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 threadOutfrostMar 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.

Show threadThe gallant knightMar 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.
Show threadCassandrichMar 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.

Show threadThe gallant knight
@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.
Mar 16 at 5:51pmWeb