Discussion
I was disappointed to read Cory Doctorow's post where he got weirdly defensive about his LLM use and started arguing with an imaginary foe.
@tante has a very thoughtful reply here:
https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/
A few further comments, 🧵>>
@emilymbender @tante touring
around and lecturing people about enshitification while defending the most harmful technology brought into existence in recent years. the hypocracy ...
@emilymbender @tante hmmmm, if I’m following the logic of the counter-argument correctly it’s that because technologies have embedded politics they cannot be reframed. Is that an accurate read? If so, this seems highly inconsistent with other STS research on how communities and cultures reimagine technologies through their values ne lenses (see Rheingold’s Look Who’s Talking as an example). Writing was a “techne” imported from Egypt. Did Egyptian politics follow?
@emilymbender @tante cory doctrow wrote a book about a washing machine living in a mountain, he might need the llm to get a dose of normality
@emilymbender @tante "Cory believes that one sometimes needs to make decisions based on one’s values. He just does not think that your values as someone not wanting to use LLMs matter."
Love this, thank you!
@emilymbender Thing is, Doctorow didn't need to write this. He could have gone on talking about his main subject, the one that's brought him applause, and many book contracts and speaking engagements.
But he's succumbed to the anxieties that afflict many who rocket to fame - what if his fans find him to be imperfect and it all falls apart?
The strength of his 'enshittification" narrative is in its truth. We all recognise very quickly that it's true, that it impacts our own everyday lives. Eventually it will be common knowledge and the speaking engagements will taper off.
But the morals and ethics of Big Tech? Clearly these are not Doctorow's subject. /2
@emilymbender
2. Maybe it's hard, between book deadlines and travel, to make time to read what others are saying. So when challenged, all he had to give is this wheedling, poorly reasoned self-justification. No doubt there are other topics he's not good at, and we should not expect his every thought bubble to be a work of genius.
That he does not produce a continuous flow of blameless ethics, pure reasoning and rare insight should not detract from the truth of his main narrative. Don't let perfection be the enemy of the good.
@anne_twain Where do you see me arguing with his main narrative? I am taking issue with the specific argument about this specific topic, because it is a topic that matters to me.
@emilymbender I'm right behind you on the ethics, btw, and it would be good to see someone with Doctorow's public profile talking to his audience about that.
@emilymbender Sorry if I gave the impression I was critiquing your comments in particular. I read a number of people's responses and the article someone ( you?) recommended and these were my general thoughts. You could say I was agreeing with you that his main narrative is of great value but at the same time addressing some general disappointment that not everything he says is of the same quality. He's human and fallible like the rest of us but also under a lot of pressure. I've been waiting to find out what his weaker side is.
@emilymbender @tante Wow, I'm kind of furious with him for writing like that having coined the term 'enshittification'. I've always found his writing style a bit self-congratulatory and off-putting, but previously respected the underlying thought, but the reasoning here is such shallow, offensive rhetoric. Great breakdown of what he's doing wrong in that article!
@emilymbender @tante I really enjoyed reading this. Thanks for sharing
@emilymbender @tante I really enjoyed reading this. Thanks for sharing
@emilymbender @tante Good read! I'm particularly amused by the idea of a free and open source torment nexus.
@emilymbender @tante The "the existance of a boat implies a hierachy of command due to the nature of the boat requiring it" and applying it to LLMs (and potentially other tech) is a super point, I'm definitely going to remember that for later.
@emilymbender @tante interesting to see cory showing his whole ass there in his strawman and turning it into some pseudo-anarchist "hire more women guards" about liberating LLMs. i'd be surprised if he was so laissez-faire about the tech if it was used to churn out content "in the style of doctorow" to the point where he'd lose his livelihood...
i read enshittification recently and would summarize it as ALL OF THIS IS AWFUL BUT I PARTICIPATE IN IT LOL AND I ACTUALLY DO NOT HAVE ANY HELFUL SUGGESTIONS
This is a mask-off moment for this influencer, put simply.
Intellectual dishonesty. Arguing in bad faith. Disposing of human volunteer proofreaders in favor of ai and joking about it. Doubling down. Defending and legitimizing mass scraping of human works by ai companies for gods sake.
The amount of ego operating here is blatant and repugnant.
Take a hike, grifter.
I don't find Doctorow's take disingenuous. There *are* a lot of people who don't discriminate between "good" or "bad" uses of AI and hate AI simply as a symbol for rich white fascism. (Which, easy to see how they get there...).
I see people espousing the absolutist take often. If he's misrepresenting, it's only by not breaking out and enumerating different rationale for thinking AI is unethical as tante did (well). The rationale he did name is an entirely real position.
@emilymbender @tante we need to cut Cory some slack here. The guy's done a boatload of good work in widely ignored areas and if I was him I'd have had a nervous breakdown a long time ago.
@emilymbender @tante of course not. And I agree with the criticism. And I admire your work very much. The guy takes one misstep and boom! That's all I mean.
@emilymbender @tante I apologize.
Ahaha Mr. "AI is asbestos in the walls" has become " #reversecentaur" himself...
What a hypocrite!
The City of Omelas we must walk away from is #petrofascism
They are building datacenters full of AI chips to burn fossil fuels. They are monetizing energy to control people with their prompt responses. They're telling people what to think and buy, the same as they've been doing since Standard Oil.
They have energy, and they are trying desperately to control people, because their energy monopoly is dying.
The only way to beat the company town scam is to walk away.
Ive found some solace in combining Kant's universal categorical imperative with ethical hedonism.
@emilymbender @tante Thank you so much. Yours is the ethical reading of LLMs that is needed. (1) Moral beliefs lead to choices that are not black-and-white. (2) Tools are not immoral because of their creators. (3) The decision to use knowledge immorally obtained should weigh heavily on the user. (4) Tools whose use produces immoral outcomes should also weigh heavily on the user.
It's unfortunate that Doctorow went all-in on logical fallacies and presumed absolutes in order to defend his use.
@emilymbender @tante
FYI, there was also a follow-up that I found equally worth reading:
https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/on-alliances/
@tante small typo if useful to know:
"And that stand lead him into the problematic train of thought (led)
And thank you for this piece!!
It was particularly disappointing to see Doctorow misconstrue (and thus, if he is believed) undermine the work that many of us are doing to shine a light on the ways in which the ideology of "AI" and the specific ways in which LLMs and other "AI" products are created do real harm.
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@emilymbender Well, he has always been a self important jackhole, so….
I also want to point out (again) the ways in which lumping together all uses of LMs (like the lumping of technologies into "AI") obscures the issues at hand.
Language modeling is a useful component of many technologies that can be built without extractive, exploitative means. Take the automatic transcription built by and for the Māori people -- there's te reo Māori language model that's part of that.
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Oh c'mon! Let not facts stand in the way of the Luddite hordes...
...least you be denounced as a broligarch/techbro by the righteous!
I'm with Lord Byron on the Luddites:
Heh! I'm often reminded (and the piece below does a gorgeous job with the subject, incl referencing Byron's poem) that Luddism wasn't anti-progress / anti-tech / reactionary 😊 That's how the victors rewrote it, as they so often do.
And the transformer architecture represented an important step forward in language modeling, that brought improvements to things like spell checking (Doctorow's use case).
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@emilymbender Somewhat off-topic: I think some grammatical errors and typos are fine. I really don't like things that are too polished. I work with someone whom English is a second language, and he obviously uses LLMs to write messages. I'd rather read his own broken English than to wonder if the LLM generated what he actually meant. Similarly, I like live music recordings with mistakes and improvisation. Gives things more character, IMO. Over-polishing everything can lead to a type of bland conformity.
And you can build and use language models without turning them into the synthetic text extruding machines that are despoiling our information ecosystem.
And even if those are easily accessible, because OpenAI et al want to burn through cash with their demos, we can still refute and refuse the narrative that synthetic text is somehow a panacea to be used across social services (medicine, education) and in science, etc.
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@emilymbender It's so incredibly sad we have found a method to turn any snippet of text into some numbers that somehow encode the meaning behind it, and yet the most popular usecase is just guessing what the next word is
Doctorow could have gone into these details; could have said something about the particular LLM he chose was built (whose data, trained how, how much data, what kind of further data work in RLHF); could have drawn a distinction about use cases.
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@emilymbender Hi from a random Internet person! I wondered if you have a view on "Sovereign" models like Apertus? Per https://raw.githubusercontent.com/swiss-ai/apertus-tech-report/main/Apertus_Tech_Report.pdf
FWIW I am a genAI septic who started out feeling quite positive about this development, but then cooled on it rapidly once I realised that it doesn't address a) environmental impacts, or b) potential harms when genAI is used naively - or for plausible deniability by people doing bad stuff ¯_ (ツ)_/¯
*For anyone reading this who hasn't come across Apertus before, there are now several models like this with characteristics such as:
@emilymbender are there examples of people doing this well (describing what they chose, why, what data, maybe even how to challange or improve ?), that others can learn from? Would be v interested .
This distinction about use cases is the important point in my view. So much so that I wasn't fully on board with the first paragraphs of the Smashing Frames article (though I loved the rest).
For example, the analogy to wanting to be vegan but accepting vegetarian. I am convinced of the value of reducing our meat consumption and animal farming. But personally I don't find eating meat morally objectionable on principle. If I did, I'd *not* make exceptions.
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But instead he wrote a defensive screed, seemingly imagining someone knowing about his LLM use ascribing to him all of the ills of everyone's LLM production and use.
A missed opportunity, to be sure.
What we argued in Stochastic Parrots, however, was that you can get those benefits of the transformer architecture without ammassing datasets too large to collect with care (meaning consentfully, intentionally, and with the ability to document what's in the data).
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> without ammassing datasets too large to collect with care
I appreciate your post, and I'm a huge proponent for moving past the transformer.
However, how is worrying about this not choosing "cooperate" every single time in the Prisoner's Dilemma when you know Meta & Co will always choose "defect"?
This is worrying to me, because nefarious actors have no incentive to care about these issues (and actually have plenty of incentives to be hostile to these ideas). Also, they have institutional backing to do so.
@budududuroiu In what sense is this choosing 'cooperate' and also where do you see a prisoner's dilemma here?
@emilymbender "too large to collect with care" resonates strongly.
In this context, I feel like reminding people (again) that the stochastic parrots paper was not primarily a response to synthetic text extruding machines (not at all popular in late 2020), but an exploration of the range harms that had already been documented in the pursuit of LM scale.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
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