Post #2867118

2026-02-21 12:26 UTC

@onekind@beige.party OK, a few things: first, no, that's not putting words in your mouth. I am asserting that, if someone thought LLMs are compatible with socialism, they'd be wrong. (As it stands in the present moment.) As for the 'things should be otherwise', well, yes. We are socialists; the whole point is that we want things to be otherwise. I don't think it makes sense to draw some lines and insist that this particular thing can't be changed, when we're already demanding fundamental changes in economic and social arrangements. As for the point about 'open-source' LLMs: that doesn't actually avoid the problem. They aren't actually open-source, and training the weights requires the same intensive process as is done for the closed-source LLMs. Nobody can do that without millions of dollars to burn, and the existing ones all depend on the training done by those same corporations. Better/fuller explanation: https://hachyderm.io/@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange/116107854327461213 I do agree that in a socialist society the technology itself could potentially exist and be used without contradiction. But in the real world, in the present, the only possible usage of LLMs entail that dependency on capital.

Replies (1)

@onekind@beige.party 2026-02-21 16:33

@benjamineskola@hachyderm.io There is nobody else in this conversation; negating a claim imputes it to me. And it's pointless to assert an ought without any sense of the weight massed against it or any realistic program for change. Which you tacitly acknowledge because you're making exactly the same argument back to me — that there's no point asserting any prosocial or socialist angle to LLMs because of path dependency and their deeply embedded capitalist origins. Audre Lord, the master's tools, etc. There is absolutely nothing to stop a government somewhere deciding to train up a model on a more multicultural corpus. The technology is not inherently one thing or another. The implementations we've seen to date have come out of a particular corporate conjuncture but that governs their present not the future. As noted by Foucault — the great scholar of the otherwise — power is always exercised in struggle and remains constantly in danger of reversal. And the monetary expense of doing so is absolutely nothing compared to the difficulty of changing every aspect of social existence in which literacy implies class credibility and cultural capital. I do behaviour change for a living and it is a slow grind getting people to adopt even things that will benefit them. Anyway it's 3AM here so I'm going to leave you to it. Thanks for the chat.

Open ##2867119