Post #4913453 · Elektrine

2026-09-25 06:58 UTC

Funny horse-butt-creature nonwithstanding, Dotcorows AI takes have been rather mid. Quoting from Guardian… In this book, at least, he isn’t animated by the headline-grabbing concerns, whether existential risk or AI psychosis, deepfake porn or election disinformation, because those are unintended consequences. His target is the revenue model and the bubble it has created: “To be an effective AI critic, you need to strike at the source of AI’s power, which is the investment capital it attracts.” He isn’t falling for AI doom and he is aware of the bubble, which puts him near the better end of the spectrum. But he’s also unwilling to criticize community damage resulzing from LLM use. That may be because he is fond of LLMs himself for his text editing and is repping the “it’s just another tool” defense. So he isn’t willing to go all the way when it comes to criticizing the global theft of labour that continues to power this industry. Information wants to be free, dontcha know?

Replies (2)

@yakko@feddit.uk 2026-09-25 07:32

I remember when his takes were the absolute top shelf, earlier this century when we all loved tech so much and thought the internet would be the final nail in the coffin of old world ignorance and grudges. Sad to see this is where it’s led him to.

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@skarn@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-09-25 09:02

I don’t always agree with Doctorow, but at least he’s not as naive as you make him sound, and he’s not a coward. He’s a bit of a traditional socialist in his way of thinking, putting most of his attention on the underlying material and economic mechanisms of a phenomenon, rather that the ideological and cultural aspects of it. For instance, he thinks that many of the harms are side effects of the hype. To him, for instance, putting illustrators out of work is not a business model and can’t justify the money that’s spent on this. It’s just an ad to attract more investment. If the bubble pops, then this will be significantly reduced. If you expected Doctorow to get very upset over copyright, you clearly have no idea who he is. But he also literally has a book titled “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free”. He thinks model training is most likely fair use (probably true) even if the way the data are obtained violates copyright, and that giving more copyright to the authors will do nothing to mitigate this (near certainly true). And since the output of LLMs is not copyrightable except for the part of human labor that goes into improving and editing it, relying heavily on LLMs is a dead end for publishers, because then everyone can steal their work (not totally sold on this one). And finally, if we reject the hype, I find it hard to not consider LLMs to be a technology like any other. How can you buy in the exceptionalism and reject the hype?

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