Man, it's frustrating to see him end up going down this route because the opening part of this is actually one of the better descriptions of AI psychosis I've seen, and i appreciate his emphasis on the way the delusion is built up in the sufferer's mind rather than trying to game out what's happening "inside" the chatbot. Even his point about how LLMs aren't bad in exceptional ways for a new technology is pretty cogent. But his insistence on defending his own use of these things (and others who do so in "centaur-configured" ways) rather than thinking about how it interacts with all the relatively normal ways that this technology is wildly destructive is a very conspicuous blind spot.

Like, you can absolutely drive a nail with a phone book, and given the wider surface area it even has the advantage over a traditional hammer of being harder to smash your fingers. An individual craftsman may well decide that this is a useful tool and in some cases worth using over other options. But if the only source of these hammer-books was an industry that relied on massive uncompensated use of creative work passed through exploited third-world labor, ground rainforests to dust to create special "old-growth paper", placed massive and unsustainable burdens on existing road infrastructure to collect these parts and deliver them, and somehow had been blown into a speculative bubble that represented something like a quarter of the entire US economy by promising that if they created a big enough book then one guy could hammer all the nails at once and they could lay off all the carpenters, I think it's justifiable to look at the people using it as a normal tool and ask them "what the actual fuck are you doing?" The usage statistics they represent and the user stories they tell are used to justify not addressing any of the harms necessary to enable this tool to exist in its current form, and are largely driving the absurd valuations that keep pumping the bubble. Your individual role in those harms as a small-time user who finds it occasionally useful may be incalculably small, but it is still real.

Like, it feels like I agree with Doctorow on basically all the premises here. He seems to have a decent grasp on how the things actually work (even if he's wrong about Ollama specifically being an LLM in its own right) and their associated limitations. He draws a decent line separating criticism from criti-hype. He is basically correct about how much of a bastard everyone involved in the industry at a high level is. But maybe because so many of these things aren't really exceptional (save possibly in their sheer scale) he can't seem to conceive of a world where things happen any differently, or of the role his actions and words play in reinforcing the status quo even as he writes pretty explicitly about how fucked up that status quo is.

Honestly it makes me think of the finale of his second Martin Hench novel, The Bezzle. After drilling into the business of the private prison operator that is making his friend's life hell and separating the merely fucked up parts from the things that might actually have consequences if word got to what passes for cops in that tax bracket, he doesn't go to the papers or start reaching out to the SEC. Instead he goes to the bastard at the head of it all and blackmails him into making his friend's remaining incarceration less hellish and leaving him alone. And his friend, who started all this by begging for help unraveling this shit, rightly calls Marty a coward for it. There's something ironic in seeing Doctorow here seemingly make the same judgement: abuse and apathy are sufficiently normal that we shouldn't even bother to try and make the world better, just find ways to shelter ourselves and the people we care about from the consequences. And hell, I guess even there I'm not immune to it. There are reasons why I'm posting here and not waiting out front of a hotel with some engraved brass. Still, on the continuum of such things I'm disappointed that the guy who wrote that scene is stuck in the normalization blues.