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.
https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/
@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@tldr.nettime.org the enshittification's got to his head i guess
i'll say people who go out of their way to be unethical and complain about "purity culture" when confronted about it are fucking annoying at best
no more respect for that guy
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@mastodon.online @tante@tldr.nettime.org nope nope nope nope stop with the slopologism
> 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.
that's the broader field of machine learning. not LLMs
LLMs are by and large unethical cognitive decline inducing generators of soulless slop.
@mastodonmigration @tante oh and for fuck’s sake, there’s no such thing as “stealing data”, copying is not theft and a progressive individual should understand that. you’ve better angles to complain about slop generators from
@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.
I really like and admire @pluralistic and have utmost respect for him, and that's why I'm totally baffled about why he is claiming "fruit of the poisoned tree" arguments as cause of LLM scepticism.
The objections to LLMs aren't about origins but about what they they are doing right now: destroying the planet, stealing labour, giving power over knowledge to LLM 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”.
@FediThing … Certainly this is true of my reasoning for a #noAI stance. For me it's about climate, economic and social impacts of the ever growing mega-LLMs, and the craze to use them for all kinds of purposes for which they are unfit.
I am much less concerned with a local instance checking a writer's grammar. Lumping those two together makes little sense, to me.
On some other topics, I find @pluralistic's leadership constructive and helpful.
@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
Yup. Cory Doctorow has done so much good by turning complex important topics into easy-to-grasp concepts like enshittification, it's made the debate over tech much richer and more widely held.
I'm not attacking him personally or his work.
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?"
(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 __").
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.
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.
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!
☠️
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."
@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.
