CassandrichMar 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.

Show threadThe gallant knightMar 16
@dalias Yea, same with my private jet. Why should I not use it if all my friends still use it. Fuck the climate.
Show threadCassandrichMar 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.
Show threadThe gallant knightMar 16
@dalias People in Nigeria don't have a computer either. At least the people I know and who work in higher education.
Show threadCassandrichMar 16
@burningTyger What does that have to do with anything?
Show threadThe gallant knightMar 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.
Show threadCassandrichMar 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.
Show threadThe gallant knight
@dalias now you lost me to your argument :)
Can we agree that LLMs are bad?
Mar 16 at 3:07pmWeb
Show threadCassandrichMar 16
@burningTyger Yes, absolutely! 😁