@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 I think you can answer these questions yourself.

Suppose you wore a coat made out of mink fur. The minks are already dead, simply wearing the coat won't kill more minks. What does wearing mink fur have to do with cruelty to minks?

Suppose you live in the time of the Luddites. Legislation prohibits trade unions and collective bargaining. Mill owners introduce machines, reducing wages. But you build your own machine. Problem solved? You helping labor or capital?

@FediThing @tante

@skyfaller @FediThing @tante

This is a "fruit of the poisoned tree" argument.

Suppose you use a computer to post to Mastodon, despite the fact that silicon transistors were invented by the eugenicist William Shockley, who spent his Nobel money offering bribes to women of color to be sterlized?

Suppose you sent that Mastodon post on a packet-switched network, despite the fact that this technology was invented by the war criminals at the RAND corporation?

@pluralistic I don't think mink fur or LLMs are comparable to criticizing the origins of the internet or transistors. It's the process that produced mink fur and LLMs that is destructive, not merely that it's made by bad people.

For example, LLM crawlers regularly take down independent websites like Codeberg, DDoSing, threatening the small web. You may say "but my LLM is frozen in time, it's not part of that scraping now", but it would not remain useful without updates.

@FediThing @tante

@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