Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture".
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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@mamot.fr
Well, we are not only influenced by our legacy: however strong we are, we can't avoid some fundamental influence from the hegemonic culture we live in.
Yet I see how the ethical misalignment here may not be about libertarian values but about utilitarian ones.
Even more subtly, it might be a misalignment about respective utility functions, while both #pluralistic and @tante@tldr.nettime.org adopt an utilitarian framework instead of a normative one.
For example, the Pluralistic use of a local LLM might be explained with a slightly higher evaluation of the benefits that his own writings brings to society and thus (indirectly) the value the LLM brings, despite its issues.
Otoh, Tante might value a lot more the political harm that Cory's words did by blaming a political choice as irrational while it's totally rationale: in a way, by justifying the use of a #LLM, #Doctorow justified (even just a little bit) the industry that built it.
And since Pluralistic's strawman is centered around a normative "purity culture" blamed as irrational, Tante framed his response over rationality.
What if a normative behaviour was in fact totally rational in presence of unreducible complexity and informational asymmetry?
I don't use LLM for so many technical and political reasons that would take hours to list. And you both would almost certainly nod to most of them as a strictly rational arguments.
Yet the choice itself, bound to the society I want to build for my daughters and children, is normative: based on the values of truth, freedom and communion.
None of these could ever come from the LLM we are talking about: they are weapons designed to fool people (Turing test included!), so there's no way to wield them to benefit people.
As for "purity culture", I'm a catholic #christian, not a puritan: we brag about the #Church being a casta meretrix (Latin for something like "a pure bitch"
), and we preach a man who hanged with the worst sinners and sometimes even hacking the law to save their lifes, so... 
️
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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 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. -
No, this is just more "fruit of the poisoned tree" and your argument that your fruit of the poisoned tree doesn't count is the normal special pleading that this argument always decays into.
@pluralistic sorry, i'm just not good at making a point. To me, not "LLM" is the "forbidden fruit", but "using an LLM for certain purposes" is. I think there are actually use-cases for stochastic inference machines (like folding proteins or structuring references), but, as @tante wrote (better: as I understand him), there are use-cases that one very much can reject in its entirety. And that should be okay.
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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.
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@pluralistic sorry, i'm just not good at making a point. To me, not "LLM" is the "forbidden fruit", but "using an LLM for certain purposes" is. I think there are actually use-cases for stochastic inference machines (like folding proteins or structuring references), but, as @tante wrote (better: as I understand him), there are use-cases that one very much can reject in its entirety. And that should be okay.
I never denied the existence of "use-cases that...one can reject it its entirety."
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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)
enshittification of pluralistic
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@mastodonmigration tagging @pluralistic because this is a good line of discussion and he might need the breath of fresh air you're bringing.
My own two cents: you're missing one of the big complaints in the form of "how they were trained" which is the environment impact angle. Not that it isn't addressed by Cory's use case, just a missing point in the conversation that's helpful to include.
The "stolen data" rabbit hole is sadly a neverending one that digs into deep issues that predate LLMs. Like the ethics of copyright (which is an actual discussion, just so old that it's forgotten in a time when copyright is taken for granted). Using it to create "art" and especially using it to replace artist jobs is however a much much more clear argument.
Nitpick: LLMs can't be used for checking drug efficacy or surveying telescopic data, I think in this line you're confusing LLM with the technology it's based on which is Machine Learning.
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@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.
@dgold @tante I'd like to ask your opinion on the policies of the candidate that Doctorow endorsed in the NDP (Canada's most progressive federal party) leadership election: https://lewisforleader.ca/ideas
This is a genuine question. I'm not very familiar with European politics, but Lewis aligns strongly with what my perception (again, north american) on what a progressive party should be like. I think Doctorow's endorsement of Lewis rejects the idea that he's far right, even in the context of European politics.
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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)
I think the big issue is the combination of GenAI and LLMs.
GenAI by itself was a fun toy which would generate entertaining nonsense.
LLMs by themselves are effectively just a data classification technique for text. This can be used in a lot of ways. For some reason, the way that everyone in any kind of power is pushing is "generate a bunch of plausible sounding text" but it can also be used as a basis for a semantic search or as mentioned elsewhere grammar and spell checking.
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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 If you link to an academic paper as support for your argument, I will download that academic paper. This is simply nature taking its course.
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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!
