Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture".
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I'd actually take this a step further and say that technologies ARE social arrangements.
@lrhodes I agree, I believe that we do encode our values into our technology. Particularly with what we code and what we use to code or write.
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@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/
@pluralistic @prinlu @FediThing @tante I think the difference to search engines is how LLM reproduces the training data..
as a thought experiment; what if I'd scrape all your blogposts, then start a blog that makes Cory Doctorow styled blogposts, which would end up more popular than your OG blog since I throw billions in marketing money at it.
would you find that ethical? would you find it acceptable?
further thought experiment; lets say you lose most of your income as a result and have to stop making blogs and start flipping burgers at mcDonalds.
your blog would stop existing, and so, my copycat blog would, too - or at least, it would stop bringing novel blogposts.
this kind of effect is real and will very much hinder cultural development, if not grind it to a halt.
that is a problem - this is culturally unsustainable.
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@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..."@clintruin @simonzerafa @tante
This is an absurd argument.
"I just read about a thing that is fine, but I wasn't paying close attention, so maybe something bad is good?"
Come.
On.
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@tante Since I assume all the #Epstein documents have been scraped into all the LLM models by now, I'd love to see an example of LLM tech being used for good.
Show me the list of Epstein co-conspirators.
Show me names of who helped them escape accountability, and how they did it.
Show me who raped children. Their names, addresses, passport photos.
Then I will believe LLMs and "AI" have delivered a benefit. -
@clintruin @simonzerafa @tante
This is an absurd argument.
"I just read about a thing that is fine, but I wasn't paying close attention, so maybe something bad is good?"
Come.
On.
@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
Maybe...
Maybe not.You have a good day.
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@FediThing @bazkie @prinlu @tante
There are tons of private search engines, indices, and analysis projects that don't direct text to other works.
I could scrape the web for a compilation of "websites no one should visit, ever." That's not "labor theft."
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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 __").
@pluralistic @FediThing @tante
What's the difference between your argument here and "Slavery is OK because I didn't kidnap the slaves; I just inherited them from my dad." ??
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@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.@correl @skyfaller @FediThing @tante
More fruit of the poisoned tree.
"This isn't bad, but it has bad things in its origin. The things I use *also* have bad things in their origin, but that's OK, because those bad things are different because [reasons]."
This is the inevitable, pointless dead-end of purity culture.
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@lrhodes I agree, I believe that we do encode our values into our technology. Particularly with what we code and what we use to code or write.
@onepict Yeah, code is a pretty literal manifestation of that principle, right?
And one of the major advantages of AI from an ideological point of view is that it allows the provider to write their values into *other people's code*.
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@pluralistic @FediThing @tante
What's the difference between your argument here and "Slavery is OK because I didn't kidnap the slaves; I just inherited them from my dad." ??
Because there are no slaves in this instance. Because no one is being harmed or asked to do any work, or being deprived of anything, or adversely affected in *any articulable way*.
But yeah, in every other regard, this is exactly that enslaving people.
Sure.
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@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 @clintruin @simonzerafa @tante
Which "couple million people" suffer harm when I run a model ON MY LAPTOP?
Anyone who's hosting a website, and is getting hammered by the bots that seek content to train the models on. Those of us are the ones who continue getting hurt.
Whether you run it locally or not, makes little difference. The models were trained, and training very likely involved scraping, and that continues to be a problem to this day. Not because of ethical concerns, but technical ones: a constant 100req/sec 24/7, with over 2.5k req/sec waves may sound little in this day and age, but at around 2.5k req/sec (sustained for about a week!), my cheap VPS's two vCPUs are bogged down trying to deal with all the TLS handshakes, let alone serving anything.
That is a cost many seem to forget. It costs bandwidth, CPU, and human effort to keep things online under the crawler DDoS - which often will require cold, hard cash too, to survive.
Ask Codeberg or LWN how they fare under crawler load, and imagine someone who just wants to have their stuff online having to deal with similar abuse.
That is the suffering you enable when using any LLM model, even locally.
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@onepict Yeah, code is a pretty literal manifestation of that principle, right?
And one of the major advantages of AI from an ideological point of view is that it allows the provider to write their values into *other people's code*.
@lrhodes Yes.
There's a desperation as well for some enthusiastic folks to justify this and impose their view on the rest of us. It's what disquieted me. The defensive attitude anticipating us stating and enforcing our boundaries.
But it's our culture in Tech and I wish as a whole Tech would step back and like take a minute, rather than reacting and negging.
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@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).
@shiri @pluralistic @mastodonmigration @tante Also it's incredibly unclear to me how a LLM is a good use case for punctuation and grammar checking,. something regular document editors have done incredibly well since the late 90's or so. Like that's your use case? Not promoting Microsoft here but Word has been fantastic at that since at least 2003.
Seems weird to use that as the case for an energy sucking plagiarism machine.
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@pluralistic @prinlu @FediThing @tante I think the difference to search engines is how LLM reproduces the training data..
as a thought experiment; what if I'd scrape all your blogposts, then start a blog that makes Cory Doctorow styled blogposts, which would end up more popular than your OG blog since I throw billions in marketing money at it.
would you find that ethical? would you find it acceptable?
further thought experiment; lets say you lose most of your income as a result and have to stop making blogs and start flipping burgers at mcDonalds.
your blog would stop existing, and so, my copycat blog would, too - or at least, it would stop bringing novel blogposts.
this kind of effect is real and will very much hinder cultural development, if not grind it to a halt.
that is a problem - this is culturally unsustainable.
@bazkie @prinlu @FediThing @tante
First: checking for punctuation errors and other typos *in my own work* in a model running on *my own laptop* has nothing - not one single, solitary thing - in common with your example.
Nothing.
Literally, nothing.
But second: I literally license my work for commercial republication and it is widely republished in commercial outlets without any payment or notice to me.
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@FediThing @bazkie @prinlu @tante
No one is defending "creating knock offs of works." Why would you raise it here? Who has suggested that this is a good way to use LLMs or a good outcome from scraping?
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@FediThing @bazkie @prinlu @tante
No one is defending "creating knock offs of works." Why would you raise it here? Who has suggested that this is a good way to use LLMs or a good outcome from scraping?
@FediThing @bazkie @prinlu @tante
The argument was literally, "It's not OK to check the punctuation in *your own work* if the punctuation checker was created by examining other peoples' work, because performing mathematical analysis on other peoples' work is *per se* unethical."
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@FediThing @bazkie @prinlu @tante
The argument was literally, "It's not OK to check the punctuation in *your own work* if the punctuation checker was created by examining other peoples' work, because performing mathematical analysis on other peoples' work is *per se* unethical."
@FediThing @bazkie @prinlu @tante
By this standard the OED is unethical.
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@bazkie @prinlu @FediThing @tante
First: checking for punctuation errors and other typos *in my own work* in a model running on *my own laptop* has nothing - not one single, solitary thing - in common with your example.
Nothing.
Literally, nothing.
But second: I literally license my work for commercial republication and it is widely republished in commercial outlets without any payment or notice to me.
@pluralistic but then you consented to that, right? you are in control of that.
also my example IS similar - after all, it's data scraped without consent, used to create another work. the typo-checker changes your blogpost based on my training data, in the same way my copycat blog changes 'my' works based on your training data.
sure, it's on a way different scale - deliberately, to more clearly show the principle - but it's the same thing.
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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 appreciate this post. I have gotten into similar discussions of purity culture around generative AI use (me being against using AI) and you articulate many of the feelings I have about it well.
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@pluralistic but then you consented to that, right? you are in control of that.
also my example IS similar - after all, it's data scraped without consent, used to create another work. the typo-checker changes your blogpost based on my training data, in the same way my copycat blog changes 'my' works based on your training data.
sure, it's on a way different scale - deliberately, to more clearly show the principle - but it's the same thing.
Should we ban the OED?
There is literally no way to study language itself without acquiring vast corpora of existing language, and no one in the history of scholarship has ever obtained permission to construct such a corpus.
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