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The dialogue around LLMs is kind of broken both in terms of critique and advocacy. For critique, we need to focus on how we attack fascist tech power consistently — LLMs are only one part of that; merely saying "AI bad" has simply ended up with a lot of people using AI quietly while feeling shame...

People who use it should feel shame. I include myself in that. It's a feeling one should embrace so that it is only used when strictly beneficial and to not trust the results.

If you don't have a clear logical explanation you can give for why it was helpful for a given task that overcomes the shame, then you should not use it for that.

I don't feel any shame about using a model I trained on my own writing that runs on my own machine, and it's insane to suggest that I should.

More to the point, the shame about the use of the big tech platforms isn't _useful_. Everybody has an instagram account and feels bad about it while Zuck profits off of them. What the fuck good does that do anybody? All those Substack writers are ashamed but still on there. It means nothing.

What I'm hearing is that you just want to not think about the negative impacts of what you're doing and not be judged for it.

You're not sensitive at all about this, are you?

The fact that you think this is about me is very weird. Shaming people about social media *did not work*, and now millions of people use an app that sells child sexual abuse material. Or the one from the company that enabled a genocide. And we’re on that path again.

The only thing this strategy accomplishes is letting folks like smug academics feel superior while actual harms go unabated and real-world behaviors don’t change, and accountability never comes. You are the one who doesn’t want to think about the negative impacts of what he’s advocating.