Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture".

[colman@mastodon.ie]

@Life_is @tante he’s a very efficient grifter. Has been for decades.

[colman@mastodon.ie]

@FediThing @tante @pluralistic I’ve been utterly baffled why he’s so popular for decades.

[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

@Colman @FediThing @tante That's interesting. I've never wondered that about you.

[osma@mas.to]

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

[tante@tldr.nettime.org]

@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

[tante@tldr.nettime.org]

@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

[raymaccarthy@mastodon.ie]

@tante @simonzerafa
A brilliant person isn't right about everything.
It's only a criticism of one view/idea.

[tante@tldr.nettime.org]

@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.

[skyfaller@jawns.club]

@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?

@FediThing @tante

[tiotasram@kolektiva.social]

@tante excellent article; thanks for explaining things so clearly and getting into how different moral philosophies inform decisions here.

[flesh@transfem.social]

@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.

[herrlorenz@chaos.social]

@pluralistic @tante I just spoke about my impression, but didn't lay claim to objective truth. I'll keep reading along. ✌️

[shiri@foggyminds.com]

@pluralistic I'd be disappointed if I didn't see myself in the pattern of engaging with people on a post like this who are worlds away from having a fair discussion...

They literally can't see the reality of AI beyond their arguments, they've decided it's inherently evil and wrong and locked in their viewpoint.

So their "russian roulette every day for hours" is because, despite you saying what you use it for, they can't comprehend how it can be used outside of the worst possible use cases.

Same reason they're accusing you of being a libertarian, but that's already the purity culture you were originally calling out.

@simonzerafa @raymaccarthy @tante

[cjpaloma@mstdn.social]

@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.

[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

@skyfaller @FediThing @tante

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@mamot.fr]

@skyfaller @FediThing @tante

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)

[osma@mas.to]

Whatever I just wrote, thanks. Don't see why we should debate it.
@flesh

[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

@FediThing @tante

> 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@mamot.fr]

@FediThing @tante

> 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.

[dhd6@jasette.facil.services]

@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)