The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.
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The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.
Refusing to read writing made with the use of LLMs and refusing to give time to writers who use, promote or justify the use of LLMs is not purity culture, it's a boycott. It's a political act of withdrawing my time, resources and support for something that I find deeply morally wrong. It's protest. I have a choice and I refuse.
LLMs are exploitative, destructive, biased, mediocre parroting machines. Using them has a negative impact on the climate, the arts, the quality of the internet, the job market, the economy, the accessibility of electronics, even on skill development, creativity and mental health. LLMs are made and trained on the unpaid labour of millions -if not billions- of people who didn't consent. Their generic output litter the path to finding anything by true human creators.
Wherever I can, for as long as I can, I reject LLMs and anything that is related to them. I'm boycotting.
@reading_recluse For me, it doesn't make sense to think about LLMs in pure dogmatic categories like "in favor" or "against". Fact is, LLMs are out there now and won't just disappear, and they CAN be powerful and useful tools if used in a reasonable way. The problem is that a lot of people are currently overusing it and don't reflect enough about when and how to use it, which leads to a lot of AI-generated crap. Maybe humanity just needs more time to finally find a good balance of AI usage.
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@tseitr @papageier @reading_recluse My problem with this framing is: who gets to decide?
Define 'essential'. Is a new generation of MacBooks 'essential'? Not really. The ones we have are amazing. But nobody's boycotting the progress being made in chip design.
But the anti-LLM crowd seem to have decided: not having LLMs is 'enough'. Having them is superfluous. They're not 'needed'.
I get the pushback. I'll never use one to write prose, because prose comes from my human heart.
But to deny their utility in the world of code generation is to be dogmatic. The vast, vast majority of code generation isn't art: it's the rote stitching together of existing pieces to make a new thing.
Claude is _much_ better at that than I am. If properly controlled by me the result is better and more secure.
So, I use Claude. Just like I use an IDE and a higher-level language and just like I deploy to an edge network run by someone else vs. standing up my own. Because doing that is better than not doing that.
@johnnydecimal @tseitr @papageier @reading_recluse
"nobody's boycotting the progress being made in chip design"[waving hand]
Over here.
We're boycotting chips that offer us nothing more that we want or need.
Run the web browser, word processor, printer drivers, scan drivers, network connections, do security updates. And don't make the humans waste time with the damned computers. It's a lot to ask but new chips are not going to do this any better. -
@xs4me2 @ben @dynamite_ready @reading_recluse And I am disagreeing with that. I'm saying they are not appropriate for this stuff, whoever uses them and regardless of how they use them.
@lproven @ben @dynamite_ready @reading_recluse
Let us respectfully disagree then.
You are right in the sense that a lot can go wrong as I elaborated on!
Time will tell!
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The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.
Refusing to read writing made with the use of LLMs and refusing to give time to writers who use, promote or justify the use of LLMs is not purity culture, it's a boycott. It's a political act of withdrawing my time, resources and support for something that I find deeply morally wrong. It's protest. I have a choice and I refuse.
LLMs are exploitative, destructive, biased, mediocre parroting machines. Using them has a negative impact on the climate, the arts, the quality of the internet, the job market, the economy, the accessibility of electronics, even on skill development, creativity and mental health. LLMs are made and trained on the unpaid labour of millions -if not billions- of people who didn't consent. Their generic output litter the path to finding anything by true human creators.
Wherever I can, for as long as I can, I reject LLMs and anything that is related to them. I'm boycotting.
@reading_recluse exactly!
As long as I can, I will resist. And to be honest, I don’t really care what people think of it
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The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.
Refusing to read writing made with the use of LLMs and refusing to give time to writers who use, promote or justify the use of LLMs is not purity culture, it's a boycott. It's a political act of withdrawing my time, resources and support for something that I find deeply morally wrong. It's protest. I have a choice and I refuse.
LLMs are exploitative, destructive, biased, mediocre parroting machines. Using them has a negative impact on the climate, the arts, the quality of the internet, the job market, the economy, the accessibility of electronics, even on skill development, creativity and mental health. LLMs are made and trained on the unpaid labour of millions -if not billions- of people who didn't consent. Their generic output litter the path to finding anything by true human creators.
Wherever I can, for as long as I can, I reject LLMs and anything that is related to them. I'm boycotting.
@reading_recluse Add Corporate LLM and I'll agree, not generalizing A.I. as a whole Infrastructure that exist since earlier then you think.
The debate alone gets annoying, sure you can tell your opinions but it's a hype overflow lately that gets on the nerves of many people mind you.
Think what you want and do not use it at all must be satisfying enough while I agree corp AI is pure trash and immoral, not all AI is.I wish you a good day ahead
edit: Give room to others to explore and exchange how to make it better for all instead shooting it, while the gun is not the weapon in that case but you that trigger it is same as comparing it to a nuke or fire.
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@fergabell Completely true, I fully agree.
I really dislike that most LLM-defenders in my comments right now say something like: "Well actually, in this specific case LLM usage was actually helpful for me personally, so..."
Even entertaining the thought that it's somehow useful for someone somewhere, it doesn't erase the extreme damage it's doing to the world and us collectively, and the massive scale of exploitation it's engaging in to keep it all afloat.
@reading_recluse @fergabell "I didn't kill him because he was crazy, I killed him because he was making sense."
Miller, The Expanse -- one of the episodes I just watched in S2.
Thing is, the LLM thing wouldn't be a thing if it wasn't this puffed up thing. Yeah, making an LLM would be costly and would burn up some GPU. But it wouldn't be this Earth sucking thing because it would only be applied where it's worth it.
Could be that the given situation makes that possible balance irrelevant.
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The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.
Refusing to read writing made with the use of LLMs and refusing to give time to writers who use, promote or justify the use of LLMs is not purity culture, it's a boycott. It's a political act of withdrawing my time, resources and support for something that I find deeply morally wrong. It's protest. I have a choice and I refuse.
LLMs are exploitative, destructive, biased, mediocre parroting machines. Using them has a negative impact on the climate, the arts, the quality of the internet, the job market, the economy, the accessibility of electronics, even on skill development, creativity and mental health. LLMs are made and trained on the unpaid labour of millions -if not billions- of people who didn't consent. Their generic output litter the path to finding anything by true human creators.
Wherever I can, for as long as I can, I reject LLMs and anything that is related to them. I'm boycotting.
@reading_recluse i generally agree with you but did you consider nobody normal will take you seriously if you refer to people as "true human creators"?
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@mollymay5000
agree. I angrily think: how dare you. How dare you waste my precious time on earth with this trash.@reading_recluse @mollymay5000 what if this reply were written by an AI assistant? #claw
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@ben @xs4me2 @dynamite_ready @reading_recluse No, that is not what I am suggesting at all.
You are trying to interpret my position on this through the lens of what *you* think they are good for.
@lproven @xs4me2 @dynamite_ready @reading_recluse I wasn't replying to you Liam! In fact, I largely agree with the viewpoint youve expressed
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@tseitr @papageier @reading_recluse My problem with this framing is: who gets to decide?
Define 'essential'. Is a new generation of MacBooks 'essential'? Not really. The ones we have are amazing. But nobody's boycotting the progress being made in chip design.
But the anti-LLM crowd seem to have decided: not having LLMs is 'enough'. Having them is superfluous. They're not 'needed'.
I get the pushback. I'll never use one to write prose, because prose comes from my human heart.
But to deny their utility in the world of code generation is to be dogmatic. The vast, vast majority of code generation isn't art: it's the rote stitching together of existing pieces to make a new thing.
Claude is _much_ better at that than I am. If properly controlled by me the result is better and more secure.
So, I use Claude. Just like I use an IDE and a higher-level language and just like I deploy to an edge network run by someone else vs. standing up my own. Because doing that is better than not doing that.
@johnnydecimal @papageier @reading_recluse I come from Canada, so regarding clothing, it is fairly obvious that clothes are essential in order not to freeze to death, like air, water food etc. Indeed, the line gets more blurry for non-essential stuff. Even if I put other impacts aside (environment, job replacement) the simple fact it does not respect open source licenses is a hard stop for me, I ditched github for the same reasons when they introduced copilot.
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@reading_recluse For me, it doesn't make sense to think about LLMs in pure dogmatic categories like "in favor" or "against". Fact is, LLMs are out there now and won't just disappear, and they CAN be powerful and useful tools if used in a reasonable way. The problem is that a lot of people are currently overusing it and don't reflect enough about when and how to use it, which leads to a lot of AI-generated crap. Maybe humanity just needs more time to finally find a good balance of AI usage.
@FredericJacob @reading_recluse
"The problem is that a lot of people are currently overusing it and don't reflect enough about when and how to use it..."
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Meanwhile:
️
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=20737314952&gbraid=0AAAAADgO_miNIDzn-BdCIXzZ6r87g94-L&gclid=Cj0KCQiA49XMBhDRARIsAOOKJHbvIzPACe0EdEyWK86TnS7rNlnUaePKc5y22qT0ZsfqUeGDe72zzc0aAhFFEALw_wcB
#doomed #ClimateChange -
@reading_recluse You do wear machine-woven cloth, though, no?
Seriously: Why?
It's exploitative, the quality is mediocre, it kills jobs, it's a waste of resources, consumes vast amounts of energy, hinders creativity, destroys small businesses, forces uniformity onto people ... why wear it?
Because not doing so would be a waste of time. And time is the one resource that's (still) strictly limited for all of us. We compromise on the quality of clothing (debatable), in order to do other things we couldn't if we were still weaving cloth manually.
When mechanical weaving machines came about, the workers threw their wooden shoes, in French 'Sabot', into the machines to stop them.
All that is left of this effort is a word describing the futile attempt: Sabotage.
So protest all you like, it's just not going to get you anywhere.
@papageier @reading_recluse I've done some weaving with a manual loom, and I think your attempt to draw a parallel between machine weaving and LLMs is absurd, wrong in most of the specifics and missing the point of much LLM criticism.
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@lproven @xs4me2 @dynamite_ready @reading_recluse I wasn't replying to you Liam! In fact, I largely agree with the viewpoint youve expressed
@ben @xs4me2 @dynamite_ready @reading_recluse Aha! Sorry, in that case...
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@tseitr @papageier @reading_recluse My problem with this framing is: who gets to decide?
Define 'essential'. Is a new generation of MacBooks 'essential'? Not really. The ones we have are amazing. But nobody's boycotting the progress being made in chip design.
But the anti-LLM crowd seem to have decided: not having LLMs is 'enough'. Having them is superfluous. They're not 'needed'.
I get the pushback. I'll never use one to write prose, because prose comes from my human heart.
But to deny their utility in the world of code generation is to be dogmatic. The vast, vast majority of code generation isn't art: it's the rote stitching together of existing pieces to make a new thing.
Claude is _much_ better at that than I am. If properly controlled by me the result is better and more secure.
So, I use Claude. Just like I use an IDE and a higher-level language and just like I deploy to an edge network run by someone else vs. standing up my own. Because doing that is better than not doing that.
@johnnydecimal @tseitr @papageier @reading_recluse useful to whom? I write both prose and code and I would argue that they both a. come from my brain (powered by my heart, controlling my fingers) b. are about stitching existing pieces together to make new things. I find that stitching meaningful and rewarding, and through practice I'm becoming reasonably good at it. Not doing that would be worse than doing that (see how I'm restitching your words together?). That's why LLMs are useless to me.
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@reading_recluse I spend a lot of my time these days trying not to send middle finger emojis to people to be honest... Probably isn't very socially acceptable, but it's how I feel.
@mollymay5000 @reading_recluse
putting middle-finger emojis in my texts because almost all other emojis indicate that it was written by an LLM(JFC I fucking hate those texts or even technical documentation full of
and IDK what other shit) -
@thesofafox @reading_recluse of course this is a good idea, but a part of me thinks: why bother to regulate something the industry is ovviously going to move on from because it’s deeply unprofitable?
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The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.
Refusing to read writing made with the use of LLMs and refusing to give time to writers who use, promote or justify the use of LLMs is not purity culture, it's a boycott. It's a political act of withdrawing my time, resources and support for something that I find deeply morally wrong. It's protest. I have a choice and I refuse.
LLMs are exploitative, destructive, biased, mediocre parroting machines. Using them has a negative impact on the climate, the arts, the quality of the internet, the job market, the economy, the accessibility of electronics, even on skill development, creativity and mental health. LLMs are made and trained on the unpaid labour of millions -if not billions- of people who didn't consent. Their generic output litter the path to finding anything by true human creators.
Wherever I can, for as long as I can, I reject LLMs and anything that is related to them. I'm boycotting.
@reading_recluse Yep. I stopped following someone here in the Fediverse who has a bajillion followers because they were unabashedly using AI to help write their long posts. It doesn't matter how useful you personally find it, it does harm.
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The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.
Refusing to read writing made with the use of LLMs and refusing to give time to writers who use, promote or justify the use of LLMs is not purity culture, it's a boycott. It's a political act of withdrawing my time, resources and support for something that I find deeply morally wrong. It's protest. I have a choice and I refuse.
LLMs are exploitative, destructive, biased, mediocre parroting machines. Using them has a negative impact on the climate, the arts, the quality of the internet, the job market, the economy, the accessibility of electronics, even on skill development, creativity and mental health. LLMs are made and trained on the unpaid labour of millions -if not billions- of people who didn't consent. Their generic output litter the path to finding anything by true human creators.
Wherever I can, for as long as I can, I reject LLMs and anything that is related to them. I'm boycotting.
@reading_recluse But you have to be able to identify such output.
I can even imagine a scenario where it becomes so pervasive, it’s a requirement to utilize to remain functional within the system. -
The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.
Refusing to read writing made with the use of LLMs and refusing to give time to writers who use, promote or justify the use of LLMs is not purity culture, it's a boycott. It's a political act of withdrawing my time, resources and support for something that I find deeply morally wrong. It's protest. I have a choice and I refuse.
LLMs are exploitative, destructive, biased, mediocre parroting machines. Using them has a negative impact on the climate, the arts, the quality of the internet, the job market, the economy, the accessibility of electronics, even on skill development, creativity and mental health. LLMs are made and trained on the unpaid labour of millions -if not billions- of people who didn't consent. Their generic output litter the path to finding anything by true human creators.
Wherever I can, for as long as I can, I reject LLMs and anything that is related to them. I'm boycotting.
@reading_recluse I like to remember when we realized that all the nice imported surveillance cameras were suddenly phoning home and that it would be really expensive to remove them again from all our infrastructure, which is when the wonderful term "digital asbestos" was brought up in 2022:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-63749696
With AI, I mean "artifice infliction", it's much the same. It's the new wonder material that gets put into everything and then we'll have to "live with it".
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@reading_recluse @mollymay5000 what if this reply were written by an AI assistant? #claw
@zzeligg @reading_recluse @mollymay5000 Exactly, how would you know?
