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

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[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

@dhd6 @tante @simonzerafa

Rockets were literally perfected in Nazi slave labor camps.

[clintruin@mastodon.social]

@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.

[jorismeys@mstdn.social]

@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 purists' ), 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.

[reflex@retrogaming.social]

@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.

[clintruin@mastodon.social]

@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."

[mastodonmigration@mastodon.online]

@reflex @shiri @pluralistic @tante

Seems like Cory's local punctuation and grammer checker is such an example, no?

[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

@clintruin @simonzerafa @tante

You are laboring under a misapprehension.

I will reiterate my question, with all caps for emphasis.

Which "couple million people" suffer harm when I run a model ON MY LAPTOP?

[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

@clintruin @simonzerafa @tante

Well, you could "do what Cory does" by familiarizing yourself with the conduct that you are criticizing before engaging in ad hominem.

To be fair, that's not unique to me, but people who fail to rise to that standard are doing themselves and others no good.

[clintruin@mastodon.social]

@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
I'll reiterate my response.

When you *alone* do it...no big deal.
When a couple of million do it ON THEIR OWN LAPTOPS...problem.

[liquor_american@universeodon.com]

@tante It is difficult to be respectful to someone who had built a reputation and then deliberately alienated a large share of the following that came with that reputation. I will just say that when you're right about important issues as often as Doctorow has been, it is a very human thing to develop a certain arrogance. I hope he receives the critical feedback rather than digging in.

PS There are ample non-LLM technologies that do what he claims to use LLMs for. I would be interested to see his reasons for passing over those options.

[bazkie@beige.party]

@prinlu @FediThing @pluralistic @tante I agree with most things said in this thread, but on a very practical level, I'm curious what training data was used for the model used by @pluralistic 's typo-checking ollama?

for me, that training data is key here. was it consensually allowed for use in training?

because as I understand, LLMs need vast amounts of training data, and I'm just not sure how you would get access to such data consensually. would love to be enlightened about this :)

[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

@clintruin @simonzerafa @tante

OK, sorry, i was under the impression that I was having a discussion with someone who understands this issue.

You are completely, empirically, technically wrong.

Checking the punctuation on a document on your laptop uses less electricity than watching a Youtube video.

[johnbrowntypeface@spore.social]

@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)

[mallory@hachyderm.io]

@tante People like Cory who mock others for their disabilities are not worth paying attention to.

[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

@bazkie @prinlu @FediThing @tante

I do not accept the premise that scraping for training data is unethical (leaving aside questions of overloading others' servers).

This is how every search engine works. It's how computational linguistics works. It's how the Internet Archive works.

Making transient copies of other peoples' work to perform mathematical analysis on them isn't just acceptable, it's an unalloyed good and should be encouraged:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

[shiri@foggyminds.com]

@mastodonmigration
it's the "copyright" issue, the outlook that unless everyone who posted anything that was used receives a check for a hefty sum then it's unethical.

Copyright is in quotes because it's not really a violation of copyright (the LLMs are not producing whole copies of copywritten materials without basically being forced) nor is it a violation of the intent of copyright (people are confused, copyright was never intended to give artists total control, it's just to ensure new art continues to be created).

@pluralistic @reflex @tante

[n1xnx@tilde.zone]

@tante
I partly agree with Cory and partly not.
Refusing to use resource-gobbling datacenter-hosted LLMs makes perfect sense. I'd just as soon heat my house by burning kittens. It is also a rational political statement.

Refusing to use an LLM hosted on my own iron is also a political statement, as well as a personal choice. I don't give a hoot about ideological purity; I just distrust clankers, and don't want to get into the habit of depending on them. (Besides, they offer me nothing I cannot as easily do for myself.)

[correl@fedi.fenix.lgbt]

@skyfaller@jawns.club @pluralistic@mamot.fr @FediThing@social.chinwag.org @tante@tldr.nettime.org This is precisely it; it's about the process, not their distance from Altman, Amodei, et al. (which the Ollama project and those like it achieve).

The LLM models themselves are, per this analogy, still almost entirely of the mink-corpse variety, and I think it's a stretch to scream "purity!" at everyone giving you the stink eye for the coat you're wearing.

It's not impossible to have and use a model, locally hosted and energy-efficient, that wasn't directly birthed by mass theft and human abuse (or training directly off of models that were). And having models that aren't, that are genuinely open, is great! That's how the wickedness gets purged and the underlying tech gets liberated.

Maybe your coat is indeed synthetic, that much is still unclear, because so far all the arguing seems to be focused on the store you got it from and the monsters that operate the worst outlets.

[clintruin@mastodon.social]

@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante

Fair enough, Cory. You're gonna do what you want regardless of my accuracy or inaccuracy anyway. And maybe I've misunderstood this. The same way many many will.

But visualize this:

"Hey...I just read Cory Doctrow uses an LLM to check his writing."
"Really?"
"Yeah, it's true."
"Cool, maybe what I've read about ChatGPT is wrong too..."