I found myself in a frustrating argument with someone convinced that LLMs are pure vaporware—incapable of real work. Their reasoning? Since LLMs were trained on stolen material, the results they produce can't actually exist.

Not that the results should be considered illegitimate or tainted—but that they're literally impossible. That the training data's questionable origins somehow prevents the technology from functioning at all.

I couldn't convince them otherwise. But, life isn't fair and both things can be true simultaneously: the origin of something can be problematic and the results can be real.

This analogy kept coming to mind: If someone steals materials to build a bomb and successfully builds it, they have a functioning bomb. The theft doesn't retroactively prevent the bomb from existing or reduce its explosive capability. Proving the theft might help with future bombs or justify going after the bomb-maker, but it doesn't cause the current bomb to magically self-dismantle.

This seems obvious to me—embarrassingly so. Yet I keep encountering this form of reasoning about LLMs, and it strikes me as a particular kind of denial.

There's something almost magical in the thinking: that moral illegitimacy can somehow negate physical reality. That if we disapprove strongly enough of how something was created, we can wish away its actual capabilities.

The ethical questions around LLM training data are important and deserve serious discussion. But pretending the technology doesn't work because we don't like how it was built isn't engaging with reality—it's a form of wishful thinking that prevents us from dealing effectively with the situation we actually face.

Whether we like it or not, the bomb has been built. Now we need to figure out what to do about it.