OK, ya get more punchy, I’ll have to bite.  Here we go…

“LLMs Destroy Communities,” says hyperbolic invective in the sidebar.  I haven’t read the whole article yet, but I’m going to predict that should actually read “No Moderate Middle Ground is Possible where Anti-AI Moral Panic Types are Involved.”  Let’s find out if that was accurate.

HornbeckJornbeck Hornbeck tells us about an indie / open source video game engine called Bevy, with an online community that has been DESTROYED by LLMs.  This was because they recently changed their LLM policy from a ban to to allowing some use in certain aspects of coding, yadda yadda etc.  Trying to be moderate.  This has reportedly led to LLM users being distrustful and hostile toward people who interrogate their usage of them.  Basically a flame war, but as HJ presents it, only one side was unreasonable.  If his inflammatory headline is an indication of the reasonableness of the anti-AI side, forgive me thinking he’s not presenting both sides fairly.

And this destroyed the community?  Wait, I thought it was LLMs that destroyed it, not people treating the subject like a culture war.  I read on…

HibbledyJibbledy:  “Ever seen or been in a debate that never seems to end? In theory, these should not happen: as more and more evidence piles up, it becomes more and more obvious which viewpoint has correctly assessed the situation, and everyone gradually wanders into a consensus. There must be some other mechanism in play.”

Real shit, my brother.  Continue.

HonkaJonka:  “That, I think, is that most of these endless debates are not over evidence, but values.”

Certainly could be an element of it, but not in the usual conservative / liberal sense we’re used to.  Conservatives are all about stick, liberals be on some carrot.  Pro-LLM people say the value of the good they can do exceeds the harm, Anti-LLM people say the harm exceeds the value.  That seems like it really would be more about facts than values, doesn’t it?  I suppose I’ll have to play the value comparison game later, since it’s being invoked.

HominaJomina:  “Alas, reality refuses to colour within the lines we’ve drawn. In practice, we sometimes find ourselves in situations where our values lead to contradictions or conflicts. In theory, this is impossible, so until we rip out the old theory and replace it with a new one we’re left with no template on how to handle the situation. Being fallible and finite, we almost always become consequentialists instead and try to quantize human joy and misery, siding with whichever value leads to the most favourable ledger, then put the old theory back in place and pretend nothing happened. That’s quick and easy, but not how this should be done and it’s easily gamed by our prejudices.”

This is why I never took higher than philo 101 and never played the fallacy game.  He’s gotten too abstract for me.  Lemme see if Claude can make this understandable to me…

Claude:  “This is talking about what happens when someone’s moral framework breaks down in practice.

Here’s the gist, plainly:

We each carry around some ethical theory (a set of rules or values) that we use to judge right and wrong. That theory is supposed to be internally consistent — no contradictions. But real life doesn’t cooperate: sometimes we hit situations where our own values pull in opposite directions at once. The theory says this shouldn’t happen, so when it does, we don’t actually have a real answer.

What do we do instead? Rather than admitting “my framework is broken, I need a new one,” most people quietly switch strategies: they start weighing outcomes like a scale — trying to estimate which choice produces more happiness and less suffering — and just pick whichever side wins that rough calculation. Once they’ve made the choice, they quietly go back to acting like their original theory (whatever it was) is still intact, as if the contradiction never happened.

The author’s criticism: this shortcut is easy, but it’s intellectually dishonest and unreliable — because when you’re just eyeballing “which outcome feels better,” your own biases and prejudices get to sneak in and tip the scale, dressed up as objective reasoning.

In short: people patch holes in their moral logic with vague cost-benefit guessing, then pretend the hole was never there — and that guessing is an easy backdoor for bias.“

I still don’t get it.

Claude:  “Let me try with a concrete example instead of abstract language.

Say your moral rule is: ‘Never lie’ AND ‘Always protect people from harm.’

Normally these two rules never clash. But then: a murderer knocks on your door and asks where your friend is hiding. Now the rules fight each other. Telling the truth helps the murderer. Protecting your friend means lying.

Your rulebook never planned for this. It just assumed ‘don’t lie’ and ‘protect people’ would always agree. So in this moment, you don’t actually have a rule that tells you what to do.

What do most people do here? They don’t sit down and rebuild their whole moral rulebook to handle cases like this. That’s hard. Instead, they do something quicker: they guess — ‘which choice causes less suffering overall, lying or telling the truth?’ They land on ‘lying is better here,’ make the choice, and move on.

Then — this is the sneaky part — they go back to saying ‘I believe lying is always wrong,’ as if the exception never happened. They don’t update the rule. They just quietly break it when it’s inconvenient, then act like the rule is still absolute.

The author’s complaint: that ‘quick guess about which choice causes less harm’ isn’t rigorous — it’s just a gut feeling dressed up as a calculation. And because it’s just a gut feeling, your existing biases (who you like, who you trust, what group someone belongs to) sneak into ‘which option seems better,’ while it feels like you’re being objective.

So the whole passage is really just saying: our moral rules break sometimes, and instead of admitting it and fixing the rules, we fudge it with a vague ‘greater good’ guess — then pretend our rules never broke, even though that guess was really just letting our biases decide.“

Alright, I sorta get it.  He’s sayin’ if we don’t consider why we’ve reached the conclusions we have, we’re more likely to import prejudices.  I’ll take that.  On the other hand, my approach to this debate has been to never conceal my prejudices for a fucking second.  They’re right up front, so I’d say no, I’m considering them.  My argument is more pathos than logos, I freely admit.

HorbleJorble:  “Say I point to extensive documentation of labour exploitation by the companies training LLMs, from 2023 all the way to this year. If you value the quality of life of others, this argues you should stop using LLMs. But what if an LLM has made a strong material impact on your life? What if it’s become your councilor, your guidebook, your companion, friend, or even lover? Your life would be made much worse by giving up on LLMs, so if you value your own quality of life you should continue using them.

Even if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t solve this by reinventing my ethical framework. No, on one side of the scale I’d place the immense suffering caused by this exploitation, plus the arguments and evidence to back up that claim; on the other I’d place the benefits I personally get from LLMs, including arguments and evidence…”

OK, the corporations are evil.  Let’s all start living in caves immediately.  After all, 99.9% of the things available for me to purchase to sustain my household were built on exploitation, some of it quite fucking extreme.  Or maybe I don’t let that be a consideration for my daily life or I’d be turboskullfucked by it.  But ya know, I’m sure HJ has never used youtube, who can be reasonably argued as responsible for the prevalence of nazi beliefs in young men today.  Wait.

HypoJrite:  “Of course, I never really put myself in your shoes. How could I, without ignoring the evidence in front of my face?”

Like that guy saying “watch pewdiepie” before he shot up a mosque in new zealand, before we started producing FtB podcasts for that pewdieplatform?

HolyJoly:  “What’s your first instinct going to be, once learning of my support for a ban? To tell me about those benefits, to encourage me to bring out my scales again. But why would I? You’ve haven’t given me any new information here, I already took your beliefs into account.”

Except you’re drowning in data supporting your side, because you’re swimming in a self-selected media bubble which exists to reinforce your beliefs.  And you remember these anti-AI data points because they support your own unexamined prejudice, while not remembering nearly as much information about the horrible shit done by every other corporation under the fucken sun, going into hermitage and eating mold spores to avoid giving money to the people who were responsible for everything from the Bhopal disaster to modern day slavery.

HardlyJardly:  “What [the ‘but LLMs work for me’] framing ignores is what it does to the people involved in the project. People who embrace these LLMs are encouraged to view people who don’t as thoughtless luddites or annoying puritans. People who do not use these machines (or are forced to, but don’t want to, a population that makes up a significant chunk of “AI users”) are discouraged, demotivated, and devalued.”

You’re not a mindless puritan.  You’re an overthinking annoying puritan hyperfixated on what you’ve decided (based on an as-yet undisclosed personal experience I’m sure) is an apocalyptic evil that must be fought to the death.  I don’t think it’s healthy to spend so much time thinking about something you hate, but hey, you gotta live your truth.  Are you forced to use AI, buddy?  I didn’t know.  Sorry.  You could always switch career tracks and be a longshoreman.

HonestlyJonestly:  “If I toss a tonne of stories about the exploitation involved in LLMs in your direction I’ve only proven I’m not really listening to you, I don’t care about what you value or your life experiences. It’s quite reasonable to ignore and devalue me in return. On the flip, telling me stories about how much better your life is thanks to LLMs leads me down the same path. There’s no way we’ll reach a shared consensus, with those attitudes.”

You’re right.  And I should be true to my own stated values and stop wasting thought on your point of view about this.  The hyperbole in your title just got to me.  Oh hey, you’re coming to the point…  Here, he describes how Bevy’s community leaders attempting to adopt a moderate position in a polarized climate led to ideological clash about AI, which led to the anti-AI side abandoning the community.  Community destroyed!

Or maybe, as I said before, “No Moderate Middle Ground is Possible where Anti-AI Moral Panic Types are Involved.”  More generously, assuming the pro-AI types were mean little boors, “No Moderate Middle Ground is Possible where Pro- and Anti- AI Types are Involved.”  Which you just admitted is true of us, so moving on…

Oh wait.  He’s also cited an article comparing my side to nazis.  Fuck you, buddy.  No seriously, fuck you.  That is the highest insult you could ever have lobbed at me, although the shit I saw you link comparing us to slave owners was pretty damn close.  I just felt a little less like it was pointed at me personally.  Should I have?  After this one I’m just not gonna talk to you about anything for several months, to get this one out of my system.

Then HJ quotes his past self, saying my side only responds when he’s talking about how LLMs are flawed, characterizing me as a “worshiper” of a “machine god” who actually cares about the pride of LLMs.  A ) I only respond to those articles because they fly in the face of my lived experience as much as if you said “jesus loves you.”  I believe LLMs are useful because I’ve seen them used.  You making an outlandish counterfactual claim, whatever facts can be mustered in support of it, bears an appropriate response – on a network whose remit includes skepticism!  B ) I’m not responding to them because I care about the personal honor of a large language model, nor is Marcus.  You clearly have not a single jot of respect for who we are, and speaking for me, the feeling is now fully mutual.  I shoulda clocked that the first time you trotted out that turd.

Your “usual online debate rules” include “avoid getting heated or personal, ignore personal attacks directed at me, and always break off the argument if your opponent signals they’re not interested.”  I guess you’re as done with me as I am with your weaselly punk ass.  I don’t think you successfully avoided getting personal tho, for what it’s motherfucking worth!

HullaJaloo:  “I didn’t write 10,000 words about LLMs and philosophy merely because I wanted to. I laid out my arguments as cleanly as I could, in sufficient detail to make them easy to critique and analyze, so we could reach a shared consensus together. I was literally begging for a dialog!

And in return, all I ever got was this.”

Oh, you are thinkin’ of me.  Yeah, strange dialog given the loneliness series never addressed my pin post.  And what could you say to that?  Ableism or links to science conducted at a time of frenzied opposition to LLMs, which should be about as trusted as science on transgender people is right now.  Oh wait.  You thought your links were countering my points.

HorribleJorrible:  “We’re running on two parallel tracks, never to meet. Fire off what you think is a solid argument for widespread LLM usage, that they’re far superior at relieving loneliness than the alternatives? I’ll begin work on a four-point-five part series which meticulously walks through the scientific record poking holes in the original post, with at least one counter-argument per part, plus some tales from the trail as a bow on top. I’m working on a four-point-five part series about loneliness, and the third part went public within the last day?”

(me):  “this was just sidebar vandalism; i don’t have much of a point to make. though i don’t feel like my pinned post has been meaningfully addressed by anyone either, so what should i have to make a point about?”

That’s right.  I didn’t notice those were addressing my specific points.  My specific point is human beings are dogshit at providing adequate company to the unloved of the earth and that continues to be the case, else they wouldn’t be the unloved of the earth.  I’m saying LLMs are better than nothing or abuse, which is all most people have for the truly lonely.  Like I had for my coworker in the anecdote I described.  I absolutely include myself in the dogshit in that argument!

Get emotional.  Tell us why you feel what you feel.  I did.

HugeJuge: “Other people opposed to LLMs in that online community I mentioned didn’t have the confidence or knowledge to tackle the arguments supporting the higher side of the value scale for LLM boosters, so they stuck to the arguments they did know.”

I DON’T have the knowledge to tackle the arguments adequately to purpose, because I’m not a fucking computer engineer!  I was just giving it a try out of annoyance.  But you’re right, I should really stop.  You’re clearly not worth talking to because you don’t own your own prejudice and you don’t care about people tainted by touching the devil machine.

Funny you brought Siggy into it because you looked like an absolute clown there.  He doesn’t have the degree, but he has a lot more on the STEM ball than I do.

Anyway, I haven’t banned you, but I see where you’re coming from on the frustration with our irreconcilable differences.  This ain’t the agora, it’s Kramer vs. Kramer.  Would you say our community is destroyed?  We’re both still on FtB, which through this division has proved its handle quite well – we’ve freely thought through our positions enough to feel passionate about them, tho they disagree.

HardonJardon:  “Who could have predicted that consistently prioritizing your own needs over those of others would be so destructive?”

So true.  When people talk about the good LLMs can do for people, they’re only talking about themselves as atomized individuals with no regard to the good they can do for others.  So selfish, we’re just the worst, or possibly like, fuck you, man.  You’re still not banned, but let’s see if you can resist popping up like a gopher and saying something that will seal the deal.

If not, see you in several months.  Peace, bitch.

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