No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture."
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I wouldn't be saying all this if it was just Doctorow, I'm even fine disagreeing with people I deeply respect. But he's not the only one saying shit like this, and I think it's worth calling out the broader rhetorical point.
@xgranade I've fallen off reading Doctorow. Is he boosting the hallucination engines lately? That would be surprising but I just haven't listened to him recently.
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No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.
@xgranade I have to wonder whether Cory Doctorow has taught a class lately (as opposed to speaking engagements), and waded through a pile of middling written assignments submitted by students incapable of answering simple questions on the subject matter. There's a reason competent instructors aren't fans of this technological, er, advancement.
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No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.
@xgranade What is an LLM?
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@xgranade@wandering.shop opposing LLMs is an integrity culture, not purity.
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@xgranade It's like someone kept punching you in the face and when you object they claim it's purity culture that you don't want to be punched in the face.
Words mean things. Wanting to not be made accomplice to useless evil for no good reason is not "purity culture"
I mean, if "purity" means, I have an actual conscience and don't feel like participating in industrial levels of exploitation and bullshit, then, sure, call me a purist all day.
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No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.
@xgranade I still keep hoping the Doctorow quote was just him doing a shit job of explaining his stance and he'll elaborate or that it's not true or is a misquote or something, because Doctorow was one of the few people left I agreed with on literally everything involved in tech and almost seems to be fundamentally counter to statements I recall him saying mere months prior.
I don't speak about this part of my opposition to its usage because I don't know what to actually do about this happening to people. It feels like I'm watching a bubonic scale parasite spread to everyone who even looks at a computer fondly for half a second and feeds on specifically the parts of their brain in charge of critical thinking and any and all technical skill that isn't just vibe coding or asking the LLM why it isn't working.
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I wouldn't be saying all this if it was just Doctorow, I'm even fine disagreeing with people I deeply respect. But he's not the only one saying shit like this, and I think it's worth calling out the broader rhetorical point.
@xgranade repeating a point i've seen mentioned elsewhere its important we also do something with that disagreement like as an example continuing the culture of helping each other as it pertains to programming because presumably at some point it'll stop being pushed this hard and we are back to requiring this culture to continue after instead of it being lost knowledge that we never get back to -
@xgranade@wandering.shop opposing LLMs is an integrity culture, not purity.
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No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.
@xgranade I'm sure there's *some* people somewhere opposing LLMs just because the cool people in their peer group do and they want to virtue-signal, and they'll be hunted down and dragged out as an example of a "typical" LLM hater; just like the nazis will gleefully point out if a trans person detransitions. Plenty of people have good reasons to oppose the use of LLMs on grid of them being harmful, and question the logic of people who use them.
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No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.
@xgranade tbh i would agree with this, i can say LLMs are bad from first principals, because i actually have first principals; and not just 'did big authority figure say this bad/good' or whatever the fuck;
but i would _also_ say that some* of the AI hate i have seen, seems to come off more like purity culture, where ai is just bad "just because" ..
but i wouldn't say that about every single opposition to LLMs ever, and probably not the vast majority of them ..
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No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.
Especially when money is colouring perceptions of utility.
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@subterfugue @xgranade This isn't just about money or code friend.
Ever heard of AI psychosis? Children who were directed by AI software to kill themselves? Environmental devastation from training and using AI models? Trauma caused to underpaid workers in the global south, without which these AI models would never have functioned in the first place? People getting fed lies about their own health by using an AI model to find out what ails them? Misinformation caused by people using AI software like a search engine? Etc. Etc. Etc.
AI is a fascist project and an irredeemable system. Doing all we can to reject and destroy AI is one of the biggest moral imperatives of our generation.
@pip @subterfugue @xgranade yknow .. i dont think OP saying that their using LLMs to harm people and scaming the public, is a pro-AI stance, but thats just a guess
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I wouldn't be saying all this if it was just Doctorow, I'm even fine disagreeing with people I deeply respect. But he's not the only one saying shit like this, and I think it's worth calling out the broader rhetorical point.
@xgranade
Here's an excellent article by @tante criticising that broader rhetorical point: https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/It's really long, but totally worth the time IMO.
Somewhat tangentially, the backlash on the fedi along the lines of "Cory considered bad now" prompted tante to write a followup article which really gets one thinking: https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/on-alliances/
I recommend reading both.
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No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.
@xgranade honestly we need to update that meme to "Everything I Don't Like is Purity Culture".
And the problem largely comes from people who would consider themselves at least somewhat to the left.
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@xgranade I still keep hoping the Doctorow quote was just him doing a shit job of explaining his stance and he'll elaborate or that it's not true or is a misquote or something, because Doctorow was one of the few people left I agreed with on literally everything involved in tech and almost seems to be fundamentally counter to statements I recall him saying mere months prior.
I don't speak about this part of my opposition to its usage because I don't know what to actually do about this happening to people. It feels like I'm watching a bubonic scale parasite spread to everyone who even looks at a computer fondly for half a second and feeds on specifically the parts of their brain in charge of critical thinking and any and all technical skill that isn't just vibe coding or asking the LLM why it isn't working.
@disorderlyf @xgranade CD has his moments but he's ultimately a tech brightsider who is fully convinced that the master's tools will dismantle the master's house.
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@xgranade What is an LLM?
@Sickosocial @xgranade "Large Language Models" ChatGPT and stuff like that.
People (including me) like to differentiate these from the broader category of AI, because people do good stuff with AI tools without the externalities of LLMs.
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No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.
@xgranade yeah I always thought purity was refered to having principles instead of not having them and selling your soul to the devil because who cares
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@disorderlyf @xgranade CD has his moments but he's ultimately a tech brightsider who is fully convinced that the master's tools will dismantle the master's house.
@davey_cakes @disorderlyf @xgranade why not rip the master's tools from his hands and use them to demolish his house? Sounds grand to me. A hammer is a hammer is a hammer.
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@xgranade It could only be "purity culture" if we were denying ourselves something useful to put ourselves at a disadvantage for moral reasons. That's not what's happening.
@dalias @xgranade denying the usefulness of LLMs seems a bit wrongheaded at this point. I've been an engineer a decade now, at this point I don't really encounter things I can't build myself anymore, but LLMs let me build them far more quickly. 1000x more quickly? Absolutely not. But measurably quickly. I use this added time to increase my personal leisure as well as finally get some civic hacking done I've had on the to-do for years.
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@xgranade My dude is torching his own credibility to use an LLM to check for typos.
TYPOS.
@cthos I think that's less an indictment of Doctorow and more one of the never-LLM crowd, who have clearly become dogmatic Puritans
