddites. Legislation prohibits trade unions and collective bargaining. Mill owners introduce machines, reducing wages. But you build your own machine. Problem solved? You helping labor or capital?
@skyfaller I think you should be able to answer these questions yourself, but clearly are struggling...
On your mink fur argument: the one ethical way to wear something like that is to only purchase used and old. The harm is done regardless of whether you purchase, you don't increase demand because your refusal to purchase new or recent means there's no profit in it. (This argument is also flawed because it's assuming local LLMs are made for profit when no profit is made on them)
And on your Luddite argument: When someone is using a machine to further oppress workers, the issue is not the machine but the person using it. You attack the machine to deprive them of it. But when an individual is using a completely separate instance of the machine, contributing nothing to those who are using the machine to abuse people... attacking them is simply attacking the worker.
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Also, you're wrong about the Luddites, just as a factual matter. The guilds the Luddites sprang from weren't prohibited by law, they were *protected* by law, and the Luddites' cause wasn't about gaining new protections under statute, but rather, enforcing existing statutory protections.
(Also: the Luddites didn't oppose steam looms or stocking frames; their demands were for fair deployment of these)
@pluralistic Thank you for the fact check. I was paraphrasing that text from the popular Nib comic: https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite/
If this contains factual inaccuracies I will need to do more research and perhaps stop sharing that comic.
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@pluralistic Thank you for the fact check. I was paraphrasing that text from the popular Nib comic: https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite/
If this contains factual inaccuracies I will need to do more research and perhaps stop sharing that comic.
@skyfaller @FediThing @tante I strongly recommend Brian Merchant's "Blood in the Machine" as the best modern history of the Luddites.
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@Colman @FediThing @tante That's interesting. I've never wondered that about you.
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Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture". I think his argument is a strawman, doesn't align with his own actions and delegitimizes important political actions we need to make in order to build a better cyberphysical world.
Acting ethically in an imperfect world
Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are […]
Smashing Frames (tante.cc)
@tante cory is, at his heart, a conservative/liberal USian, putting him far to the right of mainstream European thought and politics.
He constantly refuses to apply his beliefs to underlying structures, arguing that AI or enshittification are aberrations in capitalism, refusing to acknowledge and blocking anyone who argues that it's just capitalism acting as intended.
It doesn't surprise me at all that he's acting hypocritically here.
