GrapheneOS is currently defending its use of AI coding tools on Mastodon against complaints by various accounts claiming to be users.
We do not understand where you’re coming from or why you’re so incredibly angry with us. It’s not justified and does not make sense.
Hey, you brought it up - I just pulled the thread. Not my fault it cuts against your argument.
So, exactly like a junior dev?
That’s a different claim than the one you opened with though. Most of those objections have documented counter-arguments, btw:
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about
https://aicentral.substack.com/p/why-anthropic-burned-the-books
Data centres were polluting long before LLMs arrived. Crypto, cloud storage, Netflix, YouTube, AWS - AI isn’t all data centre load. Blaming the latter for the former is like blaming sunscreen for melanoma.
I’d really like to see a source for the first guy’s numbers, especially how he accounts for things like training and water usage at the power plant, and as for the second guy, Anthropic is not preserving shit. The Internet Archive preserves books. Anthropic scans them and doesn’t publish the scans so that they can train an LLM that might or might not be able to regurgitate some fragments of that text, and publish that. That’s preservation in the same way that painting a picture of you is keeping you alive forever.
Also, neither of those address the effects on creatives’ livelihoods or the mental health of LLM users. Chatbot psychosis is real. People who routinely use LLMs to do things provably become worse at doing them without them. Students use LLMs to make an end run around having to learn everything they need to know to be effective members of a society, like how to articulate their points, how not to fall for rhetorical traps, what history was really like, and between that and the disastrous effects of No Child Left Behind, teachers are quitting in droves and there’s a literacy crisis.
The citations are inline hyperlinks throughout the piece - IEA, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, MIT Technology Review, Google’s own efficiency data.
They’re there. Click them.
We’ve now gone from “AI can’t code,” to “AI code is a malicious risk,” to “humans would never do that,” to “that’s a disengenous example” to “ok, but what about this, this and this”
We’re verging on a gish gallop at this point, so I demur. Let’s stick to the claims at hand instead of litigating shifting goal posts.
On the topic of the second article -
What the judge ruled was that it qualifies as fair use specifically because they destroyed the copies - the destruction is what made the scanning fair use, not what made it wrongful.
Retaining the digital files without destroying the physical copies would have been the violation.
Meaning the law perversely incentivised this behavior. (If you want the actual court reporting, the Ars Technica piece the article quotes is the cleaner source).
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/
So, it’s more complicated than “Anthropic are book burners.”