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
Show threadProf. 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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Show threadProf. 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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Show threadProf. 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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Show thread1337
@emilymbender Somewhat off-topic: I think some grammatical errors and typos are fine. I really don't like things that are too polished. I work with someone whom English is a second language, and he obviously uses LLMs to write messages. I'd rather read his own broken English than to wonder if the LLM generated what he actually meant. Similarly, I like live music recordings with mistakes and improvisation. Gives things more character, IMO. Over-polishing everything can lead to a type of bland conformity.
Feb 21 at 9:40pmWeb
Show threadJack Yan (甄爵恩)Feb 21
@1337 @emilymbender Well said. I had to ask a friend for whom English is a second language that he not use an LLM bot for the same reason.
Show threadDr. Angus Andrea Grieve-SmithFeb 22
@1337 this!
Show threadMarjorieRFeb 23
@1337 @emilymbender this (mis)use of large language models to 'polish' your text is just autotune for words, and about as unhelpful.