So he's set up an AI at home. That's not "Big LLM", but it's also definitely not "anti AI", which a lot of his fans are

I feel like it's important to keep in mind the context of the article. He's using a spellchecker LLM. It's not a chat bot. He's not asking it questions. He's not asking it to write for him. It's like criticizing someone for using a keyboard app with autocorrect.

I also have a deeper philosophical opposition to most uses of LLMs, but a spell checker is such a trivial application that I'm having a hard time thinking of a reason it's "bad".

i was posting about it earlier in this thread: https://thepit.social/@peter/116220856874688629

I only feel like you might be reading more into his words than he actually believes, but I'm not going to debate with you about it.

Fwiw, I've never read his stuff because I don't like his writing style.

But he veered into insulting people that are nominally "on his side" (whatever that means) recently and as you say there's other issues.

I don't even mind his position on this, honestly I don't care.

But what I do care about is how he said it—by directly insulting people that are not of his opinion.

It's not only a logical fallacy; it's also just bad writing.

I guess that's good enough to sell a lot of books because it is a "functionally smart" position with a little pushback against the AI trend, and not enough people in the media are willing to give us even that, but -my- problems with AI go deeper than the interface. I still consider it (attempted) intellectual theft and a sanitized interface for environmental destruction that provides results which are a lot less helpful than all the stuff that came before AI -- all the stuff they deliberately took away to make AI seem useful

(I recently stopped letting Cory in my feed after he started to share substack articles)

He was an ass for ranting about "purity culture" and belittling real concerns people have (and why many people hate AI), to quote:

"Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM. You think that LLMs are “fruits of the poisoned tree” and must be eschewed because they are saturated with the sin of their origins. I think this is a very bad take, the kind of rathole that purity culture always ends up in."

"Purity culture" is a highly derogatory term, implying that people who are anti-AI are some sort of religious cult.

I'm not going to argue the matter as if I perfectly understand and agree with Cory's position. He can defend himself. I'm just not sure that article says what was implied by @peter's post. It seems like Cory understands exactly why people hate AI, and he's trying to make a distinction between the technology and the application of it.

He's using LLM-based spellcheckers, and kind of implying this is new amazing technology.

Presumably to prove that he isn't a "luddite" or whatever.

Just a moment...

(doctorow.medium.com)

Yeah, I was going to say... I'm not aware of Cory ever saying anything like that about AI. I'm pretty sure he knows exactly what's happening.

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

the AI companies: we are going to take away your ability to think and sell it back to you, that's our plan, literally and explicitly, we are saying it from a stage.

"the best thing to me, throughout all the history of capitalism or innovation or whatever you want is to just flood the market"

JDAM all the data centers. right now. **urgently**