Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture".
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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?
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)
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@osma@mas.to @tante@tldr.nettime.org It has debatable utility in some uses, but nowhere near enough to make the industry worth keeping around given the ethical concerns. The utility is effectively immaterial compared to the self-parody levels of evil on display from OpenAI and its ilk.
Whatever I just wrote, thanks. Don't see why we should debate it.
@flesh -
> 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 __").
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> 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 __").
> 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.
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@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.
@tante @pluralistic @simonzerafa I agree in principle with Cory, but I really wish that he had clarified that:
1. Ollama is not an LLM, it's a server for various models, of varying degrees of openness.
2. Open weights is not open source, the model is still a black box. We should support projects like OLMO, which are completely open, down to the training data set and checkpoints.
3. It's quite difficult to "seize that technology" without using Someone Else's Computer to do so (a.k.a clown/cloud) -
@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.
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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.
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 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.
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@pluralistic I think you can answer 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?
@skyfaller I think you should be able to answer these questions yourself, but clearly are struggling...
On your mink fur argument: the one ethical way to wear something like that is to only purchase used and old. The harm is done regardless of whether you purchase, you don't increase demand because your refusal to purchase new or recent means there's no profit in it. (This argument is also flawed because it's assuming local LLMs are made for profit when no profit is made on them)
And on your Luddite argument: When someone is using a machine to further oppress workers, the issue is not the machine but the person using it. You attack the machine to deprive them of it. But when an individual is using a completely separate instance of the machine, contributing nothing to those who are using the machine to abuse people... attacking them is simply attacking the worker.
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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.
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 Didn't we already have spelling and grammar tools before everyone decided LLMs needed to be pushed at every problem?
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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.
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@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.
@skyfaller @FediThing @tante I strongly recommend Brian Merchant's "Blood in the Machine" as the best modern history of the Luddites.
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@Colman @FediThing @tante That's interesting. I've never wondered that about you.
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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.
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 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.
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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.
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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.
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 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.
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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!
@kel it sounds like your respect is rooted only in someone agreeing with you. If you respected them you'd maybe take a minute to listen to their arguments and ask yourself more about why they might disagree with you.
Namely the fact that you don't understand how "using these products creates further demand" doesn't relate to their arguments at all?
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@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.
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@FediThing @tante This is the use-case that is under discussion.
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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.
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 Well, I mean, he's wrong, so there's that.
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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.
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 I will point out that I don't think that Cory is engaged in erecting a strawman, I think he's making a focused argument.
LLMs are a _big_ topic, and there are so many different ways folks are using them. Some folks _are_ opposed to any use of an LLM because of the reasons he has said, I heard these arguments. I think Cory is bucking this specific argument, and I think he's trying to point out that we can still try to find what is useful amidst what is problematic, and then use it on our own terms.
I disagree with how you seem to have read his position here.
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