Anyway let me also acknowledge: people don't always have choice over their surroundings or what things they're exposed to.

Peoples' work, school, home, regional, and economic factors all construct how much agency they *have* to construct a healthy environment for themselves.

Not to mention, there will always be marketing pressures to convince you that you want things that aren't actually in your interests, attempts to exploit your reward pathways for profit. That's hard to fight. And "willpower" is certainly not an accurate framing. "Constructing your environment" is something more people have *more* control over, to some degree, but that's limited.

That said, there's also continuously a marketing narrative from capitalism: you could be better than everyone else, you *do* have the willpower to make all these choices your own. So why not get that bag of Doritos! Oh you ate the whole bag? Must be your fault.

And you bombard people with this stuff every day as they go to the gas station, etc.

And, now let's turn to the way that people are being pressured into LLM usage as much as possible from their employers... many people have no choice but to use them.

And then that's normalized for when people *leave* work. You're pulled into the clicker game, and is that an individual's fault?

But your employer has reasons to get you hooked on the stuff: if the dreams they're being sold about LLMs are true, then they can devalue your work. Fire you, or push down your wages, etc.

I don't blame individuals for that. That's structural.

LLMs aren't harmful as in terms of the technology is inherently evil. The harm comes from a larger socioeconomic construction. We have no idea what LLM usage would be like right now if this wasn't being forcefully thrust upon people.

I use a deep neural network with Blender's OpenImageDenoiser plugin. That plugin doesn't harm my creativity, it doesn't take away my agency. It *is* a deep neural network.

The problem is we *can't* be divorced from our current socioecomic structure. "Technology isn't inherently good or bad"? Well yes and no: technology may be neutral, but it is suffused in a social environment which is anything but.

And so, now, today, what *can* you do to change your environment for yourself, to affect the lives of others?

We are all limited. We have limited degrees of movements.

I am on a GLP-1. In a different world, I wouldn't be, because I wouldn't have developed a food addiction the way I did. But I did develop one, and right now, I need help with the present situation while also under the stress of trying to keep an organization I care about alive.

But it's not the right world that I would need that in the first place, and it's not the right world that others cannot afford and don't have access to that medicine.

LLMs also are erasing contextual guidance by creating "signal shaped noise". It's harder to tell whether something may be interesting based on the style it's written in. It's hard to tell whether art may have an interesting message based on whether or not it looks interesting.

But those signals were already classist.

And yet they were the signals we had.

It's complicated, and I agree that we have to look at this in terms of class divisions.

But we are moving from an already problematic world to a more problematic one.

What choices can we make that affect concentrations of power? A sense of creative fulfillment? Etc.

Maybe I am not providing concrete answers. But I will provide the following:

Earnest critique of social conditions continues to not just be important, it's critical.

We do not live in an apolitical environment. Even tech which may be structurally neutral is not apolitical, because our world is not.

Evaluate your space in the world, realize your limitations, and be brave enough to ask for change of the world you inhabit.

@cwebber I think they will be dumbing people down, will be herding people into the same information without creative pushback, so everyone will be sounding the same. For the billionaires who want to control the herds they feel entitled to control, it is just another step.

I remember calculators in school. I was the last one to get one, in my final yr of high school, & the difference in my approach to math & that of those using the calculators was noticeable. This is much more comprehensive.