@tante

I really like and admire @pluralistic and have utmost respect for him, and that's why I'm totally baffled about why he is claiming "fruit of the poisoned tree" arguments as cause of LLM scepticism.

The objections to LLMs aren't about origins but about what they they are doing right now: destroying the planet, stealing labour, giving power over knowledge to LLM owners etc.

The objections are nothing to do with LLMs' origins, they're entirely about LLMs' effects in the here and now.

@FediThing @tante

Which parts of running a model on your own laptop are implicated in "destroying the planet?" How is checking punctuation "stealing labor?" Or, for that matter "giving power over knowledge to LLM owners?"

@pluralistic @tante

(Hello Mr Doctorow! Just want to make clear I admire you a great deal and this isn't intended as an attack on you!)

Running a local LLM with no connection to outside providers might be a way of avoiding bad stuff, but I am not clear on how this relates to discussing origins of technologies?

It seems like there's ambiguity in your post about whether it applies just to people with homelabs wondering if they should try offline LLMs, or whether you are discussing LLMs as a general technology?

Almost everyone using LLMs will use the online kind, so objections to LLMs are (reasonably IMHO) based on that scenario.

@FediThing @tante

> 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 @tante

Thank you for the responses 🙏

"Because the arguments against running an LLM on your own computer"

...ahhh okay. So was this post aimed more at a very narrow homelab kind of audience?

It's just, as a reader, the article's emphasis on examples of tech origins imply it's trying to defend LLMs in general? This probably is my ignorance as a reader, but it's how it came across to me, and led to bafflement.

@FediThing @tante This is the use-case that is under discussion.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/

@pluralistic @tante

Thanks. Can totally see how that makes sense at a technical level for people who run their own offline services.

I think it's the ambiguity that is driving the discourse over this post. People are taking the "refusing to use a technology" section as a defence of LLMs in general?

If the angle was caging LLMs or something like that, it might make it clearer that you aren't endorsing the most common form of LLM?

Anyway, it's your call on this as author, just wanted to feed back on this because your writing matters and I hope feedback is helpful to it.

@FediThing @pluralistic @tante i feel in the similar way as big tech has taken the notion of AI and LLMs as a cue/excuse to mount a global campaign of public manipulation and massive investments into a speculative project and pumps gazillions$ into it and convinces everyone it's innevitable tech to be put in bag of potato chips, the backlash is then that anything that bears the name of AI and LLM is poisonous plague and people are unfollowing anyone who's touched it in any way or talks about it in any other way than "it's fascist tech, i'm putting a filter in my feed!" (while it IS fascist tech because it's in hands of fascists).

in my view the problem seems not what LLMs are (what kind of tech), but how they are used and what they extract from planet when they are used by the big tech in this monstrous harmful way. of course there's a big blurred line and tech can't be separated from the political, but... AI is not intelligent (Big Tech wants you to believe that), and LLMs are not capable of intelligence and learning (Big Tech wants you to believe that).

so i feel like a big chunk of anger and hate should really be directed at techno oligarchs and only partially and much more critically at actual algorithms in play. it's not LLMs that are harming the planet, but rather the extraction, these companies who are absolute evil and are doing whatever the hell they want, unchecked, unregulated.

or as varoufakis said to tim nguyen: "we don't want to get rid of your tech or company (google). we want to socialize your company in order to use it more productively" and, if i may add, safely and beneficialy for everyone not just a few.

@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 :)

@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 @tante

This would be my take:

Search engines direct people to the work they index. They reward labour by directing people towards it.

Scraping without consent for training data lets people reproduce the work without crediting or rewarding the people who actually did the labour. That seems like labour theft?

If it is labour theft, then it isn't sustainable and that's part of why LLMs are so questionable as a technology.

@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."

@pluralistic @bazkie @prinlu @tante

Indexing works is a totally different thing to creating knock-offs of works, surely?

What Miyazaki said about AI knock-offs surely illustrates the difference?

@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."