Peteri disagree with Cory Doctorow and his take here on "AI critic psychosis." the tl; dr is "lol everyone calm down, LLMs are a normal technology, a neutral tool that can be used for good or for evil." no. some technologies are bad and mainly do bad things. https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/
personally, i think all unregulated machine learning (including LLMs) is potentially dangerous and causing more harm than benefits to the general population. https://thepit.social/@peter/116205452673914720
but Cory has a major blind spot, which is that he's a gen X guy who came up in the whole techno-libertarian "information wants to be free" days of the early internet. it was exciting and intoxicating and they were making the world a better place! but that whole anti-regulatory Silicon Valley thing turned out to be a fucking ruse that led to surveillance capitalism, and guys like him have not fully owned up to their role in it.
he's still doing it, he's still name-checking Aaron Swartz, as if Swartz wouldn't have grown up to be just another Jack Dorsey. the America First techno-libertarians pushed an anti-regulatory ideology on the entire world, and we are now paying for it by losing our democracies.
so when that Type Of Guy comes to me and says "technology is neutral" i don't buy it. technology **hasn't** been neutral, a bunch of well-meaning academics and technologists helped the likes of Google and Facebook to build the world we have today and it fucking sucks! why the fuck would we Charlie-Brown ourselves and take another swing at their football???
Jaytechnology can be "normal" but still incredibly dangerous. cancer drugs are "normal" but we don't let people synthesize molecules in their garage and sell them on Etsy. nuclear fission is "normal" but you can't build a reactor in your garage to sell power to the neighborhood. if your call to accept machine learning tools as "normal" doesn't also include the caveat that it needs to be carefully regulated, you're a crank. we already did the unregulated tech thing and it's been a fucking nightmare.
Seiðr@peter Nuclear *fission*.
Wait, if you have specs for nuclear fusion I have an investment for you.
@Illuminatus haha oh no, i've leaked my plans!!
(corrected "fusion" to "fission", if you're wondering what these comments are about)
Uriel Fanelli@peter there is exactly zero chance you can regulate anything, in a globalized word. You can regulate it locally. But, what you fear is being done somewhere else.