I'm seeing an anti-LLM dogmatism across Mastodon, Bluesky, and Github discussions, among people I guess identify as online activists, or maybe just, activists who happen to be online.

The latest uproar is because the Big Walk devs copy-pasted a some ChatGPT code into the game, and didn't disclose this on the Steam AI thing (I think it wasn't technically a requirement at the time because it wasn't AI generated art).

On Bluesky, a lot of people are talking about this as a sort of betrayal, and are saying there's no valid LLM usage, that even just using ChatGPT once in this tiny way is verboten.

I saw this exact same thing happen when Framework was cancelled for giving a laptop to DHH. I wrote about it https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/moral-contagion/ , and it's genuinely uncanny to see this replay turn for turn. There's some kind of underlying template going on here.

The properties are the same: a good guy (the Big Walk devs are known for, for example, refusing to publish on Xbox because microsoft is on BDS) dips a toe into a determined Bad, and in doing so, has become infected with an Original Sin or perhaps disease of association with Bad. Moral contagion. There's no difference between Framework giving a laptop to DHH and bringing him on stage and shaking his hand and handing him a million dollars - both actions are identically considered an endorsement of DHH's white supremacy. Similarly, using an LLM a little bit is not only the same as dropping ten thousand lines of slop code into a PR to curl, it's also the same thing as personally drying out a river feeding a poor village next to a new Datacenter, or, creating and posting a racial dogwhistle AI generated video, or chucking a double siege-heil on national telivision, because these things are all proximal to eachother, they touch, they're all contaminated. A leper ethical system.

Now Big Walk is cancelled. Which of course creates obvious incentives: god almighty, do NOT tell people you used a bit of ChatGPT, you'll never be forgiven. Or, fuck it, if you're going to do it, just lean in, because not only have you lost an entire demographic online, somehow just using AI automatically makes you more attractive to another demographic. For example, take a look at some of the Malfoid content on youtube, a lot of it intermixes American right wing iconography with their videos, since for whatever reason a lot of American right wingers identify with the trend.

Which to me means a lot of political identity is getting wrapped up in this. You can't talk to these people, you'll get hit with a "fuck right off" or "supporting fascism? Well that's certainly a Choice." Dogmatism reduces ability to critically think, but it doesn't matter, maintaining these boundaries is how a lot of people protect these online spaces they've created. They incidentally incorporate these companies they perceived as also within that space - Framework for its right to repair / green work, Big Walk for its BDS stuff and other left-aligned things they do - so there's not just a moral contagion aspect, but also a betrayal.

Which leads to my final thing I've noticed here, and others too: these erstwhile ideological allies are punished far more severely than objectively worse actors. Data centers suck up some water, sure, but the worse contributors to human caused climate change are oil and gas companies, who actively lobby to maintain their polluting industries over green alternatives (and even publish misinformation to do so). So why then is a person who drives a car instead of taking a bike or public transit not also tainted by moral contagion? What about people who buy clothing from sweatshop factories? Or the endless other evils under capitalism. Well because those companies aren't betraying us, they're just doing what evil capitalist companies are expected to! There's no betrayal.

So the end result is that good actors face far more scrutiny and can't make the smallest mistake, and all this online activist energy is burnt away attacking erstwhile allies and then purity-purging any of their own members who push back on this in the slightest. It's really frustrating to see this happening again with LLM usage, which "Lula's army" winning against Bolsanaro in Brazil (leveraging social media and AI-created content) conclusively proved that the left wing can use these tools to forward left-aligned goals.