Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture".
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@bazkie @FediThing @prinlu @tante
You've literally just made the case against:
* Dictionaries
* Encyclopedias
* BibliographiesAnd also the entire field of computational linguistics.
If that's your position, fine, we have nothing more to say to one another because I think that's a very, very bad position.
@pluralistic @FediThing @prinlu @tante I did not make that case, if you'd properly read my [additions] to the statement.
making dictionaries etc isn't automated on mass scales like feeding training data to LLMs is.
it's a very human job that involves a lot of expertise and takes a lot of time.
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@Colman @FediThing @tante That's interesting. I've never wondered that about you.
@pluralistic @Colman @FediThing @tante
This is...disappointing. To be fair, I'm disappointed in almost everyone in this thread for engaging in schoolyard shit throwing, but you're much higher in status and your shit sticks. Have a conversation. Figure out where these views can comingle. Find common understanding or you risk using your high status to fracture an already unstable alliance of people who want technology to operate safely and for the benefit of our shared humanity.
Do better.
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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 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
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@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.
@pluralistic This seems like whataboutism. Valid criticisms can come from people who don't behave perfectly, because otherwise no one would be able to criticize anything. Similarly, we can criticize society while participating in it.
The point I'd like to make (that doesn't seem to be landing) is that LLMs aren't just made by bad people, but are also made through harmful processes. Harm dealt mostly during creation can be better than continuing harm, but still harmful.
@correl @FediThing @tante -
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 @tante 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.
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@mastodonmigration @tante 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
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@pluralistic This seems like whataboutism. Valid criticisms can come from people who don't behave perfectly, because otherwise no one would be able to criticize anything. Similarly, we can criticize society while participating in it.
The point I'd like to make (that doesn't seem to be landing) is that LLMs aren't just made by bad people, but are also made through harmful processes. Harm dealt mostly during creation can be better than continuing harm, but still harmful.
@correl @FediThing @tante@pluralistic @correl @FediThing @tante In the climate crisis we are often concerned about "embodied emissions", things made with fossil fuels that may not use fossil fuels once they're created. If we don't change our fossil fuel using production systems, those embodied emissions could be enough to kill us.
I'd say that the literal and figurative embodied emissions of even local LLMs are sufficient to make them problematic to use. Individuals avoiding them is insufficient but necessary.
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@zenkat good point. I will admit, if we didn't live in a techbro-feudal slopworld, I probably wouldn't mind a non-consenually trained typo checker LLM all that much.
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@FediThing @tante This is the use-case that is under discussion.
@pluralistic @FediThing @tante you’re attempting to legitimize use of an unethical technology for something you don’t actually need a plausible-sounding-wall-of-text generator for
it goes beyond “it’s made by bad people in bad ways”. it’s a “”tool”” that actively causes cognitive decline and psychosis and sucks the soul out of everything it touches. and mind you promoting and legitimizing it is an act of support for those bad people and their bad ways. your deflection is a typical that of someone with no regard for ethics
“I installed Ollama” instantly gives a person away as a techbro
- your not-so-friendly not-so-neighborhood “””liberal”””
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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 @bazkie @prinlu @FediThing @tante Is DDOSing independent websites an unalloyed good?
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@pluralistic @correl @FediThing @tante In the climate crisis we are often concerned about "embodied emissions", things made with fossil fuels that may not use fossil fuels once they're created. If we don't change our fossil fuel using production systems, those embodied emissions could be enough to kill us.
I'd say that the literal and figurative embodied emissions of even local LLMs are sufficient to make them problematic to use. Individuals avoiding them is insufficient but necessary.
@skyfaller @correl @FediThing @tante
That is completely backwards.
The entire point of measuring embodied emissions is to *make use of things that embody emissions*.
We improve old, energy inefficient buildings *because they represent embodied emissions* rather than building new, more efficient buildings because the *net* emissions of building a new, better building exceed the emissions associated with a remediated, older building.
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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 Chiming in, in defense of people like me who are not "neoliberal" and refuse to use AI of any sort because we don't have a use for them and find them rather superfluous to the functioning of our own native-born great minds. We simply have no use or need for them at all. Such things are for the weak-minded and lazy. -
@pluralistic This seems like whataboutism. Valid criticisms can come from people who don't behave perfectly, because otherwise no one would be able to criticize anything. Similarly, we can criticize society while participating in it.
The point I'd like to make (that doesn't seem to be landing) is that LLMs aren't just made by bad people, but are also made through harmful processes. Harm dealt mostly during creation can be better than continuing harm, but still harmful.
@correl @FediThing @tante@skyfaller @correl @FediThing @tante
Yes, that is just more fruit of the poisoned tree.
This thing harmed people in its creation, therefore the thing is bad, as are all things derived from it.
However, the things *I* use don't count, because the bad things in their history are different because [insert incoherent rationalization].
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@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.
@pluralistic@mamot.fr @skyfaller@jawns.club @FediThing@social.chinwag.org @tante@tldr.nettime.org While I can understand your argument and almost certain exhaustion at hollow criticism, that response feels very dismissive of the points being made against your application of that argument.
I'm not sure how fruitful of an argument can be had with regard to what you may or not be using, as you really haven't clarified that anyhow besides locally hosted software that could be used to run terrible models, so this whole mess is just an endless back and forth of "You seem to be dodging the nature of the evil you may be accepting" vs "You're over-concerned with purity", and I think that's justifiably leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth. -
@pluralistic@mamot.fr @skyfaller@jawns.club @FediThing@social.chinwag.org @tante@tldr.nettime.org While I can understand your argument and almost certain exhaustion at hollow criticism, that response feels very dismissive of the points being made against your application of that argument.
I'm not sure how fruitful of an argument can be had with regard to what you may or not be using, as you really haven't clarified that anyhow besides locally hosted software that could be used to run terrible models, so this whole mess is just an endless back and forth of "You seem to be dodging the nature of the evil you may be accepting" vs "You're over-concerned with purity", and I think that's justifiably leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth.@correl @skyfaller @FediThing @tante
> as you really haven't clarified that anyhow
I'm sorry, this is entirely wrong.
The fact that you didn't bother to read the source materials associated with this debate in no way obviates their existence.
I set out the specific use-case under discussion in a single paragraph in an open access document. There is no clearer way it could have been stated.
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@pluralistic @FediThing @tante you’re attempting to legitimize use of an unethical technology for something you don’t actually need a plausible-sounding-wall-of-text generator for
it goes beyond “it’s made by bad people in bad ways”. it’s a “”tool”” that actively causes cognitive decline and psychosis and sucks the soul out of everything it touches. and mind you promoting and legitimizing it is an act of support for those bad people and their bad ways. your deflection is a typical that of someone with no regard for ethics
“I installed Ollama” instantly gives a person away as a techbro
- your not-so-friendly not-so-neighborhood “””liberal”””
I'm not a liberal, I'm a leftist, so perhaps this is why I disagree with you.
The argument that "something is unethical because someone else used it in an unethical way" is so incoherent that it doesn't even rise to the level of debatability.
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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 like 'cyberphysical world'. Es benutzt 'cyber' auf eine Art und Weise, die es wieder vertretbar macht. Sehr spaßig, wie begriffe so verwolft werden, dass sie wieder schmecken können. 🙃
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I'm not a liberal, I'm a leftist, so perhaps this is why I disagree with you.
The argument that "something is unethical because someone else used it in an unethical way" is so incoherent that it doesn't even rise to the level of debatability.
@pluralistic @FediThing @tante yea no the thing is you’re acting like a liberal, what we in the biz call a shitlib, and i’m a leftist, and you have things conflated a little
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@tante @pluralistic @simonzerafa But ALSO: using a multi-billion-parameter synthetic text extruding machine to find spelling and syntax errors is a blatant example of "doing everything the least efficient way possible" and that's why we are living on an overheating planet buried under toxic e-waste.
If I think about it harder I could probably come up with a more clever metaphor than killing a mosquito with a flamethrower, but you get the idea.
@dhd6 @tante @pluralistic @simonzerafa
Isn't this just purity testing? Aka liberal aestheticism masquerading as praxis?
The planet is hot because capitalism is a malformed cancer that can't stop growing until it kills itself and everything growing in its environment, not because a writer used an LLM. Therefore we need environment change to make capitalism maladaptive, see: ice age, mammals.
The environment is society, not one guy. Purity testing is the opposite of focusing on social change
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I'm not a liberal, I'm a leftist, so perhaps this is why I disagree with you.
The argument that "something is unethical because someone else used it in an unethical way" is so incoherent that it doesn't even rise to the level of debatability.
@pluralistic @FediThing @tante The argument that “The argument that “something is unethical because someone else used it in an unethical way” is so incoherent that it doesn’t even rise to the level of debatability.” doesn’t address what i’m saying here at all
again, pretty clear you don’t know what ethics are or how to be ethical in tech
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