people are sleeping on the last part of his comment:
"the best thing to me, throughout all the history of capitalism or innovation or whatever you want is to just flood the market"
JDAM all the data centers. right now. **urgently**
Cory Doctorow, Chris Hayes, and David Roberts: why do people hate AI i can't figure it out
the AI companies: we are going to take away your ability to think and sell it back to you, that's our plan, literally and explicitly, we are saying it from a stage.
He's using LLM-based spellcheckers, and kind of implying this is new amazing technology.
Presumably to prove that he isn't a "luddite" or whatever.
I'm not going to argue the matter as if I perfectly understand and agree with Cory's position. He can defend himself. I'm just not sure that article says what was implied by @peter's post. It seems like Cory understands exactly why people hate AI, and he's trying to make a distinction between the technology and the application of it.
He was an ass for ranting about "purity culture" and belittling real concerns people have (and why many people hate AI), to quote:
"Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM. You think that LLMs are āfruits of the poisoned treeā 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."
"Purity culture" is a highly derogatory term, implying that people who are anti-AI are some sort of religious cult.
I don't even mind his position on this, honestly I don't care.
But what I do care about is how he said itāby directly insulting people that are not of his opinion.
It's not only a logical fallacy; it's also just bad writing.
I only feel like you might be reading more into his words than he actually believes, but I'm not going to debate with you about it.
@malcircuit @thomasfuchs @jonne his latest post he says AI critics are experiencing "psychosis" because it's just a "normal technology" https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#more-12536
i was posting about it earlier in this thread: https://thepit.social/@peter/116220856874688629
@peter Ah! He believes they have LLM Derangement Syndrome; I see.
@peter @malcircuit @thomasfuchs I would think that he is both right and that your criticism of his technolibertarianism is correct. (He is quite consistent in it, at least.) The psychosis rhetoric is bit much.
There is nothing exceptional about Silicon Valley technology being absolutely horrendous, so in that sense it is normal. I don't think that he argues that it is therefore neutral, but just that it is one technology in a long line of technologies used for horrendous purposes.
ā¦and an assault rifle is just a tool, like a hammer or a can opener; the _sinner_ is lovable, it's just their _sin_ that's contemptible. </s>
(I'm scorning Doctorow's disingenuity, not scorning
@malcircuit or anyone else in this thread)
@jonne @thomasfuchs @malcircuit @peter
If I have been reading his complaints correctly Cory never hated AI unless it was burdening the user: i.e. "Reverse centaur"
I guess that's good enough to sell a lot of books because it is a "functionally smart" position with a little pushback against the AI trend, and not enough people in the media are willing to give us even that, but -my- problems with AI go deeper than the interface. I still consider it (attempted) intellectual theft and a sanitized interface for environmental destruction that provides results which are a lot less helpful than all the stuff that came before AI -- all the stuff they deliberately took away to make AI seem useful
(I recently stopped letting Cory in my feed after he started to share substack articles)
Fwiw, I've never read his stuff because I don't like his writing style.
But he veered into insulting people that are nominally "on his side" (whatever that means) recently and as you say there's other issues.
@RnDanger @jonne @thomasfuchs @peter
I feel like it's important to keep in mind the context of the article. He's using a spellchecker LLM. It's not a chat bot. He's not asking it questions. He's not asking it to write for him. It's like criticizing someone for using a keyboard app with autocorrect.
I also have a deeper philosophical opposition to most uses of LLMs, but a spell checker is such a trivial application that I'm having a hard time thinking of a reason it's "bad".
@malcircuit @jonne @thomasfuchs @peter
He's running olama on a local computer. I haven't looked into the the training for that model but if i was able to be convinced that there's an ethical model to use it might be that one.
So he's set up an AI at home. That's not "Big LLM", but it's also definitely not "anti AI", which a lot of his fans are
@RnDanger @jonne @thomasfuchs @peter
Yeah, I know nothing of Ollama, so it's hard for me to take a position on it. At the same time though, previous generations of spell checking and grammar checking are also arguably "AI" technology, and trained on similar sorts of datasets. I'm not sure whether a spellchecker based on lower complexity neural nets and Markov chains is meaningfully different from one that's based on an LLM. Seems more like just a matter of scale.
@malcircuit @RnDanger @jonne @peter spell checkers have been around for 45 years commercially, grammar checkers for 30; itās just lists of words with some stemming and grammar rules.
LLMs donāt really add anything to this wrt to typos.
@thomasfuchs @RnDanger @jonne @peter
I think the point of it is more to identify parts of a sentence that, while being grammatically correct, are worded in a way that's "hard to read" or whatever. An LLM would be very good at suggesting alternative ways to say the same thing.
But as you have pointed out elsewhere, that's essentially what an editor does.
I'm not arguing it's a good use of the technology, just that it's such a trivial application that it's not really worth talking about.
@peter @thomasfuchs @RnDanger @jonne
And I would point out that "psychosis" is a word that *you* used, not him.
@malcircuit @RnDanger @jonne @peter I completely agree with you.
For wha itās worth, itās him talking about it and heās using it as a springboard for what is abusive behavior.
The way he gets preemptively angry and defensive and is blaming people with generalizations and comparing them to a cult _before they even did anything_ is ringing my (tiny) alarm bells.
Of course thatās just my opinion, but I think I have sound reasoning.
(Anyway: I need to do more astro again.)
@thomasfuchs @malcircuit @RnDanger @jonne @peter
Fuchs is right to ask about the ethics (consistency) of any person using something they have claimed is problematic, and who was abusive.
We can question the supply chain, comfort and collateral damage of LLMs just as much as a shoe. And then we can choose not to wear it or support it.
It's a good practice. In my case, choosing not to use things has helped me appreciate and discover the work of others motivated to do something for the right reasons. It also shows what is overlooked by just following the crowd.
@malcircuit @jonne @thomasfuchs @peter
Well one difference is that he sends his whole work through at once and says "find errors" instead of looking for squiggles in the text as he goes, which sounds good to me because those squiggles distract me so much from actual writing.
Another is the training. Where's the data from? Did those people agree to provide it? How much energy did it take to train? I just don't know these things.
@RnDanger fwiw many word processors have the option to do a full spellcheck on the whole text (without any LLMs); indeed that was the default until the 90s.
I agree that this is way less distracting and a byletter workflow.
Anyway, he should just hire a good editorāwho for example could tell him not to insult his audienceā¦
@thomasfuchs @malcircuit @jonne @peter Oh, but oh, but it's just a li'l bit of _modest_ li'l harmless li'l use of a neato LLM tool, just to, y'know, double-check his punctuation, though! Pfft. I don't believe him; no it's not.
I can engage with the merits of a worthy (thoughtful, grownup) opinion on 'AI' that is counter to mine. Doctorow's gross hypocrisy doesn't qualify, and his petulant delivery seals the deal: No.
Something-something 'purity culture' something-something 'imperfect world' something blahbitty blah? That needs a copyeditor's touch; here, let's have a go:
"I know you are, but what am I?"
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