Mastodawn

The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.

Refusing to read writing made with the use of LLMs and refusing to give time to writers who use, promote or justify the use of LLMs is not purity culture, it's a boycott. It's a political act of withdrawing my time, resources and support for something that I find deeply morally wrong. It's protest. I have a choice and I refuse.

LLMs are exploitative, destructive, biased, mediocre parroting machines. Using them has a negative impact on the climate, the arts, the quality of the internet, the job market, the economy, the accessibility of electronics, even on skill development, creativity and mental health. LLMs are made and trained on the unpaid labour of millions -if not billions- of people who didn't consent. Their generic output litter the path to finding anything by true human creators.

Wherever I can, for as long as I can, I reject LLMs and anything that is related to them. I'm boycotting.

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Papageier Feb 22

@reading_recluse You do wear machine-woven cloth, though, no?

Seriously: Why?

It's exploitative, the quality is mediocre, it kills jobs, it's a waste of resources, consumes vast amounts of energy, hinders creativity, destroys small businesses, forces uniformity onto people ... why wear it?

Because not doing so would be a waste of time. And time is the one resource that's (still) strictly limited for all of us. We compromise on the quality of clothing (debatable), in order to do other things we couldn't if we were still weaving cloth manually.

When mechanical weaving machines came about, the workers threw their wooden shoes, in French 'Sabot', into the machines to stop them.

All that is left of this effort is a word describing the futile attempt: Sabotage.

So protest all you like, it's just not going to get you anywhere.

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Violet Madder

@papageier @reading_recluse

Go back and read up on what the Luddites were actually protesting, jackass. They were not mindless technophobes.

Machine-woven cloth IN AND OF ITSELF is NOT inherently exploitative. It could have been used instead to elevate and improve the textile trade, making life easier for the workers.

Instead, the way the capitalists weaponized the tech to devalue labor was fucking evil.

Tech is not inherently good or bad. It's just a tool.

"AI" and LLMs, as they are currently being designed and deployed, are a tool being used as a WEAPON. Child-raping technofascist planetwreckers are using them to enclose the digital commons, jam any useful signals they don't control, and surveil the everloving shit out of everyone everywhere.

If we don't protest like our lives depend on it, NOW, things are going to get unimaginably and horrifyingly fucking bad.