The actual title of the article is "The Left Doesn't Hate Technology, We Hate Being Exploited" and I think anyone can agree with that sentiment regardless of your political leanings.

LLMs are amazing math systems. Give them enough input and they can replicate that input with exponential variations. That in and of itself is amazing.

If they were all trained on public domain material, or if the original authors of that material were compensated for having the corpus of their work tossed into the shredder, then the people who complain about it could easily be described as Luddites afraid of having their livelihood replaced by technology.

But you add in the wholesale theft of the content of almost every major, minor, great and mediocre work of fiction and non-fiction alike to be shredded and used as logical paper mache to wholesale replace the labor of living human beings for nickles on the dollar and their complains become much more valid and substantial in my opinion.

It's not that LLMs are bad. It's that the people running them are committing ethical crimes that have not been formally illegalized. We can't use the justice system to properly punish the people who have literally photocopied the soul of modern media for an enormously large quick buck. The frustration and impotence they feel is real and valid and yet another constant wound for them in a life full of frustrating constant wounds, which in itself is a lesser but still substantial portion of what we created society to guard the individual against.

It's a small group of ethically amoral people injuring thousands of innocent people and making money from it, mind thieves selling access to their mimeographs of the human soul for $20/month, thank you very much.

If some parallel of this existed in ancient Egypt or Rome, surely the culprits would be cooked alive in a brazen bull or drawn and quartered in the town square, but in the modern era they are given the power and authority and wealth of kings. Can you not see how that might cause misery?

All that being said, if the 20 year outcome of this misery is that everyone ends up in an GAI assisted beautiful world of happiness and delight, then surely the debt will be paid, but that is at bet a 5% likely outcome.

More likely, the tech will crash and burn, or the financial stability of the world that it needs to last for 20 years will crash and burn, or WWIII will break out and in a matter of days we will go from the modern march towards glory to irradiated survivors struggling for daily survival on a dark poisoned planet.

Either way, the manner in which we are allowing LLMS to be fed, trained, and handled is not one that works to the advantage of all humanity.

"It's that the people running them are committing ethical crimes that have not been formally illegalized."

I think it's even worse than that - they are committing actual crimes that many people were punished severely for in the previous decades, (for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thoma...)