tanteFeb 20

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/

Acting ethically in an imperfect world

Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are […]

Smashing Frames
Show threadFediThing Feb 20

@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.

Show threadIan BetteridgeFeb 20
@FediThing @tante @pluralistic Some people - in fact quite a lot; if my reading is correct - do indeed argue that LLMs can *never* be ethically used because they are “trained on stolen work”.
Show threadCory DoctorowFeb 20

@ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante

Performing mathematical analysis on large corpora of published work is not "stealing."

Show threadJames GleickFeb 20

@pluralistic @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante “Mathematical analysis” is doing a lot of work here. It could mean gathering meaningless statistics. Or it could mean capturing the qualities (deviations from the average) that make a particular work of art (or author) special, creative, surprising—for use in simulacra.

I think that's harmful, to the culture as a whole, if not to the artworks and artists getting regurgitated.

Show threadCory DoctorowFeb 20

@gleick @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante

Let's stipulate to that (I don't agree, as it happens, but that's OK). It's still not a copyright infringement to enumerate and analyze the elements of a copyrighted work.

For the record, I think AI art is bad and neither consume nor make it.

Show threadAlaric Snell-Pym
@pluralistic @gleick @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante there's been documented cases of LLMs regurgitating stuff from their training set verbatim, which clearly IS copyright infringement; and that means some parts of the training set are.encodrd in the weights of the model, which looks like publishing a copyrighted work to me. If publishing a JPEG of an image without copyright to it would be infringing, isn't publishing a model that can recreate something also infringing?
Feb 20 at 9:23pmWeb
Show threadAlaric Snell-PymFeb 20

@gleick @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante

BUT I'm also still a fan of @pluralistic in general, although I disagree with him on some points (such as this); we have more in common than divides us, and I see too many people totally reject somebody over one thing. Sure, if that one thing is nazism, sexism, selfishness, etc - they can go straight in the bin. Something I hold a hope of arguing them around on, however, isn't cause for cancelling :-)