Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,525 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 3d ago
Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
A language model is a collection of embedded inferences that certain words are likely to follow from other words.
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You may rightfully regard the use of a model trained on your work to attack your wages as unethical, but that's about the model's operation, not its creation.
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The fact that the model has derived some of these inferences by counting all the words you ever published is not theft, no more than it's theft for the OED to identify the first times I use the word in shittification in its entry on my word.
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Counting words, even all the words ever uttered, is not theft.
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We call that a search engine.
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If an open model operated and hosted by someone other than the hyperscaler that shipped it is sold or used to destroy your livelihood, then the person using that model is bad.
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And we should have social, economic, and legal sanctions for that person.
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But the issue here is the use of the model.
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A neo fascist who uses the Autobahn to travel to a racist rally is a Nazi.
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But they're a Nazi because of what they're doing.
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Not because they're doing it on Hitler's highway.
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The technopolitics of language models are bad because the people selling language models market them for the purpose of bankrupting writers and filling the world with slop.
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But there is nothing intrinsic to language models that decrees their use in this fashion.
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The computer scientist Pete Warden has a lovely demo of a language model running on a sub-10 system on a chip or SOC that can ingest and conversationally access the manual for an appliance.
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In his demo, Warden uses this system to create an interactive dishwasher manual.
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Tap a button on the dishwasher and ask it a question like, What should I do if I'm getting streaks on my glassware?
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And it will locate the correct answer in the manual and tell you what to try.
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This language model may have been trained on the corpus of all available literature without permission, and the company that did the training may have raised their capital on the promise of bankrupting writers with their own words, but
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But the button on your dishwasher that uses an open, disconnected model to give you advice on getting your dishes clean, in no way perpetuates this harm.
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If tomorrow someone invented a nuclear reactor that sifted uranium out of seawater and ran safely in your garage, it wouldn't have the same centralizing technopolitics as the nukes that Winter concerned himself with.
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Showing 241–260 of 2,525 · page 13 of 127
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