LLMs are based on extraction, exploitation and subjugation

So is torrenting. This is a very capitalist argument, coming from someone that self-identifies as a communist, that one deserves to reap the rewards of them adding value to humanity through some form of gatekeeping and is entitled to a reward from such gatekeeping. You’re literally arguing on the side of Elsevier and JSTOR against Aaron Swartz

What does it matter if human knowledge is available as a book or an LLM? The important part is that all of humanity has access to it.

Omelas is an almost perfect city. Rich, democratic, pleasant. But it only works by having one small child in perpetual torment.

Walking away from Omelas doesn’t stop that child’s perpetual torment. Your choice is merely ignorance and cowardice in front of injustice. Choosing to stay in Omelas and poison its democratic system to lead to its downfall is the arguably the more moral option. Let’s not even get into the argument about how Germany made the Eurozone its Omelas at the expense of deficit-prone southern Europe, and how you should leave Germany by your argument.

If everything is somehow “free and open” then we have won.

your moral choice to not use LLMs is the same as abandoning Omelas and the eternally tormented child, it serves as nothing but intellectual onanism. Distilling GPT 5, Opus 4.6, commoditising the petaflop (see George Hotz), deploying efficient models on Huawei chips is the same as causing rot in Omelas from the inside, causing the billions invested into AI to be worthless, tearing down the system that is perpetually tormenting that child. It is the only way forward.

Cory was right to label this “neolib purity testing”, because 1) it sides with capital (see above point re: torrenting), 2) it tries to don the mantel of dialectical materialism, while viewing this issue through a lens of “individualist action” and static morality and 3) It endlessly criticises power instead of aiming to claim and wield it for good.

::: spoiler Also, one (out of many) of Cory's points mentioned in the last paragraph of the comment:

Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems