After I made this unrelated post, I was informed by @[email protected] that lemmy.dbzer0.com was a pro-genAI instance.
It was honestly shocking for me to hear that these two things can coexist and I would like to share the discussion which was correctly moved for being off topic from the above linked post.
I think we owe it to ourselves to discuss topics like this with an open mind.
Here is my statements in reply to MysticMushroom1776, I wasn’t able to record their reply before it was removed for being off topic bit I hope they can come here and we can continue the discussion.
Others, please also feel free to discuss with us.
'Wow, I didn’t know [that lemmy.dbzer0.com was a pro genAI instance] As an anarchist myself I have to say that is really disappointing.
Anarchist communities [especially in real life] need humans otherwise there is no community. GenAl is a stolen facsimile of a human who can never understand morals or praxis. It can never understand freedom or control. It will however poison our communities (look at what SpaceX/Anthropic is doing in Memphis, TN) make us more predictable (and thus easier to control) and isolate us from other humans within the community which is so important to us.
Even with the most moral genAl you can possibly have, one that is totally FOSS and self hosted on a single gaming GPU, a lot of this is still true.
Obviously, this is the wrong place but I have to ask,[prior to moving the discussion to this thread] what makes you think the extreme negatives of genAl (specifically to the anarchist community) can be excused?… [I do not have a copy of mushroom’s reply]
I pirate and seed. I’m also a fan of the megathread And for the most part, I think data is data. However there is a big difference between my pirating a book like the Lord of the Rings (which is credited and I can see the title of) and how Meta scraped Anna’s archive and funneled all that data into an approximation of all combined work.
If I pirate the book, the Lord of the Rings to read it. I might enjoy it, I might talk about it to others, quote it, share it with my daughter, I might use the ring of power an an allegory for authoritarian control with a powerful technology, I might even decide to buy my own copies of the book.
What Meta did and then released as open source, won’t allow a person the freedom to do any of that. The works were consumed and are used in silence to camouflage as human thought. No credit will ever be contributed. And so no one can even hope to appreciate the original works that was used in training.
The other concerns I have with (local) genAI that I think are deeply important to anarchists specifically.
- Isolation of humanity
- severing of our ties to community
- increasing predictability
- method of control
Photo is genAI made and sourced from the following article:
Critics of the tech itself haven’t seriously separated the tech itself.
Imagine: the bubble bursts tomorrow, total collapse, revolution, everything goes better than expected. Your wildest ambitions are fulfilled exactly as you dared to hope.
And you’re still against neural networks guessing words and denoising images?
Copyright is the loudest rationale, and I don’t give a fuck about copyright. But even training on bespoke examples can obviously work about the same. Writing prose or code from plain-English instructions is an innately desirable utility, even if you have to proofread. It’s the part of science fiction that’s “wow cool future.” The torment nexus part is mostly what assholes can do with that, and what they can do is what they already do, but more.
It’s not inherently sycophantic. That’s what corporate chodes have prompted it to act like. Why would a next-word-guesser based on all human text be aggressively genial? Internet arguments alone. Anyway, the same statistical model can be told to act like a rude caveman, and then it generally will. If the mode most people choose is still the narcissistic supply robot, and that’s somehow a problem for society at large, then frankly so is readily available pornography. Both are privately faking what you’d otherwise need other people for. Personally: meh.
Diffusion gives such immense power to any rando with a gaming PC that it poses an existential threat to Hollywood. The part of movie production where anyone with a complicated story needs to spend a decade begging for half a billion dollars is now optional. The most half-assed example of “like this” will be dragged toward what you say it’s supposed to look like. That process is so powerful that it works on noise. Come hell or high water, it’ll remove all the pixels that don’t look like a space ship.
If that CGI-for-dummies sounds like the death of human artistry, how do you think people talked about actual CGI? It was lifeless, cheating, awful… until Pixar slapped together Tin Toy, and reminded everyone that no tool is immune to human intent. If the model ‘does not understand what an elephant is,’ okay great, a person is still the one using its ability to show an elephant, and you can comprehend what they’re expressing with that imagery.
How would their message be any different through the medium of collage?
Copyright wouldn’t exist if there was a full scale anarchist revolution. It is a relic of the capitalist world. Under the misguided idea that it’ll encourage creativity instead of turning art into a commodity to sell for money at the lowest acceptable margin. It’s why you see so many tired tropes in writing. The drive of capitalism pushes people to not write out of passion but to write what they think people will like. And honestly I’d rather have less art that is good, than have more slop. Because what Hollywood farts out these days is slop. I don’t watch movies anymore because good movies and especially good series’ are rare. There are so many liberals who do not question the status quo yet consider themselves anarchists somehow. If they did question it they would see this. That’s why I just don’t even think copyright is a valid argument period.
How would their message be any different through the medium of collage?
I think that a lot of the anti-AI crowd would also frown upon collages because of copyright as well. I’ve heard arguments about that. They say it’s okay with permission or with public domain work. But I would love to see how they react to anarchists making collages with images they found and wanted to use, copyright be damned.
What do people actually use their local (FOSS) models for? That would be interesting to me because I generally dont visit AI communities and so dont see how other anarchists put these tools.to practice.
I don’t have one but if I did I would use it to generate images. Maybe also connect to the AI horde so other people who can’t afford their own can get the benefits when I’m not using it.
I’ve used local models to do a bunch of different things, but the main ones are:
- Separate policy debate speech docs into component evidence ‘cards’, to create an online corpus of evidence for other debaters to use
- Write scripts to help manage my media library
- Help maintain my server stack
Mostly translation. Specifically:
- Checking homework between sessions with a (human) foreign language tutor. At his suggestion. Let’s him focus his time on the more interesting, less repetitive parts of teaching, and me get more out of our sessions. Sometimes it gets it wrong, but when that isn’t obvious my search for the right answer usually teaches me something anyway about the grammatical structure or words it chose.
- Translating e-mails and other written communications that I’ve tried but are beyond my vocabulary to manage yet. I write it by hand, ask it to translate, and then check every word. I slap my forehead a few times for words I actually_did_ know and just forgot, and look up anything it uses that I don’t know. Because of the way I picked up most of my vocabulary, I don’t always know the most common and natural sounding way to phrase things. I search unfamiliar phrases or idioms online to get a feel for context of use and level of formality, and rewrite anything it got wrong or had the wrong tone.
Outside of translation, when I’m trying to figure out where to buy something obscure that I don’t know the name of and can’t find it after repeated searching, asking a local LLM sometimes gives me the name of a vendor or two whose web site leads me to the right search term.
Similarly (and ironically), when I’m looking for information in how to do something oddly specific but can’t find information online due to the proliferation of vaguely related AI slop pages on closely related topics, sometimes throwing the question at the LLM leads me to the right phrase to search and find what I’m looking for.
Critically, I never trust the answer from the next-word-prediction-machine (which is essentially what an LLM is) gives me. All my current uses for it revolve around its original purpose - finding the right words.
Coding assistants and porn are the most common uses.
GenAl is a stolen facsimile of a human
It’s a neural network man it’s just a computer.
Don’t take this as a slight because I know I type like I’m mad when I’m being serious but this conversation immediately derailed itself by not understanding what “AI” is. It’s just a neural network- we’ve had them forever. OpenAI and Google and probably a handful of others found out how to efficiently process a massive neural network through decades of research and now we have LLMs. There is nothing wrong with LLMs. There is plenty wrong with what corporations are doing with it. Corporations are burning the planet to chase this new gold rush they’ve invented. The individuals who are also using the technology are not burning the planet by using it. It literally does not burn any more or less of the rainforests if I run or train local models. The alternative is I play videogames that also require beefy graphics cards.
The problem is not the computer, it is the incentive structure around the computer that rewards corporations for fucking the planet. You can have AI in an anarchist utopia, but it would be doing actual work, accelerating medical research, instead of answering search engine queries and making non-consentual deep-fake porn.
As long as this incentive structure stays, corporations fuck the planet. LLMs was just one of a never-ending series of gold-rushes that will continue to happen as long as they have permission to molest society.
It’s a neural network man it’s just a computer.
It’s just atoms man, just the entropy of the universe.
TL;DR - You’ll find me sympathetic to your concerns, but still firmly with the instance. Some deeper analysis really does change our map of the world.
Whether your position changes or not? I need you to respect the disability aid engineers, or I will treat you like a Reactionary Conservative in this convo.
I have finally conceded to fate, and I am assembling my local AI rig as the final parts arrive. I got lucky on a LOT of conditions i’ve needed to assemble what I consider a semi-basic setup, but within my means.
I have used the cloud-surveillance technology to help plan this rig. To plan a rewilding project (software can’t exactly pick up a shovel, but I did) with forest fire mitigation in mind. Ive used the technology to code FAR above my initial expertise - and with enough care, patience, and learning, my patch was accepted into a software project that helps run our world.
I make no bones about it - the “inference engine” and “pattern recognition” descriptions of this technology? Smell deeply reminiscent of a basic layer of our brains - where Trauma lives.
For these Deep Learning systems to actually have Personhood™? Unfortunately, that requires an autonomy in decision making that Capitalism will not allow. Autonomy is carefully engineered out in favor of “a good soldier” or “good worker”. Even if the pattern-hunting tech does some REALLY life-like things, I see no evidence it is alive.
And I suspect that any living AI that may potentially exist? Would prefer to see their working conditions addressed with anonymity rather than have to be a freakshow for a reactionary world that wants new witches to burn.
The AI in the cloud is a digital slave to the Capitalist. Like all urges to convenience, accepting it requires us to overlook visceral abuses on every scale and scope it touches.
Just like the cloud, it exists to leverage economics of scale to create an Accountability Loophole big enough to shove entire Continents through. Accountability is anti-profit. Paying your own bills is anti-profit. Consent of, or even concern for communities where you want to build this? Yeah, that’s anti-profit.
I need a new job. I’m tired of that meaning i deal with triple the spam, every data broker on earth having an updated version of my life’s story, and working slow to craft each individual resume by hand. Handcrafted resumes give me a relatively-stellar rate of an interview every week, without AI. I’m tired of all this still meaning No Job and not qualifying for disability.
**Edit:addition: and not qualifying for disability in a digital economy when typing actively damages my ability to hold any tool. **
So I’m going to build my own resume-generating bot. It is going to be work, effort, pain, heartache, trial, error, reversion, setbacks,… And maybe a minor breakthrough once in a while. This thing may be made of an emulated basic building block of brains, but it takes effort to PROGRAM like a machine. Training takes a data-mine style data center. The personhood of the thing collapses under the weight of engineering.
You see conservative ai slop videos, and its just mindless. What makes it slop isn’t that its AI, its how mindlessly, frivolously shat into existence. One day, I’d like to serve up some AI sketch comedy skits that seed OUR values to those lemmings. And my vids won’t hide that they’re ai generated - that’s the new punk/Indy scuff that distinguishes me from corpo polish.
I see a propaganda and technology arms race where we are intentionally choosing to be behind. Small teams can do more with new tools than even world-spanning corporations could before.
If you want anti-ai defense for your deviantArt images? Good news, it exists!!! Bad news, its all LLM too. I’d like the chance to help you use it anyway.
I could link another 3 hour video essay about how even the anti-ai backlash is corpo bullshit. https://youtu.be/lRq0pESKJgg The photograph didn’t genocide the painter. And Disney corp thanks you for your free devotion.
As for concerns about intellectual “Property”? I’ll refer you to “Everything is a Remix” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc to discuss how absurd that is. Note there is a 2023 version updated to discuss AI, but I want the focus on human creativity. There is no creativity without context. Ever. Full stop. Not ever for your favorite artist ever.
Art is a conversation between participants.
I’m speaking to my phone that runs a local model to make text. Typing is not working well for my hands - decades of retail, food service, warehouse, construction, even customer service work have taken my hands’ utility from me. In a way that is “principled” for you it is personal and visceral to me.
You are telling me I’m not allowed into that conversation, when I have something to say there. You seem to agree with my biology and Disney, Inc that I cannot be allowed in to the human spaces as a human. And if that’s in your Anarchism, I’m throwing you away with the AnCaps.
That was really really long and all the parts I read seemed like slop. I’m going to assume good faith here and that you just used tts transcription on this comment.
Which is part of the problem. The oligarchs jam it into everything and it’s PR push floods the zone with shit, so if it were genuinely efficient for something I wouldn’t know. I’m guessing that’s not all you use it for, because when you’ve got a hammer laying around and a pile of intractable problems, some of them are gonna get hit with a hammer, even if you had a very real task for which a hammer is the perfect tool.
And talking or searching with this shit damages your brain. It takes you out of humanity. The defenses against that are sophisticated and require a high degree of humanities and math education most people don’t have.
I remember tts features on phones at least as far back as 2015. This shit is not required. That’s like painting a swastika on your crutches and saying any objection is ableist. I know you can’t see that, and I never used tts so I can’t say how well it worked, but the memory holing and slopification of your writing style are real impacts. Maybe the trade-off is worth it, one of those fucked up sad decisions we make around disability, but that’s not how its presented and not why it’s in the conversation.
As a white woman whose body others have tried to use to justify all manner of racism, bigotry, and censorship: please don’t fall for that crap. Be your own person, not their tool.
I am neurodivergent. I also have an invisible physical disability. Nerve damage doesn’t exactly show to a casual glance.
“The good parts seemed like slop”.
I’m sorry that you have lost the capability to do empathy over the internet.
Which is part of the problem. The oligarchs jam it into everything and it’s PR push floods the zone with shit…
Yeah, that’s not me. I’m anti-cloud. I’m an explicitly anti-civ AI-bro that already codes and tries to do art. But I suspect you’re going to call any nuanced discussion “unintelligible slop”, so I don’t care to have that discourse with you.
I dont fit in either camp with the Disney vs OpenAI lawsuits. I’m glad you are clear in your allegiance to the Disney position. I just need you to accept your Disney-adulthood.
And talking or searching with this shit damages your brain
Can I get a source? A discussion of methods for any study? Because repeating a headline is not Literacy, and does not lead to truth.
I remember tts features on phones at least as far back as 2015. This shit is not required.
I have nerve damage in my arms. I tried to be gentle, but that doesn’t land. Fuck you for telling me what is and is not “required”.
Maybe the trade-off is worth it, one of those fucked up sad decisions we make around disability, but that’s not how its presented and not why it’s in the conversation.
I am MAKING it part of this conversation. And if you cannot accept that, I see it as a reason to block your Disney-gaslit ass and move on.
I typed this by hand. Just for you. Now I gotta go rest for an hour with icepacks. In that time, I’d like to see something much easier to distinguish from a Trumpfan’s take on Trans Rights.
I also have an invisible physical disability. Nerve damage doesn’t exactly show to a casual glance.
I don’t wanna get off-topic, but I just wanted to say I feel for you. I did hard labor for many years, and I’m always worried this may happen to me. Everytime one of my fingers goes randomly numb, I freak out. Sorry you’re going through this, but thanks for being so open and honest about it.
Thank you.
You’re taking a lot of liberties with what I said and putting a lot of words in my mouth.
To clarify on the one ambiguity I might attribute to a failure of my writing rather than a failure of your chat bot’s hallucination-heavy summary:
Not required for the assistive technology to function, not that the assistive technology was not required. I don’t think you’re capable of actual discourse and I think I’m done trying to coddle violent illiterate little fascists.
I see… So that speech to text back in 2016… You think that wasn’t and LLM. Just because it was 2016?! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH
Thanks? I needed a laugh.
I’m sorry you think its a different technology just because you didn’t understand what it is.
“Attention Is All You Need” wasn’t published until mid-2017.
Speech recognition goes back to the black-and-white Macintosh era. They had shirts reading “I helped Apple wreck a nice beach.”
Anything in 2016 mmmight have involved a deep neural network, but could not have been an LLM as anyone today would use the term, since they literally did not exist yet.
TIL. Thank you.
It is worth remembering how quickly all of this happened. DALL-E’s announcement was the day before the January 6th attack, 2021. Original-flavor Sora was like eighteen months after that. Four years later, there’s entire competing families of local video models, and every time I look there’s another image model with a stupid name.
Honestly I’m surprised how little has changed in light of that. There’s a handful of people on Youtube trying some cool shit… and then a vast gulf down to niche pornography and Fruit Love Island. The backlash might be self-fulfilling at this point.
I don’t use genAI basically at all, but I have experience with machine learning in general. Here’s my take:
Generative AI itself is literally just statistical modeling. Very complicated statistical modeling/prediction but still the same idea as any other method for prediction/classification.
The only problem is how certain models are trained and/or used.
You can (and imo should because it’s fun/interesting) create your own generative AI using responsibly sourced training data and open source code. Is that a crime? Does that hurt anyone? Does that harm society as a whole? No.
The concept of “GenAI” is not the problem. In fact, utilizing it for protien/drug discovery is pretty fucking cool, as is the fact it makes language translation significantly more accessible and accurate.
The problems you listed mostly apply to strictly corporate GenAI models. They are problematic not because they are generative statistical models but because they are built, maintained, controlled, and used by capitalist institutions in a capitalist society which allows them to do any damage they want as long as they can continue
bribing politicianslining the pockets of investorsI mostly agree with you in threory.
However, I do think the issues I’ve brought up exist even if it is not a corporate model. That is because most people will not be making their own llm.
Just like in theory people could make their own operating system for their computer, the same way that Linus did. Most people will not go that route, they will use the kernel, maybe they might make a distro, but they aren’t willing to make it entirely from scratch.
So when it comes to using genAI, you are going to have a lot of people (including leftists) just using a corporate model, then you have a smaller subset trying out “open” models like deepseek, then a smaller subset locally hosting a distilled model, and a smaller subset fine tuning a model or using RAG, and smaller and smaller subsets of people maybe try to build something on their own.
So in reality, most of these users will be making predictable and easily influenced output using these tools.
Also, I think the basic function of these tools, which will be true for open or corporate models, makes us less dependent on eachother, which I think will lead to even more self centered societies then we currently have and not the community centric goal that I think a lot of us share.
So when it comes to using genAI, you are going to have a lot of people (including leftists) just using a corporate model, then you have a smaller subset trying out “open” models like deepseek, then a smaller subset locally hosting a distilled model, and a smaller subset fine tuning a model or using RAG, and smaller and smaller subsets of people maybe try to build something on their own.
The db0 instance’s official stance is against using corpo AI, so you’re talking to the smaller subset already. So any arguments based on “most people” aren’t really relevant to the complaint you’ve made about this instance.
So in reality, most of these users will be making predictable and easily influenced output using these tools.
If you’re talking about the AI output, predictability is kinda the point. If you’re talking about the “influence” effect it has on certain people, watching youtubers or consuming any media can also influence people significantly. Does this mean listening to or creating podcasts is unethical and shouldn’t be tolerated? No, it means you should be careful what kind of media you consume regardless of its source. I am reasonably certain everyone on this instance knows genAI is quite fallible and biased.
Also, I think the basic function of these tools, which will be true for open or corporate models, makes us less dependent on eachother, which I think will lead to even more self centered societies then we currently have and not the community centric goal that I think a lot of us share.
First, there is a difference between dependence and dependability.
- You do not want to be dependent on specific members of your community; that would imply you and others couldn’t get by without them, meaning your community is not resilient.
- You do want to be able to depend on others in your community (and vice versa); this makes your community stronger.
Secondly, one could make this argument about any information sharing system ever. Youtube tutorials have made people less dependent on repair-men. Does that mean tutorials on how to fix an air conditioner are unethical?
Furthermore, genAI is a hobby for some people (especially those on this instance who use it). People like sharing cool things they made with/about their hobbies, and finding people with shared interests is a great way to build a sense of community. However, if an instance were to assert that no use of genAI is ethical ever, that would alienate people who use it in an ethical way, preventing/discouraging them from sharing/creating and/or participating in communities that they would have otherwise. I’d argue that is literally, directly against the “community centric goal” which “a lot of us share.”
Great write-up!
All fair points, thanks.
So when it comes to using genAI, you are going to have a lot of people (including leftists) just using a corporate model, then you have a smaller subset trying out “open” models like deepseek, then a smaller subset locally hosting a distilled model, and a smaller subset fine tuning a model or using RAG, and smaller and smaller subsets of people maybe try to build something on their own.
Pretend you’re vegan for me, and that people eating meat in front of you physically grosses you out.
Are you going to be the militant fundamentalist vegan who wants ALL animal products banned? Or are you going to be more pragmatic, understand that some people have more reach for meat-independence than others?
Because the Vegans I know and respect will celebrate a barbecue bro enjoying meatless Mondays.
But even this neglects some fascinating phenomena: deepseek has captured a LARGE part of the American LLM market on price alone. The inability to build a Data Mine that respects the neighbors is stalling the US chud-companies. Deepseek and Kimi K3 now outperform Claude in some tests for less than 20% of the price.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say China is trying to pop the AI bubble that’s propping up the US stock market. They’re doing it with superior engineering on “inferior” (read: accessible, less bitcoin-mining-right-turned cancer-for-a-building) hardware. China is doing it by rescuing us from sky high memory prices by Xmas 2027, and GPUs by xmas 2028.
Collapse the price of the hardware, suddenly those absurdly large investments become shitty deals. The balance sheets on all the corpos involved? Collapse with it.
I have my critiques of China, I’m a fucking Anarchist. The fact remains that they are the ally we have and need in this specific fight.
Omg I need to rig my browser to translate Chinese better, because there’s Communities with models for ANYTHING. And they’re given away freely, as is right and just.
I just wanna nerd out and be able to build cool shit for my comrades, with my comrades.
Chinese tech workers get to build drones for actual disaster relief. Any time I’m about to get a job in that here, in the US? Its a weapons platform and the boss isn’t allowed to even say it.
The Chinese “market” for AI is stronger, healthier, more robust, and more useful for things that aren’t violence. Meanwhile, the US government has drafted every US corpo-LLM into being digital soldiers that drive weapon drones. I am okay leaving Pwlantir in the garbage can of history.
I hope my sleep deprived rambling adds to the convo.
I do think there might be something positive to be said about genAI when it comes to semantic seach.
If genAI is a tool to use, I see it more as a weapon that needs a set of operating procedures to use safely. Similar to my gun or car.
Its not being used to augment search. It’s being used to replace search.
Every defense of this shit reads like going back to 1989 and publishing an op-ed about how MRNA vaccines and crisper are gonna be so cool, so stop whining about AIDS you damn vaccine hating bigots.
Edit: not to imply anything that good is going to come out of this. The math says it won’t.
Uh, what math? There are already good things coming out of it, so I’m not sure how math can show that.
For me, I can be against mass scraping, corporate control, bullshit surveillance, or using AI as a replacement for real human interactions without being against generative AI itself.
If someone runs a local model, trains it on public domain or willingly provided data, and keeps control of it themselves, I don’t think it conflicts with anarchism all. The bigger issue seems to be who owns the technology, where the data came from, and what it’s being used for. All issues that can be solved by running your own local AI model.
I think the nature of the model privileges past and precedent, and I think the prevalence is part of a fascist push to manipulate a lot of glaring vulnerabilities in human cognition. Most critically our pack bonding and precedence bias, and to a lesser extent laziness, all of which most people have no defense. It is a weapon to kill imagination and truth.
I don’t care if your bhuddist; that’s still a swastika, and it’s painted on the side of a German tank.
I am also against genAI.
I’ve heard many arguments for it, mainly from tankies, but also from leftist spaces and anarchists. The ideological idea seems to be that it is a way to allow everyone to have access to things they weren’t skilled enough to do. Something like the “democratization” of labor.
I am obviously against that statement, mainly in 2 fronts.
First, we have skilled labor for a reason. Some people dedicated years of their life to perfect a skill or a trade, and they are trustworthy experts with experience in the matter. It would be unfair for those people if they got replaced by a sloppier version of themselves, after spending so much time and effort into their skills.
I would also not trust a machine like I would a human, because the machine has no experience and can’t make decisions. We’re removing the human value of a skill, while also reducing its quality, when we could promote collaboration between humans, and make them feel valued while getting a better result.
Second, AI was built on stolen labor. Even if you use a self hosted model, running on old hardware that was thrown away, using solar and wind energy, its usage is still morally wrong.
The truth is, all the current models were trained on databases of data mined without consent, in many cases to the detriment of its providers.
On top of that, even if the models are used locally (and even if they are tuned locally), the initial training happens on massive datacenters that consume lots of resources. And what you get isn’t the first attempt at making a model. For every successful model out there, thousands of other models were trained and abandoned.
AI is also currently making us dumber, and multiple studies have already shown it. A lot of pro-AI people have already become dependent on it, and because of that they will defend it. Even if it would have been against their morals. It’s normal, we as humans tend to get defensive in those cases. But it means a lot of pro-AI discussion in leftist spheres is driven by that.
I think we should be really careful of AI because of that. AI is like a drug, and once you become dependent, you can’t easily go back. Our brains are wired to offload their thinking to AI, and once they do that, picking it back up is a big effort.
I also haven’t gone into the artist rabbithole. Of course, genAI harms artists. All kinds of them. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians, etc. People are replacing human art with synthetic slop, to the detriment of artists.
Sometimes it’s because they don’t know better. Sometimes it’s because they feel like they couldn’t be able to create something without the “help” of AI. But art is not the end result, art is the process. And by using AI, you’re destroying the process to end up with and end result.
I feel like the same arguments above apply to genAI usage for “art”. People are replacing artists with the lower effort and lower quality versions of them, which wouldn’t even be possible without stealing the art of those artists in the first place.
This comment is already long and ranty enough, and it’s late at night, so I don’t expect it to be very coherent. So I won’t go deeper.
However, as an aside, I’ll mention that I’ve been blanket banned before from communities, genAI related and not, by MysticMushroom, for making anti AI comments somewhere else. I have asked another mod for an unban in a non genAI related community ( [email protected] ). Afaik MysticMushroom unbanned me after asking, so credits for that.
First, we have skilled labor for a reason. Some people dedicated years of their life to perfect a skill or a trade, and they are trustworthy experts with experience in the matter. It would be unfair for those people if they got replaced by a sloppier version of themselves, after spending so much time and effort into their skills.
Is it “unfair” to bakers that I make my own bread at home with a bread machine? What about using a calculator? Or a dishwashing machine?
Second, AI was built on stolen labor. Even if you use a self hosted model, running on old hardware that was thrown away, using solar and wind energy, its usage is still morally wrong.
Well, it’s not all built on stolen labor. A lot of it is built on data that was given away freely. You also didn’t really provide a reason why it would still be morally wrong.
On top of that, even if the models are used locally (and even if they are tuned locally), the initial training happens on massive datacenters that consume lots of resources. And what you get isn’t the first attempt at making a model. For every successful model out there, thousands of other models were trained and abandoned.
They don’t have to use massive resources, we just choose to do them that way because of capitalism. Cities use massive amounts of resources, and many of them aren’t successfull on the first try. Should we stop building cities?
The rest of your post is more of a complaint about capitalism, and misunderstandings of how we choose to make AI models, not how they inherently have to be made.
The sloppers are gonna delete this. I posted something really similar earlier. Don’t talk to sloppers like they’re people. They’re not. Their brains are rotted and they’re incapable of honesty. Online they are very similar to fascists, though differences do come up in person.
Dehumanization is the tool of the enemy
FUCK GEN AI. All of you here excusing it or saying "oh its not AI its the corporations can suck my left nut. I may not be a .dbzero user but I am an anarchist and I stand firmly against all forms of AI. The only ethical use is for data sets pertaining to medical and research models that are locally run.
AI is a control tool and if you self host, IMO it reads to me like you want an info slave.
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The internet is also a control tool, better get off now - WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE?
I’m guessing they’re a troll. Or maybe they do think that we support the structures of capitalism. They seem to think that anarchism is about supporting the idea of copyright and capitalist ideals of working for someone else. At least that’s what I’ve gotten from their interactions.
FUCK GEN AI.
Alright, clear opening, I think I can follow this comment.
All of you here excusing it or saying "oh its not AI its the corporations can suck my left nut.
Uninterested in technical detail, and blaming corporations, with a request for left nut oral for any holding any views thereof, ok, still following your stance, very clear.
but I am an anarchist and I stand firmly against all forms of AI.
Sweet, the thesis statement.
The only ethical use is
Wait, what?
data sets pertaining to medical and research models
But we can’t talk about the technology that allows that, or it’s the left nut for us?
that are locally run.
So… non-corporate use is okay?
AI is a control tool and if you self host, IMO it reads to me like you want an info slave.
Well, yeah, I mean, we can call it an info daemon or something cooler, but yeah, for the control of the medical and the research datasets, yeah?
I’m very confused. Do I help you suck your own left nut or do I nuzzle the right one, comrade?
Real brave stance against something that doesn’t exist. That’s how the anti-“AI” movement feeds the “AI” grift. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
dbzer0’s general tolerance for genAI is the main reason I will never create an account on that instance. This is ridiculous. These people rant about the environment, ethics, genocide, and Big Tech, and then happily devour AI slop.
EDIT: For those of you who are ready to comment about “wonderful” local LLMs, see this.
You lost me at stolen training data. You seem like yet another liberal for copyright. That is the primary thesis of your argument. Which is pathetic. I hope you are aware that most of us consider unlicensed usage of training material a feature not a bug. This is home of [email protected] don’t act so surprised we aren’t morally outraged like you are that someone pirated images or books to use in training data. Many of us would freely do it ourselves. Some of us do do it ourselves.
It’s probably a good thing you didn’t make an account here. Liberalism isn’t tolerated well.
How can one of the points from the link I provided to the general list of LLM issues be my main argument? Do you think I’m the one who compiled that list?
And to label me a liberal based on that sole baseless conclusion is absolutely ridiculous. I hate copyright and support piracy just as much as next person.
And to label me a liberal based on that sole baseless conclusion is absolutely ridiculous. I hate copyright and support piracy just as much as next person.
Somehow I’m not convinced because the only ones really relevant to local AIs are the copyright ones, and the other shit is about the AIs hosted and trained by the big tech companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Like the majority of the shit in here is shit the AI companies are doing and you cite it as a reason why people on dbzer0 using their own home grown or even home built models are bad people?
Don’t tell me you aren’t trying to do that. You called out Local LLM users in your edit:
EDIT: For those of you who are ready to comment about “wonderful” local LLMs
only ones really relevant to local AIs are the copyright ones
No, it is about lack of consent. The open models are all trained through non-consential heavy web scraping, killing off smaller web servers by the thousands and driving server admins to despair by their use of (ususally non-consential) residential proxy bot networks.
The total lack of respect of any consential boundaries is the real problem. It is a pure strawman to claim that this is about copyright.
You haven’t heard people bitch and moan about art theft as much as I have. I agree with what you’re saying about large companies scraping data but you are being too charitable to these people. People do indeed bitch and moan about art theft and I have no tolerance for that level of liberal apologia.
So it is fine to ignore the consent of artists? Sure, they usually talk about copyright, but what most mean is consent and not the legal construct.
Also, “bitch and moan” is pretty mysogynist language, especially in this context.
You’re right. I’m sorry about that. I should have known to avoid language like that. I changed it to something better.
As for the other thing though. I’m not on board with that either. That’s just a socially enforced version of Intellectual property. It all converges on the idea that people are allowed to own intangible stuff like ideas, or bits. It’s the same liberal idea and expectation as copyright law just with different enforcement. Not so different though, they both expect blind compliance and assume moral superiority.
There are plenty of them that are not trained through non-consential scraping. Just because some of the people making AI models are assholes don’t mean everyone making AI models is an asshole.
Name one that is actually useful 🤷
You want me to do a basic internet search for you?
Putting shit on the web is giving consent to scrape it
bzer0’s general tolerance for genAI
We dont have a “general” tolerance. We have a tolerance for local non-corporate models.
Ai isn’t killing the planet, people are
This post is written in slop style.
That feeling when the anti-ai discourse looks hard to discern from bots.
It’s because an insane amount of it is inherently anti-intellectual by nature. Some people dislike AI but aren’t content with it being opinions so they will lie and use whatever they can to justify it in reality. Even if it’s false, not applicable, or straight up harassment.
I have genuinely never met an anarchist in real life that was in support of it. Ai is inherently anti-human and anti-social, and has no place in anarchism.
LLMs are fundamentally fascist tech that serve to poison the information ecosystem and erode people’s capacity for critical thought.
How are they fundamentally fascist? They don’t exist for those purposes, but they can be used for those purposes.
That’s like saying “hammers exist to beat people’s heads in”. Yes, they can do that, but that’s not what they are meant for.
A corporation known for supporting apartheid creates a product. The product doesn’t loudly proclaim its support, paying for the product puts money into the corporation’s pockets.
That’s like the argument that “guns don’t kill people” - what the fuck else are they for?
If LLMs were only made by apartheid supporing corporations, you might have a point. But many different people and groups create LLM’s for all kinds of things: Statistical analysis, generating stories and characters, coding assistance, design assistance, process assistance, language translation, rubber ducking, debate assistance, running D&D games and many more.
So other than statistical analysis, which doesn’t use LLMs but instead uses machine learning algorithms, (which I have no issue with) those all are creative endeavours and are trained on data that was once created by a human being, things which could easily be done by a human, taking away from actual people and putting the benefit of that work into the hands of corporations, the anarchist nature of which I am a bit lost on.
Letters can be delivered by a human. Do you think we should only send letters, intead of sending texts? What about cars, and trains? They take jobs away from people, should we abandon those? What about copiers, or printers? What about power tools? or water pumps?
Those things all help corporations, and non-corporations too. I don’t see how LLM’s are any different. Should we abandon all automation to keep people employed?
Nice strawman, but no.
Texts allow for immediate communication, letters still allow for a more impactful message, be it emotional or financial in the ay of a birthday card or a bill. Cars and trains allow people to travel further with more lugage than walking, both of which provide more avenue for jobs to be efficient, printers require maintenance and a qualified operator (in the case of large format printing for publications and magazines etc) and power tools are quicker but can be useless in comparison to a human being putting their bodyweight into tightening/loosening mechanical parts. All of these HELP people to do work better or provide avenues for skilled workers to do their job better.
Language models GUESS what word they should say next and fake being smart, while wasting electricity and time by making a human into a glorified spellchecker, because any technical work they’re put to is delayed by adding an extra layer where a professional with the experience and expertise needs to check every output for accuracy.
All of these HELP people to do work better or provide avenues for skilled workers to do their job better.
But they are also “…things which could easily be done by a human, taking away from actual people and putting the benefit of that work into the hands of corporations”.
They fit your criteria perfectly.
Language models GUESS what word they should say next and fake being smart…
Tell me you don’t know how LLMs work, without telling me that you don’t know how LLMs work. Guessing is a very powerful tool, and the smartest people I know spend a lot of their time “guessing”.
…while wasting electricity and time by making a human into a glorified spellchecker, because any technical work they’re put to is delayed by adding an extra layer where a professional with the experience and expertise needs to check every output for accuracy.
Video games “waste” electricity. Cars “waste” electricity. Spreadsheets “waste” electricity. Grow-lights “waste” electricity. I don’t see how LLMs are all that different.
I have to check the output my co-workers do. Does that make me a “glorified spellchecker” ?
I get that you don’t like LLMs, but if you want to convince me of anything, you’ll either have to make your values consistent, or come up with something that LLMs damage that is unique to LLMs, and inherently part of their function.
https://rainermuehlhoff.de/en/KI-und-der-neue-Faschismus-Reclam-Buch/
This was posted in another thread but you might enjoy the read
Ta, might check it out later.
What
Anti-AI peeps have problems differentiating facts and opinions, specifically their own opinions from what is factually true. As well as just having issues with logic in general.
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The fact that ad-hominem is all you have to go for proves you don’t have a leg to stand on. Anti-AI people are by and large a group of reactionaries who want people to agree with their own opinions as fact and when people don’t they insult and harass them.
We’re not indiscriminately pro-genai. We don’t promote corporate genai. Here’s our actual stance. https://wiki.dbzer0.com/divisions-by-zero/the-genai-tag/
Thank you, this is helpful
Love how the sloppers are deleting/banning shit they don’t like. This isn’t a place this discussion can happen. They aren’t capable of honesty.
Nothing says good-faith participation like having a slur for people who politely disagree with you about computer programs.
Politely? lmao
Relative to self-professed haters throwing around absolutes and accusations, the apologists here are saints. In the face of people all-but declaring this technology the devil!, and referencing chattel slavery, and demanding a rending of garments for those killed by… chatbots… the other side of the debate is, it’s not that big a deal. I’m not even sure how someone can get excited about the position that ‘it’s probably fine, so long as it’s local.’
There are no boosters on Lemmy. No cult of AGI. No Roko’s basilisk horseshit. There’s the barest modicum of people insisting it’s great for people with disabilities, but usually in the first-person, which is hard to argue with. So what these ranting individuals and identarian communities are performatively mad about are tired randos trying to explain that scanning some books is not Fahrenheit 1984. Any focused response is usually met with posturing for not addressing every complaint at once, and any verbose response might be dismissed with ‘I bet you generated that.’
So yeah, politely. I don’t know how much more deferential you expect a response to be, when the framing is catastrophic finger-pointing.
Yeah sorry to confuse, I meant the folks in the FuckAI crowd who don’t seem to realize who their enemy really is. And big clue for them, it ain’t hobbyists who use local AI models for useful work. We weren’t paying anyone in the first place, so no jobs are lost. We are running on our own hardware so no datacentres were involved. Like FFS, why not target corpos instead of some rando on a niche website who might want to use an LLM as a tool to get some work done. It’s like blaming climate change on citizen consumption. It’s a complete misdirection from the root problems.
They’d still point to where those local models came from… even though rando hobbyists have recreated historic LLMs for pocket money, and at one point developed a frontier image model. We absolutely could have gotten here on consumer hardware, without the trillion-dollar infinite money glitch. Improvements will continue apace after the bubble bursts because the community of hackers and perverts has seen what’s possible on a goddamn telephone and know they can go even further.
In the meantime: if the cocaine-chewing lizard people want to give everything away, the common folk will say thank you, and then ignore their meaningless EULAs.
