Max Leibman
Bogdan Buduroiu@maxleibman Not to start a fight, but the community went on a week-long witch hunt against Cory Doctorow because he dared to use AI
@budududuroiu That’s not why people were mad at Cory Doctorow. They were mad because in the same piece he called anti-AI sentiment “purity culture,” framing it as reflexive, unthinking moralizing.
If not for that element, it barely would have been a ripple. Witness that feature article a few months ago about how Ed Zitron, one of the leading critics of AI, also represented AI companies in his marketing firm. That was way more salacious and barely got any play here at all.
@maxleibman really not here to fight, so please don't take as such, but...
> Using LLMs isn’t always popular with the cool crowd, Cory knows that. And he wants to defend his (quite modest) use, which I understand:
> Nobody likes their problematic behavior being pointed out to them. But as outlined: Life’s complicated.
Why would using an LLM be "problematic", unless there was a purity culture at play?
I digress, Mastodon is a great platform that allows one to curate their own feed to their liking, sometimes there's cross interactions between bubbles of Mastodon, so far, anecdotally, the cross interaction that bled into the ML/AI research space has been pretty negative, for no reason. Some people think that negativity is good, and that the ML/AI research space does not belong here. I guess that's where defederation comes in.
Acting ethically in an imperfect world
Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are […]
Kwaze KwazeOkay, take LLMs out of the equation so we don't have whatever baggage we have about them hanging around.
Is the use of DDT problematic? It also "works" for its purpose. But it has serious issues.
If it is "problematic", does that mean we're engaging in purity culture over which pesticides are okay and which aren't?
If it's not problematic what would you call it?
@budududuroiu @maxleibman
Like with DDT we have documented evidence of the harms caused by the LLM industrial complex. We know the negative externalities. Many of us experience them first hand.
The only way this "purity culture" angle makes sense is if you think the negative externalities don't exist or aren't that serious in which case I don't really know if we actually share any values which is a completely different issue from "purity culture".