I don’t think that you are really disagreeing with the article - I read it mostly as an invitation to broaden your view on what it means to use AI as it is today, with current benefits and harms, and stop trying to mentally divorce yourself of the consequences of said use by calling it just a tool, as if tools were fundamentally neutral, because they aren’t, as you said yourself.

I do have some gripes with your stance though.

Yes, we have local models. But have you ever tried to set up a coding assistant with a local model on consumer-grade hardware? LLMs that are small/performant enough to run on a laptop tend to suck really bad, compared to the cloud-based (data center driven) flagship models. You can barely use them for anything more advanced that “Write me a friendly email to my boss”.

That’s the whole problem - to approach anything like real “I can use this in production”-usefulness, you do need this gigantic mass of data centres. We are in the beginning stages of having that kind of usefulness, currently, with all its costs. But that doesn’t mean we should keep doing it.

It does mean that using gigantic LLMs as an everything machine is an ill-conceived idea, because they are too fucking expensive to run measured by the kind of ressources we have on our planet, and while you can make them more efficient, it always comes at a cost to their usefulness (more hallucinations, less stringent logic in long tasks etc.).

I also want to question this idea of “Well, any bad consequences of LLM usage are just people using it wrong, it’s not inherent”, especially for “AI psychosis”.

Most reports of “AI psychosis” I’ve read started out as something totally benign - someone had a random, unusual idea and they decided to talk to an LLM about it to get some feedback. You know, to not have any women in their life do emotional labour for them, or something.

And now, the inherent tool design of LLMs becomes important. The fine-tuning on LLMs used as chatbots can be optimized for different things - like giving the impression of being purely informative, or to be responsive to emotional markers in the prompt, or to structure answers in a way that keeps users engaged, to encourage them to burn their token rate limit and purchase more. The latter is something nearly all commercial LLMs do to some degree.

Human psychology is not a secret science. You know what is a lot of fun for many humans, and keeps them engaged? Being told that they’re right. And really clever. Have great observations and thoughts, and to offer to develop them further, together. A lot of people enjoy being flattered, even by a machine.

And this is fun, so why not explore further where this chat leads?

And the story goes on - the idea is expanded upon, the LLMs praising responses become grander and grander, the usage becomes longer, the user dives deeper and their divorce from reality becomes bigger, and at some point, no other human shares their reality anymore, and that is what psychosis, at its core, is.

Some snap back out of it in time, others get lost in it.

My point being: yes, maybe these harms result in a misuse of LLMs. But they are absolutely exacerbated by the way current implementations are designed. And then, the actual misuse is to have used an LLM for brain-storming at all, instead of talking to a human, that is fully prepared to tell you that your idea is stupid.

This harm, from my perspective, IS an inherent risk in the current implementation of the technology, and so are others. These systems are being designed that way. The misuses you decry are actively advertised for and are being promoted, because they are also lucrative.

No tool is neutral.

On a personal note: I personally don’t like working with LLMs. I noticed that by doing it extensively in the last couple of months, especially for educational and coding purposes. It does something bad with my brain and with my learning and thinking, and it impairs me in the long run - if I do this a lot, I don’t think I will be able to do things without an LLM at some point - classic skill decay. I don’t want that. Other people might not think so, and rather feel empowered. That’s fine to me, but I would encourage everyone to test themselves on that regularly.

And on a political note: The politics around “AI” are, to me, not especially new. It’s just end-stage-capitalism, again. It’s a finance sector bubble that will hurt us all when it bursts, again. It’s the devaluation of human labour, again. It’s surveillance and data collection and unjust wealth distribution and disinformation and societal atomization and environmental destruction again, but faster. The type of thing that has been happening before just keeps on happening, more. I do think that that kind of change (mostly in velocity) is something to oppose.

I really want to link this article here as a counterpoint - why “AI is just a tool” as a stance doesn’t quite cut it as far as well-founded opinions go: https://www.frank.computer/blog/2025/05/just-a-tool.html

How are they w.r.t. human rights abuse, enshittification or otherwise being an adverse contractual partner?

I’m not entirely sure what level of morality you are aiming for… it’s an electronic device, and contains lithium and other rare substances which are won and manufactured into parts far away and in highly problematic conditions concerning human rights, as is true for most devices you are likely to own. So maybe not that.

Their cloud as well as online in general is optional for basic use (not updates and onleihe, of course), and their servers are based in Germany, so Datenschutz applies.

You own your files, and nobody asks where you got then from. If you buy from their store or do onleihe, of course there is some amount of tracking. They are linked to German book stores, the one from which you buy the device will be put in as default. However, it’s not hard to choose another one from those participating in the program, or buy independently and load the file onto your reader. More details are likely to be found in their terms and conditions.

The maximum size I could find on Geizhals (tolino epos 3) was also only 8" diagonally which is a tad small. I’d prefer something closer to 10".

Yeah, they do not have a device that big. Kobo does, I think, with the Elipsa, but as I said, you’d have to import it and can’t use onleihe there, which made it unsuitable for me. Might not be for you.

I’ve tried finding equivalents to some recommendations in this thread but it appears they’re entirely different devices and some even have Android.

Tolino used to be a part of Rakuten for some time, all the current devices have virtually the same hardware as kobo devices, with customized kobo software, which is based on linux.

for more details, look here: Wikipedia

I just wanted to say, I’ve been very happy with both tolino and kobo, the devices last really long, and I want to pull my hair out anytime I have to deal with an amazon device of any kind instead. Take from that what you will!

A lot of people say kobo, but since you are in germany, you might want to consider tolino as well. they use kobo hardware with slightly customized software, and since you don’t have to import (kobo does not have a market presence for their devices in Germany), they are cheaper.

I went to tolino from kobo because I lost my kobo and wanted to use onleihe, which is not your use case. but if you are considering kobo, in my experience the devices from tolino are very comparable. loading epub on there is easy and works, no DRM-shenanigans, and wakeup to last-read book on opening a magnet folio as well.

one caveat - while UI is identical, I had a slight dip in life quality (problems opening up specific files, longer loading tines), but I think it’s mostly because I downgraded on hardware when I went from kobo libra (like tolino vision) to tolino shine (like kobo clara).