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.

@jonne @peter

Yeah, I was going to say... I'm not aware of Cory ever saying anything like that about AI. I'm pretty sure he knows exactly what's happening.

@malcircuit @jonne @peter

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.

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-02-18-now-we-are-six-stock-buyback-725260ca04bd

@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)

@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; it’s just lists of words with some stemming and grammar rules.

LLMs don’t 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.