Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

(Underlying reasoning: implementing 'mutual aid' as "mostly poor folks supporting other poor folks" is not really sustainable and it's about time that the people with the money start doing their part without hiding behind charitable institutions)

Thinking of offering discounts on my (generally pretty well-paid) freelance work in exchange for customers sending money directly to people asking for aid (eg. on fedi), to cut out myself as the middleman, but this feels like something that could have unintended effects if not thought through carefully...

The idea being to normalize sending money directly to people who need it, as a part of business procedures

Actually, I want to point something out here. The exact words vary, but I often hear the same kind of argument: "I just need a few assets for a game", "I just use it to help me do art, I'm bad at it", "I just have it do the hard parts".

That is labour exploitation too.

It's not any less labour exploitation because you're small-time. You know how there's landlords that 'only' own 3 buildings, and they let them rot and screw over tenants, but if you say anything about it, they're just an uwu smol landlord and they just don't have the money to do it right? That's what this is.

This is how LLMs are *intended* to diffuse responsibility and immoral actions; and they're not the first tech products to do so. Remember how Uber called itself a marketplace, claiming they don't control the market's desires, they just facilitate it and the responsibility for labour exploitation lies with the nebulous cloud of their 'customers'?

This is exactly what OpenAI and the like do. They build the tools, knowing full well what they are going to be used for, and then go "oh well you'll have to talk to our users about that" when someone calls out the labour exploitation and worker abuse, and all of the users believe they're not doing much harm because they don't use it *that* often, and boom, everyone is complicit but nobody is responsible, while OpenAI or Google continues to rake in the cash.

Stop being complicit in this. Stop being the moral fall guy. Stop being the small-time landlord. Stop using these services, and trying to excuse it away by making it "labour exploitation but cute".

If you have trouble doing art, commission an artist. If you have trouble writing, pay someone to help you with it. If you cannot afford these things - and I mean *really* cannot afford these things, not just assume that you can't or dislike spending money on it - then find someone who is willing to help you out for free *with their consent*.

And if you still choose to do labour exploitation, then yes, I *am* going to judge you for it.

I just summarized my view on LLMs to someone this way, and figured it might be worth sharing here too:

The two options for using LLMs are "weapon" or "labour exploitation" and that is why I treat people advocating for them with extreme suspicion.