Mastodawn

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

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.

Ian Betteridge Feb 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”.

Cory Doctorow Feb 20

@ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante

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

Bruno Nicoletti Feb 20

@pluralistic @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante If that “mathematical analysis” regurgitates near verbatim works created by other people, it certainly is committing IP theft, and LLMs will happily do that. The “mathematical analysis” is effectively a form of lossy compression on its training data which a prompt can later extract.

Cory Doctorow Feb 20

@bjn @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante

Once again, you're talking about *using* a model, not training a model.

Also "IP theft" isn't a thing. Perhaps you mean copyright infringement?

Bruno Nicoletti Feb 20

@pluralistic @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante I’ll give you pedant points for copyright infringement, which is what most people mean by “IP theft”. As for training/using, the difference is somewhat moot. The models are trained to be used, and if trained on copyrighted data without a license, you’ve encoded that data into the model which might then regurgitate it thus facilitating copyright infringement.

Cory Doctorow Feb 20

@bjn @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante it is a bedrock of copyright law that devices 'capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use' are lawful. Decided in 1984 (SCOTUS/Betamax) and repeatedly upheld.

It is categorically untrue that merely because a model's output can infringe copyright that the model is therefore illegal.

There's not much that's truly settled in American limitations and exceptions, but this is.

Cory Doctorow Feb 20

@bjn @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante 'facilitating copyright infringement' just isn't a thing.

Cory Doctorow Feb 20

@bjn @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante and as befits UK fair dealing (and related limitations and exceptions), we've had opinions from IPREG affirming that training a model doesn't infringe.

Bruno Nicoletti Feb 20

@pluralistic @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante Then the laws are not fit for purpose. The whole point of copyright is to encourage people produce works by being sure they get the benefit of those works. If my works can be encoded into a bunch of matrix weights and reproduced without attribution let alone financial recompense, then why should I bother? Google is doing its best to effectively steal the bread out of creators mouths with its AI summaries. It may be legal, but it stinks.

Cory Doctorow Feb 20

@bjn @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante by all means say 'i don't like this technology' but don't conflate that with 'therefore it is illegal'

Bruno Nicoletti Feb 20

@pluralistic @ianbetteridge @FediThing @tante Well apart from Anthropic having to pay $1.5B for copyright infringement, it’s all above board, 🙄. It’s not a matter of liking the technology or not, machine learning is capable of cool and useful things. However, how LLMs are being used and pushed is both immoral and culturally destructive. I’m surprised you are buying into it.

Gabriel N Feb 20

@bjn @pluralistic @ianbetteridge @FediThing @[email protected] I don’t like what Cory wrote, and I don’t think he’s “buying into it” either.

His explanation is like the one in treaties that prohibit the use of biological weapons, but not their research, development and storage.

Maybe a better question is “Can we protect the creation of cultural artifacts by copyright law?”

Not by these standards, it seems.

GunChleoc Feb 21

@wtrmt @bjn @ianbetteridge @FediThing @pluralistic As a personal example for using technology one prefers not to use, although I do everything else on Linux, I use a piece of proprietary Windows software for my FLOSS translation work, because it means that I can produce a massively bigger amount of UI translations in higher quality than I could produce with Linux tooling. So, I understand that part of the reasoning.
🧵

Gabriel N Feb 21

@gunchleoc @bjn @ianbetteridge @FediThing @pluralistic the same tools that are useful to you are used by big corporations to eliminate jobs.

Mercado Libre —a huge online retail in LATAM, owned by EBay— fired his entire team of User Experience Writers last month and replaced them with an LLM. The more than 120 UXW didn’t see it coming.

Will the LLM do a better job? Nope, and those designers will not find a job doing that again.

@wtrmt In the translation business, they squeeze the rates by pre-translating by LLM and turning everybody into proofreaders on text that looks right but is often slightly off.

This is not what I was talking about - I was talking about traditional Translation Memories. They get trained on your own, personal work or your team's work only. The translator is still doing the work, but I no longer get RSI from lots of manual copy/paste.

@bjn @ianbetteridge @FediThing @pluralistic

Gabriel N Feb 21

@gunchleoc @bjn @ianbetteridge @FediThing @pluralistic yes, LLMs can be used in many ways, and the impact on their application is wide ranging: my sister in law is a freelance certified legal translator, and she no longer has a job.

Who needs legal translator, movie extras, set decorators, designers, illustrators, technical writers, architects, middle managers, artists, writers?

All of them will become burger flippers for all we care.

Gabriel N Feb 21

@gunchleoc @bjn @ianbetteridge @FediThing @pluralistic this is impacting people all over the world, in many creative and technical fields. In other countries it does look like a new wave of colonialism, that now comes to eliminate your work and culture.

In the streets of my neighborhood in Santiago I see slightly different AI slop images promoting things on the sidewalks. Those used to be made by hand, on chalkboards, 2 years ago.

GunChleoc Feb 21

@wtrmt LLMs used for Legal translation? 😱

That's asking for real trouble.

@bjn @ianbetteridge @FediThing @pluralistic

Gabriel N Feb 21

@gunchleoc @bjn @ianbetteridge @FediThing @pluralistic poring over that boring legalese? who cares! It’s way cheaper! Instantaneous!

Ups! The document was badly translated and the visa was rejected. Who’s responsible? Not the LLM.