this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Looms are bad. They don't do silk. They can only do big blocks of material. Even so, lots of people want to use them.
But my point is that going around attacking AI will be as effective as the luddites destroying machinery.
The villains are the same in both cases. Capitalists.
AI is a broad term; of course neural networks and machine learning have been important in a lot of research etc. That's all great. LLMs...it's all anyone wants to talk about (maybe image generation too) and it's junk for any application that matters.
If looms could only make burlap, and the capitalists tried to make burlap underwear a thing, I think the luddites would be wise to say to the public "hey, don't buy this crap...it's uncomfortable!" Of course, in reality, auto-looms did a lot of the same stuff traditional weavers could do. I think pointing out that when techbros say LLMs output is great, pointing out that LLMs output is generally garbage is effective. Luddites couldn't really say that the output was significantly inferior (or maybe it was and people didn't notice...jesus I hope that's not the case with this garbage!).
Maybe that's what we disagree about. To me, the auto-looms are only making burlap and I don't see any reason to think they're going to get much better. And they're lighting the planet on fire :P
I am not willing to capitulate to this kind of BS: "LLMs are very useful and they're clearly here to stay." I just think that's horseshit. That's what the capitalists who are selling them want you to think, but I genuinely believe if you ever look at it in a critical context you'll see.