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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...

And amongst AI advocates, there's too often the same tedious fallback to arguments of inevitability and "progress", which excuse the enabling of the bad actors in tech, and advance their authoritarian project. It's a failure of imagination, in addition to being complicit in their political goals...

The ultimate "right" answers are going to involve complex solutions that will feel dissatisfying at first, and that's hard to get across to people. First, there isn't one killer alternative, just like there shouldn't just be "use Bluesky instead of Twitter". There needs to be a healthy ecosystem...

And all of the options in that ecosystem have to be radically different than what people think of as being intrinsic to "AI" today. It is possible to build systems that use data consensually. It is possible to build systems entirely on renewable power. It is possible to build actually open systems…

I have not seen much conversation about worker-owned AI models, nor have I seen any unions talking about collectively-owned platforms, but that's what a good alternative should look like. I do understand people will say that sounds insane; It usually takes about 7 years until people think I'm sane.

This is the conclusion that my (admittedly very local, admittedly very artsy) peer group landed on though! LLMs the technological concept are totally fine - if you do local, open-source models running on consensually trained data and clean energy. But "AI" as it *actually exists* is loathsome.