The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.
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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?
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@fosstastic @reading_recluse Careful with this: LLMs are well-known for always agreeing with the user and taking the user's side. They are not impartial. The architects behind LLMs want you to keep using them, and you're less likely to use them if they're completely honest with you.
I'm not saying you were at fault or anything (I know nothing about your situation); just reminding you to exercise caution. People have taken their lives after using LLMs for therapy.
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@thesofafox @reading_recluse Maybe. The tech industry hasn’t seemed to care very much about satisfying consumer demand ever before. I think AI is about pumping tech stocks to stave off another bubble bursting.
I don’t think this tech requires any resistance, personally, because it’s already failing. There’s no “advancing through it,” our computer systems were more advanced (worked better, faster, and more securely) ten years ago when fewer people were using this stuff.
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@thesofafox @reading_recluse Maybe. The tech industry hasn’t seemed to care very much about satisfying consumer demand ever before. I think AI is about pumping tech stocks to stave off another bubble bursting.
I don’t think this tech requires any resistance, personally, because it’s already failing. There’s no “advancing through it,” our computer systems were more advanced (worked better, faster, and more securely) ten years ago when fewer people were using this stuff.
@thesofafox @reading_recluse I also think it’s difficult to say if there even is much real consumer demand for AI, considering how much it’s been forced into everything. There might be, but how would we know?
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@xs4me2 @lproven @dynamite_ready @reading_recluse
What you're essentially suggesting here, is that LLMs are only good for consuming information if the user either already has the knowledge to judge output (in which case, why are they asking?) or spends time to verify the claims that the LLM makes (in which case, why bother asking the LLM?).
I've seen them make some pretty important mistakes, including suggesting that a Director who wasn't on the call being summarised had authorised something
@ben @xs4me2 @lproven @reading_recluse
Exactly that.
Much like what already happens with Google, or indeed, at the library, but in a far more dynamic way.
You don't need to look too far for examples of people settling on the first Google link, or cherry picking news articles either.
I personally believe the main issues are the economic and environmental impact, intellectual property infringement, privacy, and the potential to erode critical thought.
These are huge though, obviously.
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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.
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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 There are fundamental differences between
1. "the person who had the idea was bad, so I will not touch things they tainted with their badness" (purity argument)
2. "the tool was created using bad (or catastrophic) means, so the ends don't matter" (purity)
3. "the tool creates bad ends every time it is used, so the means don't matter" (function)
4. "the tool creates bad ends when used inappropriately" (define "appropriate")
5. "the tool is sometimes helpful under limited circumstances". (define "limited")
and they can all be true.
Right now I'm somewhere between 2 and 3 - the means are bad but it may be possible to avoid adding to them,
and the bad ends are hard to quantify.But as someone whose ability to code is almost completely gone due to long covid, but who sees a need for unprofitable software tools that no-one else will build, I may eventually end up in 5, supervising an LLM out of desperation.
For now I'm continuing to try to avoid LLM-generated content.
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@papageier @reading_recluse machine-woven cloth was answering an essential need in a profitable capitalistic way. Can we say the same about LLM?
I think it is not inevitable, but time will tell.
@tseitr @papageier @reading_recluse Tech advancement is not only desirable, it’s part of human evolution. It should be a good thing, even AI, freeing up humans from basic grunt work.
But not in a profit driven capitalist system that relies on disenfranchising fellow citizens to make profits. And the haphazard manner of competitive development putting excess strain on energy and resources. $$$ is the lure, it seems to undermine us at every turn. -
@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"?
@grepe @reading_recluse why do you think this
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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.
People who use AI for writing have a non-zero risk exposure to lawsuits based on existing law and coming laws developed in response to AI.
I am seeing more companies' material clearly written using AI. Why? Because users have either no idea there's risk, or believe no one will know they've lazily or foolishly passed off some other company's artificial sentence machinery as their own words. I recently received a letter with an EEOC prohibited phrase in it - I flagged the sender who admitted using AI.
There will be a new growth area in legal practice -- suing for use of AI and the rising "It wasn't me, it was ChatGPt (that plagarizes, hallucinates, discriminates, writes dreck), sue them instead" defense.
Careers will be obliterated, rightly so. Stop using AI for writing or openly credit AI as author, co-author, or editor.
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@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.
Go back and read up on what the Luddites were actually protesting, jackass. They were not mindless technophobes.
Machine-woven cloth IN AND OF ITSELF is NOT inherently exploitative. It could have been used instead to elevate and improve the textile trade, making life easier for the workers.
Instead, the way the capitalists weaponized the tech to devalue labor was fucking evil.
Tech is not inherently good or bad. It's just a tool.
"AI" and LLMs, as they are currently being designed and deployed, are a tool being used as a WEAPON. Child-raping technofascist planetwreckers are using them to enclose the digital commons, jam any useful signals they don't control, and surveil the everloving shit out of everyone everywhere.
If we don't protest like our lives depend on it, NOW, things are going to get unimaginably and horrifyingly fucking bad.
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@tseitr @papageier @reading_recluse Tech advancement is not only desirable, it’s part of human evolution. It should be a good thing, even AI, freeing up humans from basic grunt work.
But not in a profit driven capitalist system that relies on disenfranchising fellow citizens to make profits. And the haphazard manner of competitive development putting excess strain on energy and resources. $$$ is the lure, it seems to undermine us at every turn.@Huntn00 @papageier @reading_recluse
I somehow agree, but pushing further, I think all aspect of a new technology should be considered before mass production and adoption. Sure it would slow things down, but it will also ensure we take into account the humans and environment in the process. This would create less technology / novelty, but increase living standards more equally and not leaving all the problems to future generations.
North America consume like we have 7 planets earth, Europe 5
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@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.
@tseitr @papageier @reading_recluse I genuinely fail to see the distinction between this view and being Amish.
There's nothing wrong with being Amish. I long for a life in the country with nothing but Lucy and chickens for company. But if your line of 'essential' is 'clothes so I don't freeze to death', I must wonder what you're doing here, on the Internet, that you're using via some computer, none of which is essential for life.
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@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.
@harisont @tseitr @papageier @reading_recluse Perhaps the difference is that my job is not, and never has been, 'professional software developer'.
My current job involves trying to help people to be more organised. As part of that, it's very helpful if I can write computer programs and websites. In that aspect of my business, I find Claude Code very useful.
It provides much the same utility as does my accountant. As a business owner I must file taxes. But it's not what I do. It's not the function I serve.
My job, arguably, is much closer to that of a writer. The _ideas_ that I present are mine, from my human brain. So I value the act of creation.
I can see how a software developer might think differently. But for that person to deny me the utility of an LLM is like me telling my accountant that they can't use Xero and that they have to enter everything by hand in a double-entry ledger.
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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 It's even more cringe when they try to downplay how much they use it in the final product when called out. They know they're stealing talent they will never have and they know they don't deserve any credit.
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@glennseto @reading_recluse totally agree.
It’s like how recipe websites become useless as they added so much useless text for SEO and so they have “jump to recipe” buttons to actually find what you want.
The AI chatbots are like that button except, terribly, the only reason it’s needed is because of all the AI slop in the first place.
And then we have to rely on it as the entire internet is noise and no signal. Tech companies made the mess then push the tool to clean
@lifewithtrees @glennseto @reading_recluse
Selling the disease along with the "cure".
What's scary is... they're shoehorning "AI" into everything, while also manipulating hardware prices and supply such that it's becoming increasingly harder for anyone to get their hands on home computing-- they're trying to make everyone depend on cloud computing through tools that allow them to surveil damn near everything we say and do, while poisoning the wells of information and claiming to be our rescuers if we only swallow the shit being spewed by the mindless digital oracles running on algorithms they can warp any way they like.
This shit was never supposed to make money or be useful in any direct way. It's a fascist's panopticon torment nexus wet dream.
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@reading_recluse Absolutely. LLMs are the biggest, most bloody useless con ever invented by the vacuous arseholes in charge of the tech industry.
The extra annoying thing is that there are other potential approaches to AI out there that are ultimately likely to be more useful, less destructive and work better (e.g. some expert systems, decision support systems, etc.) But so many folks are just playing with probabilistic horseshit generators instead.
The only way anything this aggressively useless gets investment on this scale, is when it's a weapon.
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@reading_recluse There are fundamental differences between
1. "the person who had the idea was bad, so I will not touch things they tainted with their badness" (purity argument)
2. "the tool was created using bad (or catastrophic) means, so the ends don't matter" (purity)
3. "the tool creates bad ends every time it is used, so the means don't matter" (function)
4. "the tool creates bad ends when used inappropriately" (define "appropriate")
5. "the tool is sometimes helpful under limited circumstances". (define "limited")
and they can all be true.
Right now I'm somewhere between 2 and 3 - the means are bad but it may be possible to avoid adding to them,
and the bad ends are hard to quantify.But as someone whose ability to code is almost completely gone due to long covid, but who sees a need for unprofitable software tools that no-one else will build, I may eventually end up in 5, supervising an LLM out of desperation.
For now I'm continuing to try to avoid LLM-generated content.
Good luck with whatever the clankers define as 'appropriate', since - to date - they seem to have settled on 'Whatever I can get away with, and then some.'
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@reading_recluse My first thought was that the people wittering on about "purity culture" literally can't grasp the concept of collective action. But then it struck me that framing everything as an individual choice is a classic neoliberal tactic to defuse and dismantle opposition when it becomes a threat. So I say: Good work, keep it up!
I think they also are having a hard time grasping the concepts of morality, ethics, or conscience in general.
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They would enthusiastically tell you it's not your fault and there's nothing wrong with you even if you're a damned axe murderer.
A glorified Furby is no substitute for therapy or peer support from actual caring, empathetic, properly trained humans.
