It's sad to see Cory Doctorow disparage avoidance of LLMs as "purity culture." I usually admire people for making difficult choices in a sincere effort to live in accordance with their values, especially when those values center being considerate of shared resources such as environment & economy.

There are certain values that are important enough to me that I can't stand looking in the mirror if I consciously betray them. Using LLMs would make me feel like I'm disrespecting the skills that I spent a lifetime of painstaking work (and a fuck-ton of student debt that I'll be repaying until I die) acquiring, disrespecting every working class person and siding with the oligarch class against them, helping to raise energy prices that already strain so many people including myself, and ultimately helping to tip the scales of climate change in favor of existential threats. That's not a way to feel awesome about the girl in the mirror.

But even if none of those reservations existed, I doubt I'd be keen on LLMs anyway. Because, much like video gaming (which I also avoid), LLM use just seems like a tedious distraction from things in life that I find most enjoyable. I loved my career because of how it fit so well with my skills and interests. Why would I invite a machine to strip my career down into something far less personally engaging? I love to write, and I love exercising my (admittedly limited supply of) creativity. Punting on those opportunities is the last thing that appeals to me.

So I do not see the point in disparaging people for prioritizing the things they find most fulfilling, avoiding the things they find most demotivating, and most of all trying to live in a way that attempts to be thoughtful about coexisting with others.

I'm disappointed in the messenger, but it's just one more tiny data point of ultimately unpersuasive rhetoric that still hasn't sold me on the notion that there is fun to be had from participating in a system that is dedicated to ensuring that memory, storage, clean water, affordable energy, privacy, and other nice things become so scarce that only the wealthiest people on earth can eventually access them.

So call it "purity culture" if you need to. It won't shame me into doing what you want.