Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture".
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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)
"Artifacts and technologies have certain logics built into their structure that do require certain arrangements around them or that bring forward certain arrangements… Understanding this you cannot take any technology and 'make it good.'"
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@skyfaller that is a better argument and I'll definitely accept that.
I think for many of us, myself included, the big thing with AI there is the investment bubble. Users aren't making that much difference on the bubble, the people propping up the bubble are the same people creating the problems.
I know I harp on people about anti-AI rage myself, but I specifically harp on people who are overbroad in that rage. So many people dismiss that there are valid use cases for AI in the first place, they demonize people who are using it to improve their lives... people who can be encouraged now to move on to more ethical platforms, and when the bubble bursts will move anyways.
We honestly don't need public pressure to end the biggest abuses of AI, because it's not public interest that's fueling them... it's investor's believing AI techbros. Eventually they're going to wise up and realize there's literally zero return on their investment and we're going to have a truly terrifying economic crash.
It's a lot like the dot-com bubble... but drastically worse.
@skyfaller Added detail: much of the perceived popularity of AI is propped up and manufactured.
We're all aware how we're being force fed AI tools left and right... and the presence of those tools is much of what the perceived popularity comes from.
Like Google force feeding AI results in it's search then touting people actively using and engaging with it's AI.
There's a great post I saw, that sadly I can't easily find, that highlights the cycle where business leaders tout that they'll integrate AI to make things look good to the shareholders. They then roll out AI, and when people don't use it they start forcing people to use it. They then turn around and report to the shareholders that people are using the AI and they're going to integrate even more AI!
Once the bubble pops, we stop getting force fed AI and it starts scaling back to places where people actually want to use it and it actually works.
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@tante Since I assume all the #Epstein documents have been scraped into all the LLM models by now, I'd love to see an example of LLM tech being used for good.
Show me the list of Epstein co-conspirators.
Show me names of who helped them escape accountability, and how they did it.
Show me who raped children. Their names, addresses, passport photos.
Then I will believe LLMs and "AI" have delivered a benefit. -
@FediThing The link in question where he talked about it, and did explicitly say it, though he didn't use the "offline" label specifically he basically described it as such. (The label itself is not purely self explanatory, so wouldn't have helped much)
Here's the article link: pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now…
On friendica the thumbnail of the page is what I've attached here, incidentally the key paragraph in question.
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"Artifacts and technologies have certain logics built into their structure that do require certain arrangements around them or that bring forward certain arrangements… Understanding this you cannot take any technology and 'make it good.'"
I'd actually take this a step further and say that technologies ARE social arrangements.
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@tante @simonzerafa
A brilliant person isn't right about everything.
It's only a criticism of one view/idea.@raymaccarthy @tante@tldr.nettime.org
Well, you would think that should be obvious. Another example of the lack of critical thinking or is this just "common sense" being less than common?
If anyone else has any objections to my earlier well reasoned postings about LLM's please do shout so you can also be blocked.
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No. It's like killing a mosquito with a bug zapper whose history includes thousands of years of metallurgy, hundreds of years of electrical engineering, and decades of plastics manufacture.
There is literally no contemporary manufactured good that doesn't sit atop a vast mountain of extraneous (to that purpose) labor, energy expenditure and capital.
@pluralistic @tante @simonzerafa As always, yes and no. A bug zapper is designed to zap bugs, it is a simple mechanism that does that one thing, and does it well. An LLM is designed to read text and generate more text.
That we have decided that the best way to do NLP is to use massively overparameterized word predictors that we have trained using RL to respond to prompts, rather than just, like, doing NLP, is just crazy from an engineering standpoint.
Rube Goldberg is spinning in his grave!
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@FediThing @pluralistic @tante i feel in the similar way as big tech has taken the notion of AI and LLMs as a cue/excuse to mount a global campaign of public manipulation and massive investments into a speculative project and pumps gazillions$ into it and convinces everyone it's innevitable tech to be put in bag of potato chips, the backlash is then that anything that bears the name of AI and LLM is poisonous plague and people are unfollowing anyone who's touched it in any way or talks about it in any other way than "it's fascist tech, i'm putting a filter in my feed!" (while it IS fascist tech because it's in hands of fascists).
in my view the problem seems not what LLMs are (what kind of tech), but how they are used and what they extract from planet when they are used by the big tech in this monstrous harmful way. of course there's a big blurred line and tech can't be separated from the political, but... AI is not intelligent (Big Tech wants you to believe that), and LLMs are not capable of intelligence and learning (Big Tech wants you to believe that).
so i feel like a big chunk of anger and hate should really be directed at techno oligarchs and only partially and much more critically at actual algorithms in play. it's not LLMs that are harming the planet, but rather the extraction, these companies who are absolute evil and are doing whatever the hell they want, unchecked, unregulated.
or as varoufakis said to tim nguyen: "we don't want to get rid of your tech or company (google). we want to socialize your company in order to use it more productively" and, if i may add, safely and beneficialy for everyone not just a few.
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Don't mistake a hugely popular fad or bubble for "reality." And if you don't believe that "[nearly] everybody believes" can be quite detached from punishingly harsh reality, then you need to read about the "Tulip Mania" craze and bubble:
I see. Well, thanks for wagging your finger at me, and mansplaining about tulip mania as if it's not common knowledge. I hope it has brightened your day.
Now I must get back to see if Antigravity / Gemini 3.1 has finished the stuff I asked it to do, that I definitely could and would not be able to do myself.
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@FediThing I think the problem in discourse is the overwhelming amount of people experience anti-AI rage.
In the topic of LLMs, the two loudest groups by a wide margin are:
1. People who refuse to see any nuance or detail in the topic, who can not be appeased by anything other than the complete and total end of all machine learning technologies
2. AI tech bros who think they're only moments away from awakening their own personal machine godI like to think I'm in the same camp as @pluralistic , that there's plenty of valid use for the technology and the problems aren't intrinsic to the technology but purely in how it's abused.
But when those two groups dominate the discussions, it means that people can't even conceive that we might be talking about something slightly different than what they're thinking.
Cory in the beginning explicitly said they were using a local offline LLM to check their punctuation... and all of this hate you see right here erupted. If you read through the other comment threads, people are barely even reading his responses before lumping more hate on him.
And if someone as great with language as Cory can't put it in a way that won't get this response... I think that says alot.
@shiri fully agree!
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@pluralistic @tante @simonzerafa As always, yes and no. A bug zapper is designed to zap bugs, it is a simple mechanism that does that one thing, and does it well. An LLM is designed to read text and generate more text.
That we have decided that the best way to do NLP is to use massively overparameterized word predictors that we have trained using RL to respond to prompts, rather than just, like, doing NLP, is just crazy from an engineering standpoint.
Rube Goldberg is spinning in his grave!
Remember when Usenet's backbone cabal worried about someone in Congress discovering that the giant, packet-switched research network that had been constructed at enormous public expense was being used for idle chit chat?
The nature of general purpose technologies is that they will be used for lots of purposes.
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@kel @pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante Not only that, but popularizing LLMs but running them all locally is less efficient than running them in the cloud. It's false that it minimizes harm when you are still consuming power, but more of it since the chip in your computer isn't nearly as efficient as the ones the providers use.
Plus it's all stolen and biased fashware.
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What is the incremental environmental damage created by running an existing LLM locally on your own laptop?
As to "90% bullshit" - as I wrote, the false positive rate for punctuation errors and typos from Ollama/Llama2 is about 50%, which is substantially better than, say, Google Docs' grammar checker.
@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
"What is the incremental environmental damage created by running an existing LLM locally on your own laptop?"I dunno. But how about a couple of million people?
The person who coins the term 'enshittification' defends LLM. Just...wow. We truly are fucked.
Let's all do what Cory does!
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Meanwhile:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=20737314952&gbraid=0AAAAADgO_miNIDzn-BdCIXzZ6r87g94-L&gclid=Cj0KCQiA49XMBhDRARIsAOOKJHbvIzPACe0EdEyWK86TnS7rNlnUaePKc5y22qT0ZsfqUeGDe72zzc0aAhFFEALw_wcB
#doomed #ClimateChange -
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)
Oh boo! boo CD!
It's a good thing no gods no masters is my mantra.
Also yes!
The problem isn't the use of them as much as the apologetics.
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Remember when Usenet's backbone cabal worried about someone in Congress discovering that the giant, packet-switched research network that had been constructed at enormous public expense was being used for idle chit chat?
The nature of general purpose technologies is that they will be used for lots of purposes.
@pluralistic @tante @simonzerafa indeed, I guess the question is whether the scale of the *ahem* waste, fraud and abuse *ahem* of resources that LLMs seem to imply, even in benign use cases like yours, is out of line with historical precedent or not.
Am I an old man yelling at a cloud?
No, it's the children who are wrong!
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@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
"What is the incremental environmental damage created by running an existing LLM locally on your own laptop?"I dunno. But how about a couple of million people?
The person who coins the term 'enshittification' defends LLM. Just...wow. We truly are fucked.
Let's all do what Cory does!
️
Meanwhile:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=20737314952&gbraid=0AAAAADgO_miNIDzn-BdCIXzZ6r87g94-L&gclid=Cj0KCQiA49XMBhDRARIsAOOKJHbvIzPACe0EdEyWK86TnS7rNlnUaePKc5y22qT0ZsfqUeGDe72zzc0aAhFFEALw_wcB
#doomed #ClimateChange@clintruin @simonzerafa @tante
Which "couple million people" suffer harm when I run a model on my laptop?
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@pluralistic @tante @simonzerafa indeed, I guess the question is whether the scale of the *ahem* waste, fraud and abuse *ahem* of resources that LLMs seem to imply, even in benign use cases like yours, is out of line with historical precedent or not.
Am I an old man yelling at a cloud?
No, it's the children who are wrong!
Rockets were literally perfected in Nazi slave labor camps.
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@clintruin @simonzerafa @tante
Which "couple million people" suffer harm when I run a model on my laptop?
@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
Missed the point, sir.When one person does it...no big deal.
When a couple of million people do it...well, see the MIT article above.
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@tante Dunno where you got the idea that I have a "libertarian" background. I was raised by Trotskyists, am a member of the DSA, am advising and have endorsed Avi Lewis, and joined the UK Greens to back Polanski.
@pluralistic
Fair enough, but that's not the core of the argument
@tante made. He had the same complaint for starters (your argument was heavily drenched in 'you ppl are purists' ), but he also makes the valid argument that technology isn't neutral in itself. Open weights based on intellectual theft and forced labor is still a problem. Until we have a discussion on how the weights come to fruitition, LLM's are objectively problematic from an ethical view. That has nothing to do with purism. -
@mastodonmigration @shiri @pluralistic @tante The only ethical use of a LLM would be one where the training dataset was ethically acquired, the power was minimized to the level of other methods of providing the same benefits, and the 'benefits' were actually measureable and accurate.
None of those are true today, and so far as I know there is little to no path to them.
