Mastodawn

Cassandrich Mar 16

Saw some article about "quitting LLMs for climate" and.. uhg. Can we please drop the "personal responsibility" bs? Your choice, as an individual, to use or not use this shit has no effect on the climate.

Where your individual use of LLMs *does* have harm is rotting your brain, destroying your credibility, exposing you and your contacts' private conversations and photos to parties who wish us harm, wasting your peers' time, exposing people who use the things you made to legal risk, etm etm etm.

Edit: To be clear, I'm perfectly happy with people refraining from using LLMs for whatever reason works for them! This post was more about media/mass-communication narratives and how they risk implying that there's value in "AI" and that refraining from using it is a sacrifice rather than being self-care and community care.

The gallant knight Mar 16

@dalias Yea, same with my private jet. Why should I not use it if all my friends still use it. Fuck the climate.

Cassandrich Mar 16

@burningTyger That's not related because ordinary ppl don't have private jets. There is no private jet industry pushing billions of ppl to fly private jets. It is not a harm that's the aggregate of billions of microharms that individually mean nothing and where only fixing the pressure to do it can solve anything.

The gallant knight

@dalias People in Nigeria don't have a computer either. At least the people I know and who work in higher education.

Cassandrich Mar 16

@burningTyger What does that have to do with anything?

The gallant knight Mar 16

@dalias Things that "ordinary people" have or have not. Things like private jets or computers. Every choice is embedded into your socioeconomical context and should be considered meaningful.

Cassandrich Mar 16

@burningTyger In "ordinary people have" the point is not whether everyone has it. The entire point is that it doesn't matter if one person, or even a large class of people, doesn't, because the harm comes from the gigantic scale, outside the control of anyone who doesn't, of people who do. And that is not a result of their aggregate individual choices (which individually possess "free will" but at scale are clearly modeled by predictable rules) but of the pressures imposed, by entities in possession of power, on populations.

The gallant knight Mar 16

@dalias now you lost me to your argument :)
Can we agree that LLMs are bad?

Cassandrich Mar 16

@burningTyger Yes, absolutely! 😁

Outfrost Mar 16

@burningTyger I believe cars, at the scale they're produced, owned and used today, are bad.

I also own and drive a car (while living in a densely populated European city).

It's the system that's broken, not the decisions individuals make in order to make their lives easier within said system. A few people choosing to not own a car doesn't fix the climate, health, safety, or community impact of cars in general.

I believe this is roughly what @dalias is saying wrt llms.

The gallant knight Mar 16

@outfrost @dalias I know and it frustrates me because I do think my actions have impact. Who's going to start making a difference. While I personally have some disagreements with Greta Thunberg's activities she started something small with global impact. Who know who is next? Might be me, might be you. It's an ethical decision for me. I try not to judge other people for their decisions but I want to make it better for everybody so I try to do as much as I can on my own.

Cassandrich Mar 16

@burningTyger @outfrost Your actions in systemic things can make a difference when they're part of an organized concerted effort to produce change and take into account the power systems involved.

When they don't make a difference is when you just think "well I'm not doing that, so I've done my part and the other people who are doing the thing are the problem" rather than identifying the power relationships that lead to the thing being done at population-scale.

Outfrost Mar 16

@dalias @burningTyger yeah. Beverage corporations taught people to "recycle" plastic bottles not because that fixes the plastic problem, but because they want you to think it's your responsibility, and that if only everyone sorted their rubbish properly, there would be no plastic problem. Because they want to keep selling overpriced beverages in cheap plastic bottles with no consequences.

Outfrost Mar 16

@burningTyger That said, I do always appreciate strongly principled personal choices! What you do in this regard is definitely good. I guess we just need to not turn this issue into another plastic bottle.

Outfrost Mar 16

@burningTyger @dalias
My current job involves coding on things I think shouldn't exist. (And I don't get much choice in the market, really, beyond not touching slophouses.)

If, hypothetically, LLMs only had a climate, hardware availability, and labour market costs, I could see myself using an LLM sometimes at this job. I need to pay my bills, I don't care about the product, in fact lowering the code quality could be a benefit.

But in reality the evil of LLMs goes so, so much deeper than that.

Outfrost Mar 16

@burningTyger @dalias That is of course _not_ to say i'd be happy with LLMs in the described hypothetical. But it does assume them being built like an actual tool, through genuine means and with correct intentions, which couldn't be further from the reality we face.

And I think there's value in teaching people that nuclear weapons are not "just tools".

The gallant knight Mar 16

@dalias @outfrost Now you're talking Niklas Luhmann and the resonance between systems. You have to find a way in your system that creates vibrations in the other system so that they oscillate with your system. I'm bad at explaining this. But you have to make your idea their idea. This works pretty well e.g. in making green energy popular with conservative folks if they see that it makes them save a lot of money. The tricky part is finding the sweet spot that triggers the other system.