Mastodawn

On reflection, I think the worst part of Cory Doctorow’s argument in favor of LLM use is this:

« Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM. You think that LLMs are "fruits of the poisoned tree" and must be eschewed because they are saturated with the sin of their origins. I think this is a very bad take, the kind of rathole that purity culture always ends up in.

Let's start with some context. If you don't want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then _you are totally fucked._ »

This is a form of argument beloved by awful people. I can’t be pure and perfect, they say, so there’s no point my trying to make better or less damaging moral choices.

Stop buying from Amazon? Walmart and Target aren’t perfectly moral. Stop driving an SUV? Your car pollutes too, and so do buses. Stop using Twitter? Facebook and Bluesky are far from morally perfect, and mastodon.social has poor moderation. And so on.

I see this kind of excuse all the time online. It’s a cousin to both whataboutism and Mister Gotcha. It also rests on a false premise. The idea that anyone is expected to achieve complete purity is a straw man. You’re not having sainthood demanded of you, people are just hoping you’ll consider *reducing* the amount of immoral and damaging behavior you engage in *when there are perfectly viable alternatives*. Sure, we can argue about whether the alternatives are truly viable, but the idea that if you can’t be perfect you may as well not even try to be better? That’s moral bankruptcy.

Mocking the desire for people to behave more ethically as “purity culture” is like mocking it as “virtue signaling”. It says things about the person doing the mocking, none of them good. It’s also deeply hypocritical coming from someone who has gone out of his way to avoid using DRM. Isn’t that “purity culture”?

Let me give an example of how I’m not perfect.

I believe that environmental plastics are a big problem and we should try to cut out plastic packaging. Do I buy products packaged in plastic? Absolutely yes! There are some kinds of product I don’t think it’s possible to find in non-plastic packaging. An example from last week: CR2032 batteries. They’re sold in hard-to-open plastic packages for safety reasons. (They’re also apparently coated in something bitter to discourage kids from swallowing them, which immediately made me want to taste one out of curiosity, but I was able to resist that urge.)

On the other hand, if I’m buying olive oil and there are two bottles on the shelf, and one is plastic and the other is glass, I’ll buy the oil in the glass bottle, even if it’s a bit more expensive, because glass is both recyclable and less harmful in the environment. The canola oil in the kitchen, on the other hand, is in a plastic bottle; I’ve never seen any sold in glass.

So yeah, we can’t be perfect, and I absolutely don’t expect you to be, but let’s all try to be a bit better eh?

@mathew sounds like Corey needs to read his own words and consider the behavioral consequences of enshitifieing things because of fomo and whataboutism. He should know better.
As for perfection, it's a myth to guide but not measure ourselves.
#AMorePerfectUnion #wwcdd

Jeffrey Haas Feb 22

@mathew My own trite example of this was suggesting elsewhere that, "If you are considering giving money to a charity, consider writing a check rather than using a credit card so they don't lose money due to the fees." (Clearly, this is in the US...)

A majority of comments were about "you should donate via credit card because ... pick random argument having nothing to do with the fee motivation for the original suggestion".

@jhaas Charities I’ve contributed to recently have an option to pay the credit card fees and add that to the total, so I’ve been doing that. Of course, contributing via credit card is still better than not contributing.

Jeffrey Haas Feb 22

@mathew All true. All mentioned.

And if you pay the 3-7% to cover the costs and have the option to just give them that money directly rather than fritter it way... why not?

The core message is: Donate.
The enforced point is: As efficiently as possible
The chorus of purity folk: If you don't do it the easiest way, you're discouraging people from donating at all. Which is the bullshit in question.

Mason Loring Bliss Feb 23

@mathew One thing I've learned from your post is that I know how CR2032 cells taste and you don't.

Semitones Feb 23

@mason @mathew I put t near my nose and smelled, does that count for half credit?

@mathew I agree with you, Cory is just looking at it from a skewed perspective. My personal take is:

As long as you, the individual, have the INNER motivation to strive for "perfection" with regards to anything, nobody has the right to stop you. Give the best you are able to offer.

On the other hand, if you're forced to be perfect by others or by society in general, so it's an OUTER motivation, then ... Yeah it might be the right thing to do objectively, but maybe it's not fitting in your reality which might be really constrained (as explained with your example) ... So don't stress yourself out too much about it. Sometimes its not possible to live a contradiction free live.

@mathew Cory Doctorow right now

d@nny disc@ mc² Feb 23

@rakoo @mathew i've been on the doctorow hater train for years and i finally feel the tides are turning

Sci-Fi Girl Feb 23

Agree with all this!

But FYI, spectrum brand uses glass bottles, and I'm pretty sure they have canola oil (organic).

@mathew Numbers are too abstract and the human species hasn't evolved to comprehend them yet. We are more binary than computers. "Let's reduce plastic use": numbers. "But I can't stop using plastics" (zero), "so I keep using plastics!" (one). Purity is number illiteracy: same reason how billionaires get away with it and why awful voting systems allow gerrymandering. It's everywhere. Oh and defund education to keep it that way, doomscrolling instead. Easy enough: funding is numbers.

Climate Jenny 2.1 Feb 22

@mathew Life has kicked me around enough to finally learn the lesson that achieving *most* of a goal has to be acceptable.

I wanted to decarbonize my house, but my solar array only covers about 60 percent because of archaic zoning requirements.

I wanted the HVAC to be entirely electric, but it turns out I have to burn a small amount of gas when it gets seriously cold.

Sometimes I throw out things that could be recycled because they probably won’t actually be recycled.

Etc.

arestelle Feb 22

@mathew from the parts I’ve seen quoted, he’s also totally ignoring that it’s not about the sin of their origins, it’s mostly about the ongoing harms. The theft that’s baked into the models and repeated with every use. The poisoning of air when they’re used. The depletion of water in drought zones doesn’t stop when the models are trained. The trauma and abuse of data workers is ongoing. Foisting the ongoing costs of their power demands on area residents instead of the companies.

Linebyline Feb 22

@mathew So, two things. One: As your follow-up and everyone else's comments illustrate, ethical consumption is about harm reduction, not perfection.

Two: "And yet you participate in society. I am very intelligent."

Jared White (ResistanceNet ✊)Feb 22

@mathew Right on. I don't take any statements which include pejorative phrases like "purity culture" or "virtue signaling" seriously. They are simply one tiny step away from "woke" and it's a lazy rhetorical shortcut. Gonna start calling us luddites too? Geeeeez.

André Lampe Feb 22

@mathew oh, this is so well said, thank you. Yes.

some kind of orange shape Feb 23

@mathew yeah, I mean, he's written several books without using any AI at all. We just want him to keep doing what he'd been doing.

@mathew When I say "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" i mean to imply "and therefore we should attempt to avoid consumption wherever possible under our circumstances." To date nothing has made it so I *have to have to have to* use LLM's so I won't.
I also hate that some say "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" and mean "and therefore I don't have to take responsibility for my harmful actions"

Abazigal Feb 23

@mathew This sounds to me like a variation of his other take - that there are no individual solutions to structural issues. You can refuse to use LLMs for your own reasons, and the rest of the world are just going to continue using them, and the one to be disadvantaged ultimately would be you.

In short, it doesn’t seem any different from his earlier conclusion here.

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/109932407074736182

Fatalistic? Maybe?

Cory Doctorow (@[email protected])

Content warning: Long thread/25

Mamot - Le Mastodon de La Quadrature du Net

@Abazigal The rest of the world will go on using DRM even if he doesn’t, and he’ll continue to be disadvantaged by not having Audible carry his audiobooks, but somehow he thought that was a battle worth fighting. I wonder what’s different this time?

Cassandrich Feb 23

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Abazigal/116117668340314369

@Abazigal @mathew If this were true, he'd partly have a valid point. But refusing to melt your brain the way he clearly has is not disadvantaging yourself.

tony 🏳️‍⚧️ 🏴 🚴🧗🏻Feb 23

@mathew yeah but ya see, LLMs are neat.

The weirdest part to me is he is defending using them as spell and grammar checks, when that's been a solved problem for ages. What a waste.

@mathew To me LLMs are almost something like cars which are also terrible inventions and a lot of people will go to great lengths why they can‘t under no circumstances give up driving. It‘s like an instinctive version of Adorno‘s "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly,“ a consumer choice.

Which is why the whole argument is meaningless if we don’t manage to overcome the relations of production. It‘s good and right to buy olive oil in a glass bottle but it won‘t achieve any real meaningful change.

Phil Haigh Feb 23

@mathew exactly this. 💯

There are other problems with that section: to begin with, you can tell not even he believes it. It's a bad-faith argument and he knows it, so he has to stack the emotional deck in the reader's mind. "my modest use," "the kind of rathole," etc. Nothing like beatifying your choices and comparing dissenting thought to vermin!

The bigger problem, though, is that it's a bullshit mischaracterization of the opinions he's attacking. At first I though it was a deliberate misdirection; pretty common in online shit-talking. Elsewhere in the document he talks about "Refusing to run an LLM on your laptop because you don’t like Sam Altman" which is exactly the sort of dismissive trivialization of legitimate concerns internet trolls like to undertake.

Then I noticed he writes about 'Ollama' as though it's an LLM itself, rather than a tool used to run an LLM. So, I'm now wondering if he just has no idea what the fuck is going on, and maybe actually does not understand that the tools he's using aren't just of shitty people but have ongoing horrific external costs -- including the "open source"† models to which he's addicting himself.

† - they're almost all not, of course; just another term the AI hypeboyz redefined

G. Clavier Feb 23

@mathew Ah yes, the good old Nirvana fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

"No perfect solution hey? Then your solution is shit."

I am kind of disappointed to see Doctorow fall into this sort of shitty rhetoric but hey, "Burn your idols" I guess.

Nirvana fallacy - Wikipedia