@tante This is why I hate talk about "good" uses of #LLM / #GenAI technology.

Those tools are rooted in harm, whether it's theft of creative works, exploitation of developing world labour, or abuse of scarce resources. You can't use them without being complicit in that harm, no matter how noble your cause.

@tante

The same arguments are used to thwart public safety on guns. Disingenuous "People kill people, not guns".

AI is a net negative.

1. It wastes fossil fuel & worsens climate change. It pushes up gas prices, electricity & water rates.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/electricity-price-data-center-ai-inflation-goldman.html

https://www.wired.com/story/trump-energy-industry-ai-fossil-fuels-pittsburgh-summit/

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ai-companies-data-centers-electricity-trump-administration-df665913

https://www.desmog.com/2025/12/11/the-koch-network-is-pushing-trump-to-accelerate-ai-documents-show/

2. It's used to automate information pollution & cyberwarfare, like covid disinformation & election meddling by hostile foreign powers like Putin

1/

@tante I think that Lourde's central insight here is that tool use changes the user and to some degree determines what it's used for. We see this in the cognitive impact of LLM tools, in revolutionary violence leading to the reestablishment of similar structures of oppression it was originally meant to fight, etc etc.

As the old saying goes, if all you have is a hammer...

@tante

thank you for that explanation. I kept thinking hammers and saws, and didn't get the metaphor at all.

Now this is much clearer.

@tante

Your observation is brilliant.

In order to what you said, is that the social networks of the #bigtechs like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc., will never be a tool for the liberation of the peoples, of the opressed (us), as they structure social relations of domination and related to the interests of the oppressor. A tool creates a specific social relation.

It is pointless to open an account on twitter and shout "I will make the revolution from within!".

@tante

I see this is about ai and as llm/gen-ai has no positive cost/benefit outcome, *however it is used*, i agree ofc.

But Ai aside, what is more "master's tools" than guns and bombs? Yet if you want to oppose that, what do you need? Guns and bombs. Such "Tools of oppression" can be used to support evil or oppose evil. Such tools have no innate ideology. They only enable power. And power has no inherent ideology either.

/1

@tante

Ai, however, is a special case. It is more like nuclear weapons. These are the kind of "master's tools" that should never be used. Once brought into reality, the only course is containment.

Gen-ai and LLM-ai, tho, are more closely akin to another technology which should never be used and that is human cloning. Done digitally instead of physically. But in every essential way they are *the same* and so should be opposed on that basis and contained/banned on that same basis as well.

/2

@tante Mornings! Audrey Lorde's quote comes in a context of racism, feminism and patriarchy. I don't feel it is right to strip out that context, but at the same time I think she could have meant it as a universal statement.

»For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.«

Text is 4 pages ☕

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/audre-lorde-the-master-s-tools-will-never-dismantle-the-master-s-house

@tante

This applies to language and words too.

I am getting tired of slurs being "reclaimed" yet the oppressors are still suing them and you can't call them out because everyone else (or a whole country) is now using the word. Frustrating.

@tante but aren't many technologies we use today rooted in this very class?

Charles Babbage's Differential Engine was an attempt to better subjugate industrial and plantation labor: https://logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skies/origin-stories-plantations-computers-and-industrial-control/
Cryptography, and also the machines to break it – which would later pave the way for computers – were developed to better kill people.
Infrastructure that would later become the internet was developed to ensure the US would still kill millions of people after being hit badly.
IBM developed databases to help make the Nazis' genocide more efficient.