Why? I really don't understand this. Why can't a tech writer take a deep but neutral intellectual interest in something? Isn't it important that some do? Do people have to be stakeholders or clearly on one given team, pro- or anti-, for their opinion to matter? Is it that tribal?

It seems fully logical to me that someone who writes for a living (who, as it happens, developed the very markup language LLMs use for everything) should be invested in understanding the automatic plagiarism and word calculating machine from an intellectually honest position.

I personally am pretty severely big-two-AI-firms, increasingly anti-big-tech, but I am learning and researching uses of LLMs because for myself I really need to understand how to use them in an intellectually and (as far as is possible) ethically sound way. Learning because as a boring old freelance programmer I have to; foolish to pretend otherwise.

So I completely understand his position — that the AI industry is hot air and crooked and scammy and weird, and some of the people involved genuinely rather dark-sided, but the technology exists and if it hints at threatening your livelihood, you need to understand it.

From reading his work for the best part of twenty years or so (and emailing him intermittently over that time) it would seem to me that he's a lot less bearish on the tech industry than me, and a lot less fond of the EU than I am; he's more optimistic than I am. But he writes because he has to write. I should think that would make him highly invested in understanding what LLMs do.