#NaNoWriMo says condemning the use of #LLMs is ableist, but we know that LLMs regurgitate dominant perspectives, biases, and styles.
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#NaNoWriMo says condemning the use of #LLMs is ableist, but we know that LLMs regurgitate dominant perspectives, biases, and styles. These biases include whiteness, heteronormativity, and, yes, #neuronormativity. This hegemonic reinforcement is unavoidable because they're trained on massive, indiscriminately-scraped datasets. Given the social dominance of these biases, they form the bulk of the models' training.
By saying that LLMs are useful, enabling writing tools for neurodiverse peoples - whether for text generation, editing, or review - they're implying, whether intentional or not, that the purpose of accommodation is conforming to neuronormative, ableist standards. This is not enablement, it's erasure. It's a condemnation of #neurodiversity as a pathology that should be masked; that assimilation is how we should overcome adversity and disability. It reinforces neuronormativity and #ableism, just as LLMs do.
Our society disables people. From the infrastructures that shape our means of interaction to the conventions that embody them, we favor an idealized form of humanity that reflects the racial, gendered, ableist, classist power imbalances that dominate us. LLMs are not cognizant of this. They're not cognizant of anything. They're probabilistic next word guessers, and the most probable next word in our society is one that enables power and disables the powerless.
Fuck LLMs. Don't let these assholes use us to hype their grift. Remember that TESCREALism is eugenicist, and that this characterization of accommodation plays right into eugenicist ideas about eliminating neurodiverse peoples. tl;dr: eat shit NaNoWriMo.
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I'm not going to argue with anyone who says they benefit from using LLMs. In a capitalist, neuronormative world, where masking and assimilation are often requirements for access and advancement, of course LLMs have some potential to benefit people. That doesn't make LLMs a boon for the neurodiversity movement or the fight against ableism though - it only supports my argument.
Our society, with its ableist norms and infrastructures, is what needs changing, not us. That change obviously isn't happening fast enough, so do what you gotta do to get by. I do think there's an argument to be made about the personal and ecological costs of LLMs (in their current form, at least) outweighing the benefits, but that's not the point of my post.