Mastodawn

Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)Feb 21

I was disappointed to read Cory Doctorow's post where he got weirdly defensive about his LLM use and started arguing with an imaginary foe.

@tante has a very thoughtful reply here:

https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/
A few further comments, 🧵>>

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

Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)Feb 21

It was particularly disappointing to see Doctorow misconstrue (and thus, if he is believed) undermine the work that many of us are doing to shine a light on the ways in which the ideology of "AI" and the specific ways in which LLMs and other "AI" products are created do real harm.
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Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)Feb 21

I also want to point out (again) the ways in which lumping together all uses of LMs (like the lumping of technologies into "AI") obscures the issues at hand.

Language modeling is a useful component of many technologies that can be built without extractive, exploitative means. Take the automatic transcription built by and for the Māori people -- there's te reo Māori language model that's part of that.
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Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)Feb 21

And the transformer architecture represented an important step forward in language modeling, that brought improvements to things like spell checking (Doctorow's use case).
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Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)Feb 21

And you can build and use language models without turning them into the synthetic text extruding machines that are despoiling our information ecosystem.

And even if those are easily accessible, because OpenAI et al want to burn through cash with their demos, we can still refute and refuse the narrative that synthetic text is somehow a panacea to be used across social services (medicine, education) and in science, etc.
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Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)

Doctorow could have gone into these details; could have said something about the particular LLM he chose was built (whose data, trained how, how much data, what kind of further data work in RLHF); could have drawn a distinction about use cases.
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Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)Feb 21

But instead he wrote a defensive screed, seemingly imagining someone knowing about his LLM use ascribing to him all of the ills of everyone's LLM production and use.

A missed opportunity, to be sure.

Chris Real Feb 21

His position on subjects is distorted by his personal position in society.

It's a common side-effect of successful critics of society. He speaks, now, to the only people he thinks matter, but they are a narrow group of exceptionals, culled from the privileged, who he interacts most with.

Success has its isolations, and he hasn't confronted this yet . . .

Cassandrich Feb 21

@_chris_real @emilymbender Thank you for this insight into an easy pitfall of being a successful critic. It's something I'd like to keep in mind.

Mason Loring Bliss Feb 21

@_chris_real @emilymbender He's been responsive when I've communicated with him, and I'm not a celebrated luminary.

It could be that success has corrupted him. It seems to corrupt everyone.

I thought he was only talking about the ethics of the things, though. Is he actually using them then? For what? I'm curious, as I've only seen the peripheries of discussions about Doctorow and LLMs do far. A link to whatever he said that sparked all this would be welcome.

Paul Silver Feb 22

@mason @_chris_real @emilymbender this is the web version: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback if you search for "llm" on the page you'll find the part this has been talking about

Pluralistic: Six Years of Pluralistic (19 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Mason Loring Bliss Feb 22

@paulsilver @_chris_real @emilymbender Oh, that's disappointing. I've sent him error corrections in the past, but I'd rather see the occasional typo than have him contribute to cooking the planet.

He doesn't talk about the training data for his model, nor whether he's using their cloud services or not. He talks about "purity culture" but disregards ongoing harm.

Thank you for the pointer.

Kris Hooper Feb 22

@mason @paulsilver @_chris_real @emilymbender He's running Ollama locally to do a grammar check. Let's not pretend that's a significant use of resources.

@krishooper @mason @emilymbender I've been losing my mind about this. There might be valid criticisms to what he wrote, but like, the idea that he is directly harming the environment with his use case is a straight up denial of reality and yet people (seem?) to be saying that en masse.

Like shit man, attack the parts that you feel stick out. Everyone seems to just be copy-pasting their general argument against AI into their replies to his post, despite the fact that a lot of that doesn't apply to that post.

I feel like I'm going crazy. Either I'm missing something, or everybody is just talking past each other.

Everyday.Human Derek Feb 21

@emilymbender
Lovely post! Thank you for your well informed piece. I tend to be in Mélanie Mitchells camp or @ct_bergstrom
Sometimes both

Andreas Wagner Feb 22

@emilymbender Thank you for this thoughtful and balanced post/thread! It almost obviates a comment on @tante 's piece that I have been planning to write. I am particularly happy about your point on the Māori language model, on transformers and how to build and use language modeling without extractive, exploitative means!

If I may thus join in there and add another thought ...

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Andreas Wagner Feb 22

@emilymbender @tante

What annoyed me in the arguments I had seen was the shallowness of the sketches of liberatory and emancipatory usages, efforts and perspectives - for @pluralistic , with saying "Open Source" enough seems to have been said, while for @tante such usages, efforts and perspectives seem to be in principle impossible, or only "niche attempts" not worth looking into because they are working worse than all the other models anyway. Well, that's not the impression I got when looking at, say, the Institutional Data Initiative, a "Summer School for Women in AI and Data Science" in Addis Ababa and the RAIL workshops, and a host of other movements that I am trying to track from afar, but would love to see much, much more of or eventually become involved with.

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Andreas Wagner Feb 22

@emilymbender @tante @pluralistic

@collinsworth 's post about "AI optimism is a class privilege" made me realize and acknowledge the privilege I have, but then the question is, how can I make good use of that privilege and be an ally for those who are not as privileged as me? Boycoting AI BigTech?Boycoting any (L)LM whatsoever? With some exceptions for acrasia or external constraints being tolerated? Or as long as I am not talking about it in ways that could be understood as affirmative? Probing and developing/distilliing datasets and models in more open ways? Developing infrastructure, social relations and collective action in other directions?

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Andreas Wagner Feb 22

@emilymbender @tante @pluralistic @collinsworth

Now, how to be a good ally is not something that any of @tante , @pluralistic , you or I have any authority to determine I suppose. But I feel like thinking of the challenge we all face in these terms helps align some ideas and set priorities - well, it helps me at least.

https://medium.com/@seidymam/summer-school-for-women-in-ai-and-data-science-a56e847156d9

https://sadilar.org/en/rail-2025/

https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/sloptimism

/fin

Summer school for women in AI and Data Science

Introduction

Medium

Mark Hahn Feb 22

@emilymbender He's not making your criticism; that is not a slight to you or your ranking of what's important.

I'm not really sure what the background is here, but it reminds me of how the left so frequently winds up harming its own allies.

This distinction about use cases is the important point in my view. So much so that I wasn't fully on board with the first paragraphs of the Smashing Frames article (though I loved the rest).

For example, the analogy to wanting to be vegan but accepting vegetarian. I am convinced of the value of reducing our meat consumption and animal farming. But personally I don't find eating meat morally objectionable on principle. If I did, I'd *not* make exceptions.

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Noting that something should be reduced, and concluding that it is morally objectionable in principle are two different things. One allows for compromise and exception, the other should not.

(NB: I know and accept that some people do find any meat consumption morally objectionable in principle. I respect such views, but don't (currently) share them)

ティージェーグレェ Feb 23

Re: veganism "If I did, I'd not make exceptions."

Yeah, I am a vegan. I've even worked as a chef at vegan restaurants.

Life has a "funny" way of testing convictions in my experience.

For me, for example: I have been incarcerated, more than once. Despite requesting vegan meals, such things were never availed to me.

However: I found that others with whom I was incarcerated, were generally more than happy to trade their meals' vegetables, for my meals' meat. Same for milk, etc.

Of all the weird economies that I encountered whilst incarcerated? It certainly seemed as if it was among the more benign. I managed to maintain being vegan as best I could in a food desert, and cultivated some camaraderie from carnivores who were happy with my generosity with things I had no interest in consuming.

I would posit: @[email protected] probably isn't vegan, and isn't writing from a perspective of authority in such realms. Alas, while analogies are perhaps useful for trying to convey an idea, they're also a fundamental logical fallacy that critical thinking classes in junior colleges will typically highlight as something to avoid in writing.

I'll leave you with a vegan joke: "When I was an omnivore, I didn't understand vegetarians. Now that I am vegan, I understand them even less."

Emma Irwin Feb 22

@emilymbender are there examples of people doing this well (describing what they chose, why, what data, maybe even how to challange or improve ?), that others can learn from? Would be v interested .

Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)Feb 22

@sunnydeveloper There is a whole literature on dataset documentation, including Data Statements for NLP. We link to some of the other projects from this page and also have some sample data statements.

https://techpolicylab.uw.edu/data-statements/

Data Statements | Tech Policy Lab

Emma Irwin Feb 22

@emilymbender thankyou ! I want to help people make more informed decisions, and be able to describe their choices - but teaching myself first!

Martin Hamilton Feb 22

@emilymbender Hi from a random Internet person! I wondered if you have a view on "Sovereign" models like Apertus? Per https://raw.githubusercontent.com/swiss-ai/apertus-tech-report/main/Apertus_Tech_Report.pdf

FWIW I am a genAI septic who started out feeling quite positive about this development, but then cooled on it rapidly once I realised that it doesn't address a) environmental impacts, or b) potential harms when genAI is used naively - or for plausible deniability by people doing bad stuff ¯\(ツ)/¯

For anyone reading this who hasn't come across Apertus before, there are now several models like this with characteristics such as:

Full disclosure of training data
robots.txt is respected during scraping
Training corpus includes under-represented languages/cultures
Measures taken to mitigate harm are documented
Code base is open source, not just the weights

Cassandrich Feb 23

@emilymbender That would have required admitting/exposing that the thing he used was unethically trained and violating the consent of the people whose works were used in making it. So of course he didn't do it.