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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🪨💎🪨⛏️Feb 23

Dude. AI is just a statistics machine that you lie to so it will give you something it thinks, statistically, will fit what you said to it

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Papageier

@tinfoilchefspickaxe @reading_recluse Which is, from a software programmer's point of view, exactly what I need it to do.

I understand what LLMs are. I am neither pro nor con. I'm an observer. I observe a disruptive tool and compare it to other disruptive tools, to estimate how this may play out in the long run. And my estimate is: we are all going to wear machine-woven cloth. I don't insist this is correct, but I think my arguments are sound.

I could have chosen other disruptive technologies as well, like, the Web and its effect on Journalism for comparison, but looms seemed more fitting.