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@tante Is refusing buy a Tesla or use X because I disapprove of Musks racism and suport of Trump, "neoliberal purity culture" ? Maybe putting solar on my house is "neoliberal purity culture" too, as is refusing to cross a picket line. Seems like Doctorow uses "purity culture" to mean what I would call "moral responsibility". As for "neoliberal", insofar as it retains any meaning, it's much more applicable to the kind of free market libertarian argument that Doctorow is making than otherwise.

@tante
> Again, it twists the argument in the way that the AI corporations like to do it as well: Search engines scour the web so AI companies should be allowed the same. It’s the same technology!

Just to add to your argument, there is another key difference between scraping for searching and scraping for LLMs.
Scraping for searching does have the concept of consent (if imperfect): it's opt-out, you can always say that you don't consent to your website (wholly or in parts) be scraped (by specific search engines or all of them), in your `robots.txt` controlled by you, and your decision will be respected. And this works also for revoking previous implicitly (or even explicitly) given consent.
As far as I'm aware no LLM honors `robots.txt`, and even if they would, they still don't and cannot offer any mechanism for consent revocation.

@tante can you refer me to the blogpost you are quoting there? I would really like to understand what the context is.

@tante I don't think anyone should have to resort to ad hominem when there's so many of his actual words to point to over the past decades.

@tante "neoliberal purity culture" ? Menuda tontería!

@tante that doesn't sound like Cory "AI is a bubble and a scam" Doctrow. Can you provide link to where that's published? I couldn't find any kind of reference online.

@tante
I disagree with Corey. Now I'm going to get on with the rest of my day.

Not that I care about Doctorow but do you use only ethical technology? I think it's fair not wanting to use ChatGPT but calling LLMs or worse "AI" (a whole computer science field) the devil is plainly silly. And it's not like it's going anywhere

@tante computers make copying essentially free. LLMs are just one instance of that. We should adapt to copying being free, because after LLMs there will be inventions that make copying even easier. Strongly reducing copyright protection (and other forms of IP) is part of that. As is enforcing anti-monopoly law

@tante Gawd, you don’t even need an LLM to do that. There’s Antidote and Grammarly, just to name two…

@tante I've struggled for a while to reconcile people's justified outrage at the AI bubble's incalculably harmful unsustainability with the need to deny that even the most banal utility of its outputs could ever possibly have merit.

Credit to @pluralistic for really articulating why I find the "Not Even Once" crowd to be largely missing the point, even if we all agree that the "AI True Believers" are ghoulish monsters.

@tante @cford My only real takeaway here is that good arguments only can proceed when the arguer puts forth the opposing case in terms its proponents agree with.

I don’t think that’s what Cory did here. And, y’know that’s fine, in a real sense – not all essays need promote good arguments. When he accurately portrays the views of monopolists, regardless if they would claim to agree, that’s still a perspective worth observing.

@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.)