Post
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.
EDIT: Diskussions under this are fine, but I do not want this to turn into an ad hominem attack to Cory. Be fucking respectful
https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/
@tante Surprising. Almost as surprising as Bill Gates' 380-degree climate turnaround. What gave?
@tante I have to assume Cory's been bought by Big LLM.
I don't give a shit really but it's funny he's enraged his fans who think he's super smart and a great sci fi writer when he's really only good at fluffing himself. At least Gaiman was a genuinely good writer - something Doctorow only dreams of. (I despise Gaiman and will not read or watch any of his stuff because he's a shit human being.)
I have to assume Cory's been bought by Big LLM.
Um. @pluralistic is running Ollama fully locally. He's not shilling an API or online service. He's not condoning societal ills to my reading - and I did read his whole post.
fluffing himself
The post in question is an anniversary post from a writer whose neologism was recently selected as "word of the year" by major dictionaries, who is reflecting on his daily process and his year over year progression. It's a fluffier post than usual from him, but it's squarely to be expected given the content.
[being a] good writer - something Doctorow only dreams of
Whether Doctorow is a good writer or not, the ideas he's shoehorning into the public discussion are important ideas for society to consider.
Your post seems reactionary and inflammatory, to me!
@tante Refraining from spouting some ad hominen attacks on Cory… Yeah it's a strawman alright, and that's not even the half of it. 🙄
So Cory Doctorow has hopped on the GenAI/LLM train, mmm?
Ok. ok.
So human individuals are also subject to enshitification? OMGods!! Who knew? 🙄
> LLMs are based on extraction, exploitation and subjugation
So is torrenting. This is a very capitalist argument, coming from someone that self-identifies as a communist, that one deserves to reap the rewards of them adding value to humanity through some form of gatekeeping and is entitled to a reward from such gatekeeping. You're literally arguing on the side of Elsevier and JSTOR against Aaron Swartz
What does it matter if human knowledge is available as a book or an LLM? The important part is that all of humanity has access to it.
> Omelas is an almost perfect city. Rich, democratic, pleasant. But it only works by having one small child in perpetual torment.
Walking away from Omelas doesn't stop that child's perpetual torment. Your choice is merely ignorance and cowardice in front of injustice. Choosing to stay in Omelas and poison its democratic system to lead to its downfall is the arguably the more moral option. Let's not even get into the argument about how Germany made the Eurozone its Omelas at the expense of deficit-prone southern Europe, and how you should leave Germany by your argument.
> If everything is somehow “free and open” then we have won.
your moral choice to not use LLMs is the same as abandoning Omelas and the eternally tormented child, it serves as nothing but intellectual onanism. Distilling GPT 5, Opus 4.6, commoditising the petaflop (see George Hotz), deploying efficient models on Huawei chips is the same as causing rot in Omelas from the inside, causing the billions invested into AI to be worthless, tearing down the system that is perpetually tormenting that child. It is the only way forward.
Cory was right to label this "neolib purity testing", because 1) it sides with capital (see above point re: torrenting), 2) it tries to don the mantel of dialectical materialism, while viewing this issue through a lens of "individualist action" and static morality and 3) It endlessly criticises power instead of aiming to claim and wield it for good.
@budududuroiu @tante The objection that rankles a lot of people is not about capitalism, aka sheer monetary reward. It's about cultural appropriation.
Look at code, since that's been a very popular use case and it *is* trained on presumably open source code. Even so, it's still not ethical. The reason is that the person generating code trained on open source is not participating in the community & skillset of that open source. It's reaping the rewards of the commons, *while not growing it.*
@tante Thank you for writing this; I feel like it's a necessary counterpoint. I definitely agree more with you than I do with Cory on this one. But I also feel a bit like you're talking past each other a bit. The difficulty with Internet Discourse like this is that in order to avoid harassment we are often arguing with large, nebulous collectives rather than calling out individuals. I think that Cory is correct that the *line of argument* he is criticizing is in fact fallacious.
@tante The question about the strawman is: is anyone comprehensively, seriously making this argument? I don't think so. I think a lot of people are extremely fucking angry for justifiable reasons and directionlessly and not particularly coherently lashing out in ways that look "purity culture"-ish. You can see it all over the replies here, with Cory mixing it up, which sure seems to prove the point! *I* don't feel like this constitutes a serious argument, but it's still, like… there
@tante So, what I feel like is happening here, is:
1. Some people are making a comprehensive argument against the use of LLMs, well-supported on all sides.
2. This metastasizes into a yelling match about "AI", with fuzzy boundaries and highly emotionally charged language, with a lot of participants who aren't necessarily experts or do not have the time to make a careful argument.
3. Cory picks a fight with this *real* but not-particularly-robust position, skipping stronger counterarguments.
@tante Your abstract arguments are a good counter-position but are still missing something: a specific, situated critique of local models. A lot of the structural properties and material impacts that you describe are specific to the big, hosted models. You veer off into criticizing OpenAI pretty early, which doesn't apply to open-weight, on-device models that Cory is talking about.
@tante I think you successfully argue that artifacts *do* have politics, but you fall apart a bit on what the politics of local LLMs *are*. The argument that their politics "are violence" but that argument almost entirely applies to Google's regular "non-AI" (arguably not accurate since neural nets have been involved for years before LLMs) search index. Is a google search the same kind of "violence" as a local LLM?
@tante Ugh okay this is too many replies, thanks again for writing this, sorry for getting into so much nit-picking, I just need to write my own "it's time to stop using LLMs" omnibus that collects my own perspective on the *different* reasons one should avoid hosted vs. local models
@tante wow this is so disappointing about Cory Doctorow. I find your take more level headed.
I find it also very analogous to how I hate Facebook/Meta but I have to maintain my instagram account to keep in touch with some friends even if I hardly browse around instagram anymore. I do think there’s a way to reluctantly do things you don’t really agree with, like using instagram, driving cars, flying, using plastics, etc. and it’s still a big difference from not putting up a fight at all.
@tante It's why I'm (lately) preternaturally cautious around "very loud" voices. Part of their ability to formulate & disseminate their contrarian view is dismissing some views & focusing on core principles. If you don't keep counterbalancing voices close, it's extraordinarily easy for that methodology to abruptly send you far off the path.
See also: DHH
@tante These days, I generally follow people inclined to selectively & thoughtfully retweet folks like that than to drink from those particular fire hoses directly.
@tante The original strawman was somewhat acceptable ("if you refuse to use things touched by evil completely you can't use computers, so we all draw a line somewhere and this is where I draw mine" yadda yadda), but what follows is a pristine example of "man slips on a slippery slope, and slips a lot". :D
thanks for writing and sharing your mindful critique of this argument.
@tante That’s a lot of big words! I just want to use tech without feeling guilty. But yeah, being respectful is always good—even online.
@tante questions for the leftists and liberals from a confused anarchist:
1. Do you think you can put the cat back in the bag with LLMs? How?
2. For those that believe that LLMs were trained on stolen data, what does it mean for data to be private, scarce property, that can be "stolen?"
3. What about models that just steal from the big boys, like the PRC ones? Theft from capitalists, surely ethical?
4. Will you not using any LLMs cause Sam Altman and friends to lose control of your country?
"Sometimes a belief or ethic you hold is so integral to you that you will not move. Sometimes they are held loosely enough to let go under certain conditions." 🔥🔥
@tante I like 'cyberphysical world'. Es benutzt 'cyber' auf eine Art und Weise, die es wieder vertretbar macht. Sehr spaßig, wie begriffe so verwolft werden, dass sie wieder schmecken können. 🙃
@tante (1/2) As David Golumbia puts it in his book The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology, "More careful attention needs be paid to writers like Jarvis, Shirky, Doctorow and other promoters of 'internet freedom', 'digital liberation', 'liberation technologies,' and 'Twitter revolutions'. These voices tend to allow descriptions of technology to overwhelm and displace discussions of the politics they appear to be describing."
@tante
while we're pointing out logistical inconsistencies..
there is zero reason to stop masking in an ongoing pandemic - especially as someone who acknowledged the benefits previously
nothing has changed to make this a rational choice and it can't be said to be in solidarity with disabled people (or folks in general)
"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.
@lrhodes I agree, I believe that we do encode our values into our technology. Particularly with what we code and what we use to code or write.
@onepict Yeah, code is a pretty literal manifestation of that principle, right?
And one of the major advantages of AI from an ideological point of view is that it allows the provider to write their values into *other people's code*.
@lrhodes Yes.
There's a desperation as well for some enthusiastic folks to justify this and impose their view on the rest of us. It's what disquieted me. The defensive attitude anticipating us stating and enforcing our boundaries.
But it's our culture in Tech and I wish as a whole Tech would step back and like take a minute, rather than reacting and negging.
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.
enshittification of pluralistic
@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.
Hmmmm... How about this perspective?
LLM is just a programming technique. The ethicality of using LLMs relates to the type of use and the source of the data it was trained on.
Using LLMs to search the universe for dark matter using survey telescopic data or to identify drug efficacy using anonymized public health records is simply using the latest technology for good purpose. Cory's use seems like this.
LLMs trained on stolen data creating derivative work. That's just theft.
Hmmmm... How about this perspective?
LLM is just a programming technique. The ethicality of using LLMs relates to the type of use and the source of the data it was trained on.
Using LLMs to search the universe for dark matter using survey telescopic data or to identify drug efficacy using anonymized public health records is simply using the latest technology for good purpose. Cory's use seems like this.
LLMs trained on stolen data creating derivative work. That's just theft.
@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.
Thanks for these corrections. Completely agree with everything, and thanks for tagging Cory.
One of the really unfortunate things that the Silicon Valley scammers have achieved is to coopt new technologies for their despicable pump and dump schemes and apply their disingenuous hype factory which ends up tarring all uses with the same brush.
@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.
@reflex @shiri @pluralistic @tante
Seems like Cory's local punctuation and grammer checker is such an example, no?
I completely agree with your view on us being messy, imperfect beings. And while many take such a realization as a free ticket to shrug themselves into deep cynicism, I deeply appreciate people who tend to try a little harder than most to do the right thing, and own every compromise they decide to make as what it is.
Once we start warping our analysis and critical thinking to match our actions instead of trying our best to make our actions fit the former, we'll quickly start losing any ability to be act with any accountability.
@tante I am pursuing what I am calling my "AI Tea Party". It's origin was in putting family birth certificates in a self-hosted tool and realizing I didn't know if that meant they would end up in a training set somewhere. That began a process of me purging direct links to any LLM. Next step is switching to tools that do not use any LLM in their operation. After that is switching from suppliers of anything that use LLMs to operate.
This is a Sisyphean task since these round to **fucking everything** but I'm motivated to pursue it anyway.
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@tante Well, I mean, he's wrong, so there's that.
@tante Frankly, I don't think there are any ethical concerns with how he's using it.
The reason AI is a violation when it trains on openly available data and then outputs similar stuff is that it's creating derivative works. Something that reads everything produced by man and then uses that information to score similar output does NOT. It's completely fair use and it's a GOOD application of AI.
IFF all the evil crap that the people who made it are up to wasn't a concern there'd be none.
@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.
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
I really like and admire @pluralistic and have utmost respect for him, and for precisely those reasons am totally baffled as to why he is claiming "fruit of the poisoned tree" arguments being the cause of LLM scepticism.
The objections to LLMs are to do with what they they are doing right now: destroying the planet, stealing labour, giving power over knowledge to their owners etc.
The objections are nothing to do with LLMs' origins, they're entirely about LLMs' effects in the here and now.
@FediThing @tante @pluralistic Some people - in fact quite a lot; if my reading is correct - do indeed argue that LLMs can *never* be ethically used because they are “trained on stolen work”.
@ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante
Performing mathematical analysis on large corpora of published work is not "stealing."
@pluralistic @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante If that “mathematical analysis” regurgitates near verbatim works created by other people, it certainly is committing IP theft, and LLMs will happily do that. The “mathematical analysis” is effectively a form of lossy compression on its training data which a prompt can later extract.
@bjn @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante
Once again, you're talking about *using* a model, not training a model.
Also "IP theft" isn't a thing. Perhaps you mean copyright infringement?
@pluralistic @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante I’ll give you pedant points for copyright infringement, which is what most people mean by “IP theft”. As for training/using, the difference is somewhat moot. The models are trained to be used, and if trained on copyrighted data without a license, you’ve encoded that data into the model which might then regurgitate it thus facilitating copyright infringement.
@pluralistic @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante “Mathematical analysis” is doing a lot of work here. It could mean gathering meaningless statistics. Or it could mean capturing the qualities (deviations from the average) that make a particular work of art (or author) special, creative, surprising—for use in simulacra.
I think that's harmful, to the culture as a whole, if not to the artworks and artists getting regurgitated.
@gleick @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante
Let's stipulate to that (I don't agree, as it happens, but that's OK). It's still not a copyright infringement to enumerate and analyze the elements of a copyrighted work.
For the record, I think AI art is bad and neither consume nor make it.
@pluralistic @gleick @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante there's been documented cases of LLMs regurgitating stuff from their training set verbatim, which clearly IS copyright infringement; and that means some parts of the training set are.encodrd in the weights of the model, which looks like publishing a copyrighted work to me. If publishing a JPEG of an image without copyright to it would be infringing, isn't publishing a model that can recreate something also infringing?
@pluralistic @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante I'm not claiming that's copyright infringement. Even if one respects the general framework of copyright, which I know you don’t, it seems hopeless to apply it to this AI mess.
But there is a kind of theft here. Not that it's actionable or measurable. But it’s nontrivial. It's related to questions of impersonation. It's an assault on individuality. Whatever your reasons for thinking AI art is bad (I have some sense), it's related to that, too.
@gleick @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante
Let's stipulate to that (I don't agree, as it happens, but that's OK). It's still not a copyright infringement to enumerate and analyze the elements of a copyrighted work.
For the record, I think AI art is bad and neither consume nor make it.
@pluralistic @FediThing @tante I agree - but that is the (incorrect imho) argument they make.
@pluralistic @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante It really depends a bit on the details, doesn't it. If I copy a CD, I also perform some mathematical analysis on it, error checking etc. Maybe I even make non-exact copy by passing it through some filter to make it sound better. But it's totally different from listening to a bunch of Beatles songs and then getting inspired to write my own songs in a similar style.
@pluralistic @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante
It's still profit loss damage curable by income transfer if the illegally acquired data was used to create that profit. Dataset prominence should provide the percentage of profits and prominence is data size but also inference casualty. The primary literature should not be able to be diluted with free intellectual property.
I don't know if any of this is actual case law and I'm not a lawyer.
@drdrowland @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante
You're talking about ways of using models, not the creation of models. It's possible to make a model that does illegal things. But training a model is not illegal.
@FediThing @tante @pluralistic I’ve been utterly baffled why he’s so popular for decades.
@Colman @FediThing @pluralistic 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
@Colman @FediThing @tante That's interesting. I've never wondered that about you.
@pluralistic capital murder on the timeline
@pluralistic @Colman @FediThing @tante
This is...disappointing. To be fair, I'm disappointed in almost everyone in this thread for engaging in schoolyard shit throwing, but you're much higher in status and your shit sticks. Have a conversation. Figure out where these views can comingle. Find common understanding or you risk using your high status to fracture an already unstable alliance of people who want technology to operate safely and for the benefit of our shared humanity.
Do better.
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 You should read the top-of-thread link. It lays out in detail the author's disagreements with you in a respectful manor.
Maybe you'll call it incoherent because you don't want to listen to accusations of going against your own principles, noone does. But I would disagree.
@pluralistic i'd start with the part that the model probably came pre-trained. Or was it trained by you on your laptop...? @FediThing @tante
This is a purity culture argument about the "fruit of the poisoned tree." The silicon in your laptop was invented by a eugenicist. The network your packets transit was invented by war criminals. The satellite the signal travels on was launched on a rocket descended from Nazi designs that were built by death-camp slaves.
@pluralistic i guess this misses the point: the particular chip in my laptop wasn't made by war criminals (i hope...), but the model you do use was trained under vast amounts of energy and water consumption. I'm not sure this is completely comparable, tbh.
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 and yes, i'm aware that producing a chip also costs vast amounts of energy and water... but at least my chip is used to solve a multitude of purposes, while a LLM that checks spelling and grammar is built and trained for one single use-case (that, nb, could also be done without an LLM). So yes, I do differenciate. @FediThing @tante
To be clear, I completely reject this argument as a form of special pleading. Everyone has a reason why *their* fruit of the poisoned tree is OK, but other peoples' fruit of the poisoned tree is immoral.
@pluralistic Think a bit harder about 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?
@pluralistic I don't think mink fur or LLMs are comparable to criticizing the origins of the internet or transistors. It's the process that produced mink fur and LLMs that is destructive, not merely that it's made by bad people.
For example, LLM crawlers regularly take down independent websites like Codeberg, DDoSing, threatening the small web. You may say "but my LLM is frozen in time, it's not part of that scraping now", but it would not remain useful without updates.
No. Literally the same LLM that currently finds punctuation errors will continue to do so. I'm not inventing novel forms of punctuation error that I need an updated LLM to discover.
@pluralistic@mamot.f I don't think mink fur or LLMs are comparable to criticizing the origins of the internet or transistors. It's the process that produced mink fur and LLMs that is destructive, not merely that it's made by bad people.
For example, LLM crawlers regularly take down independent websites like Codeberg, DDoSing, threatening the small web. You may say "but my LLM is frozen in time, it's not part of that scraping now", but it would not remain useful without updates.
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.
(Hello Mr Doctorow! Just want to make clear I admire you a great deal and this isn't intended as an attack on you!)
Running a local LLM with no connection to outside providers might be a way of avoiding bad stuff, but I am not clear on how this relates to discussing origins of technologies?
It seems like there's ambiguity in your post about whether it applies just to people with homelabs wondering if they should try offline LLMs, or whether you are discussing LLMs as a general technology?
Almost everyone using LLMs will use the online kind, so objections to LLMs are (reasonably IMHO) based on that scenario.
> 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 __").
@pluralistic @FediThing @tante
What's the difference between your argument here and "Slavery is OK because I didn't kidnap the slaves; I just inherited them from my dad." ??
Because there are no slaves in this instance. Because no one is being harmed or asked to do any work, or being deprived of anything, or adversely affected in *any articulable way*.
But yeah, in every other regard, this is exactly that enslaving people.
Sure.
Thank you for the responses 🙏
"Because the arguments against running an LLM on your own computer"
...ahhh okay. So was this post aimed more at a very narrow homelab kind of audience?
It's just, as a reader, the article's emphasis on examples of tech origins imply it's trying to defend LLMs in general? This probably is my ignorance as a reader, but it's how it came across to me, and led to bafflement.
> 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.
@tante Use of the word "neoliberal" in earnest in an essay is an almost infallible sign of nonsense. Certainly it works here.
@tante Thanks for putting this into words. Struck me the same way.
@tante “Technology doesn’t need liberation, people do.“ It seems so crystal clear to me.
That doesn't seem to be the best idea @pluralistic
AI and LLM output is 90% bullshit, and most people don't have the time nor the patience to work out which 10% might actually be useful.
That's completely ignoring the environmental and human impacts of the AI bubble.
Try buying DDR memory, a GPU or an SSD / HDD at the moment.
@simonzerafa @tante @pluralistic
At best 40% junk, but unless you are so expert you don't need it, you can't know which is plausible rubbish.
Would you play Russian Roulette every day for hours?
Beats me.
I thought Cory was supposed to be clever or something? I've blocked him for now. Not interested in banging my head against that particular lack of critical thinking.
Perhaps when the AI bubble bursts, he will become more rational.
@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.
@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?"
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 I hate to dive into what is clearly a heated debate, but I want to add an answer to your question with a perspective that I think is missing: the power consumption for inference on your laptop is probably greater than in a datacenter. The latter is heavily incentivized to optimize power usage.
parsing a doc uses as much juice as streaming a Youtube video and less juice than performing a gnarly transform on a hi-rez in the Gimp.
I measured.
@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?
@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.
@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
Subhead quote from the article:
"The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next."
@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
But Google Docs anything is rubbish.
@raymaccarthy @simonzerafa @tante
I see. And do you have moral opinions about whether people should use Google Docs? Do you seek out strangers to tell them that it's dangerous to use Google Docs?
Of course, I am speaking in generalities.
Encouraging the use of LLM's is counterproductive in so many ways, as I highlighted.
Pop a power meter on that LLM adorned PC and let us all know what the power usage looks like with and without your chosen LLM running on a typical task 🙂
That's power that generated somewhere, even if it's with renewable energy.
The main issue with LLM's is that they don't encourage critical thinking, in a world which is already suffering from a massive shortage.
As I wrote (and it seems you haven't read what I wrote, which is weird, because that seems like a good first step if you're going to criticize my conduct), I'm running Ollama on a laptop that doesn't even have a GPU.
Its power consumption is comparable to, say, watching a Youtube video.
I know this because my laptop is running free software that lets me accurately monitor its activity, and because the model is also free software.
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.
I am astonished that I have to explain this,
but very simply in words even a small child could understand:
using these products *creates further demand*
- surely you know this?
Well, either you know this and are being facetious, or you are a lot stupider than I ever thought possible for someone with your privilege and resources.
I am absolutely floored at this reveal, just wow, "where's Cory and what have you done with him?" 🤷
Massive loss of respect!
@tante There must be something in the air; I think this is something that has been on many folks' minds for a while... not criticisms of Cory, but rather the general cognitive difficulty of reconciling survival in a world far less under our control than we thought it was when our character and values accreted and congealed.
It's a nuanced phenomenon especially for a limited-attention-span world. It's good to see people taking up the challenge. Thanks for this.
@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 pruists' ), 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.
@pluralistic @tante My impression was, Tante meant this specific argument and the way it is structured, and the way it functions. I hold the both of you in high esteem, and I don't have the impression that he'd somehow characterize anything beyond that argument he discusses.
> 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.
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.
@pluralistic @herrLorenz @tante Of course! Agreed.
The overlap ends around -when- reasons are "good" enough. Laws about how to treat other people are relatively easy.
But until enough people see rivers on fire, regulations on -doing certain things- aren't imposed, despite many people saying "hey, this isn't good" decades prior.
Not reining in/regulating until after -foreseeable- catastrophes results in all kinds of shit shows (from the MIC, to urban sprawl, to plastics, to tax laws, etc)
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. ✌️
@tante@tldr.nettime.org That's not the only thing where the actions and words of Doctorow do not match.
@tante I, for one, enjoyed the write-up.
As you, I do plenty of things that I either cannot morally or ethically defend or simply am ignorant of the harms of.
For other technology, I am either pressured to use it (by government or similar institutions) or I can at least use it 'for good' (facilitating some other good - in current case, student administration) and also make a living.
For LLMs, I fail to see the redeeming qualities that make the compromise 'worth it'. It's all nett negatives.
@tante My point is that LLMs 'try' (and very often fail) to solve the wrong problem.
Writing all the boilerplate -> should be solved by better frameworks.
Spell check -> I think this is already invented.
Summarize long texts -> Executive summaries.
Produce (verbose) text -> Writing in my view is as much thinking as it is writing - skipping the thinking part is counter-productive.
@tofticles @tante @onepict it's a bitter pill to be forced to use a spell checker that until very recently didn't even know how many rs are in "strawberry " (or ls in "blackball").
@perigee @tofticles I think @tante captured the difficulties existing and surviving in this world.
I'm still disappointed with Doctorow, especially since he felt the need to get his defence in first.
His choice of wording there was saddening to me. He outsourced his feelings of guilt and judgement on the rest of us.
Whenever I hear or read someone using the term purity anything I feel a mild disappointment. Because I do expect better of our leaders who take the public stage.
@tante At Tuesday night's #Faradayprize presentation from Mike Woodbridge, more than one of the slides about #LLMs brought #Trump to mind
@tante One thing I'd love to hear more about from you, and @pluralistic, @simon and others is which of these models are doing the best, most interesting things to mitigate harms? Some are being trained with thought about & limits on the inputs, and the public interest in mind in general. To at least some degree. (e.g., Apertus)
Who's reviewing, comparing models with that lens? If someone understands most companies are part of the problem and asks for alternatives, what do you offer them?
@tante I still haven't completely unpacked these arguments. To dwell on the gramnar checker thing, I assume that pre-LLM checkers were to some extent developed by building statistical models from a large corpus of existing text. That's not quite the same thing as the mass plagiarism used to build generative AI models. For myself I've never used such tools, I consider them an annoyance: If there's a mistake in my writing, the human reader will make a better job of correcting it from context.
@kbm0 @tante Yes and no. Most spelling checkers used to be built off of example text, which I gather was sourced from various 'official' dictionaries (eg the Oxford English Dictionary). I'd guess that grammar checkers were built off of similar official or agreed-on sources. No idea if there were costs or issues involved in that.
Apparently, algorithmic context-sensitive spelling checkers have been around for quite a while - the most successful algorithm for it to date was developed in 1999. I'd guess that they were again using example text as a source. (Spelling suggestion engines use a combination of example text plus user input to capture misspellings that can't be generated algorithmically, but I don't think that even comes close to the scale of scraping. Predictive text again used a source dictionary plus the user's past inputs.)
They're not without controversy or fault, especially grammar checkers, and there are still some technical limitations for some non-English languages (and apparently, specific fields like medical documentation). But they don't seem to be nearly as controversial as the use of scraped sources for data for LLMs.
(Grammar checkers come under fire mainly because they tend to include style rules that aren't universally agreed on and sometimes are very outdated too, plus they tend to not be very sensitive to context and so can easily end up causing more issues than they solve. But I just don't see how an LLM can do any better compared against the writer proofreading their own work.)
@kbm0 @tante
Spelling checkers need a curated dictionary related to a style guide as only one valid variant spelling should be used by an author, novel series or organisation.
Grammar checkers seem tuned to particular kinds of document, which certainly wouldn't include novels or blog posts.
Certain kinds of punctuation errors can be found. You don't need an LLM for that! Even some Regex can supplement a basic Grammar checker.
A lack of closing quote isn't always an error, nor a repeated word.
@tante (Not meant as nitpicking, but it's the very first stentence and I stumble over it. Should be "Life is complicated".)
@tante It's also annoying tone policing: Sure, you can protest against it, but not like *that*.
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