After I made this unrelated post, I was informed by @MysticMushroom1776@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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:
Dismissing disability cases that stink of painting a swastika on a wheelchair and calling anyone who objects ableist and the use of white women’s bodies to justify racist lynching.
Putting aside domain-idiots saying its very good at doing a thing they don’t know anything about.
I have never seen boosters participate in a discussion of the real damage interacting with the statistically average mechanical sycophant does to your brain.
I have never seen boosters engage with the fact this is not ai. Even if its useful, which I doubt, its not ai. Why are we calling it that? Where does using that name for this come from?
I have never seen boosters engage with the idea that while no business use case or viable personal use case that didn’t already exist and wasnt more than a dubious in-some-ways-incrimental-step-forward-and-in-some-ways-step-back on already existing usable technologies for massive cost. But there seem to be a lot of political use cases, all of them benefitting fascists and oligarchs. The disciplining of labor even when it can’t do the job, the opaquening of search, the death of truth, the doubt and disengagement with others, the alienation of everyone from everyone.
I have never seen boosters engage with the fact all of the money, every hedge fund every billionaire every financial institution creating money from fiscal ultimate fun space, was immediately balls deep and is now struggling to breathe in this technology, despite no return half a decade in. They’re going even harder on this than on crypto. Why? Why do you have allies like that? Which of you is a tool of the other?
I have never seen boosters engage with the addictiveness of these thought destroying models.
I have never seen boosters engage with the addictiveness cognitive decline or serious psychological hazards these models present for vulnerable people. The closest I’ve ever seen was one of them saying, about people with chatbot-aggravated psychosis being lead to self harm, is that ‘some people kill themselves, how dare you blame my precious baby’.
I know I engage with the risks hazards costs and people whose lives are made worse or ended by the technologies products and styles I love; I’ve had a lot of long discussions about this with comrades. Many of which made me look like kind of an asshole, on both sides. Sycophants of the mechanical sycophant seem incapable of this.
When pressed with anything but the most profound coddling, boosters of these models lash out with an aggressive sanctimonious fragility I’ve only ever seen from people currently undergoing massive usually complex trauma, and from fascists.
Fascists also love this technology, and there’s not really any debate about it for them. It literally creates shallow empty samey content based on a minimally articulated desire mediated by the collective norms based on a smoothed out heavily weighted idea of the past, then presents it with authority and truth. I don’t know if this or kalshi is the ultimate fascist technology, but it’s in the running.
And I can’t really find a liberatory use for this shit that isnt speculative based on calling it “ai” and covering your ears when anyone talks about math and physics, or sloppily duplicating existing functions at massive resource cost.
I guess you could in a manner of seconds generate me a picture of some amazing tits on a six pack with a narrow waist wide hips a dick a pussy cool scars and no body hair to masturbate to kind of decontextualizedly? But revolution is not stored in the balls. No more than it’s stored in the wallet.
People using it for things they’re not experts in is fine even if they wouldn’t use it for things they are experts in. Does that really need explaining? If a program can instantly do a better job than I could manage in a week, I’m not enticed by the promise of personal growth, I’m looking at a week of frustration and saying “pass.”
All reports of lost skill go ‘we gave this guy a calculator and now he’s slower at long division by hand.’ Okay. How fast was he, with the calculator? If you make hard things easy and then yank the tool away, humans tend to get frustrated.
Linus Torvalds uses this tech to help code and Cory Doctorow uses this tech to help write. These men are curmudgeons of the highest order. To insist there’s no utility is blatant nonsense. They have found value in the chatbot that almost does whatever you ask. Go figure.
You didn’t read what I wrote and you can’t now because the other sloppers thought it was too mean to your mechanical sycophant. Ask it about unaliving options.
I read every blathering word and nearly started my reply with “Gish gallop.”
If you don’t care when some of your objections are addressed, you don’t mean anything by them.
Dismissing disability cases that stink of painting a swastika on a wheelchair and calling anyone who objects ableist and the use of white women’s bodies to justify racist lynching
Nice to block you too. It’d be nice if we could have that convo where we were, but I guess you are a coward and a Disney-Adult.
All your arguments against AI existing because a chud exists who will generate pr0n with it? Make me want to ask if you think trans women should be allowed firearms.
Your points may as well be:
Chuds exist that hurt people with guns. Never mind what else exists with guns. Guns bad. No context where gun good. Especially not where a marginalized person faces actual violence, because gun always bad. We already know chuds bad, but we can’t unpack our liberalism enough to understand that a chud with a gun is still “chud bad”. No nuance.
I’m actually okay with the porn. The images are uncanny and irrational but I don’t have to look at them.
The images are uncanny and irrational but I don’t have to look at them.
Everyone is free to have opinions. That’s the point of art. You can love it, you can hate it, you can not even consider it art yourself. It’s all subjective. When you learn to respect opinions by agreeing to disagree or using the block button if you can’t work things out you make the experience better for yourself and others.
Its not art. Its an image without art, like a pie chart generated with Microsoft office. That’s fine. But you’re probably a lost cause, in every sense.
You can have that opinion. But we’re in a world where this is considered art:
Not everyone does. Something is art when some people consider it art. If someone considers a pie chart to be art then it indeed is art. It’s all subjective based on opinion. I’m not going to avoid saying that this:
Is a form of art to me and some people just because it upsets you or you disagree.
But you’re probably a lost cause, in every sense.
That’s also subjective. I think the same about you. For example I think that you are a pro-capitalist and pro-copyright liberal. Who, either due to ignorance or malice supports the most subtle yet most systemic aspects of the capitalist world we live in right now and is unwilling to question your support of those. Things like copyright, how someone can own bits. That’s my opinion though, and I know you will disagree.
I’m not here to tell you what to think, but I actually think that both images are not art. In my view, the purpose of the banana piece is to stimulate this exact discussion, i.e. to deliberately exist on the boundary between art and non-art, so reasonable people can definitely disagree. I see you’ve been getting dunked on for your opinions on art, which isn’t cool and I don’t mean to police your tastes. But I do want to comment.
In my view, the banana stuck to a wall is performance art. It is presenting an ordinary banana as if it was art. It’s quite funny 😆. But the banana itself and duct tape itself?..not really art. The image? Not really art. It’s funny, it’s definitely worth something…but it’s not art. It’s a banana. It’s a random product of evolution, and the image is just a photograph of that with a piece of duct tape. (You could argue, perhaps, that the cultivation of that breed of banana is art…but that’s not what’s on display here. It’s just a banana.)
It’s not the same class of thing as a painting. In particular, it’s not the same class of thing as a toddler drawing some crappy little scribbles. That is art. It’s incompetent art, but it’s art. I can’t quite put my finger on why…but I think it has something to do with the intentionality of the toddler. It has to do with the fact that something is being attempted. There’s a story to that toddler, what they wanted to achieve with that scribble, what they wanted to communicate if anything. You feel me? I’m not an art critic, so I am absolutely willing to admit that my opinion is a little imprecise.
Similarly, I don’t think that the AI generated image you provided is art. Perhaps it is straddling the boundary since someone prompted it into existence, but it is not within the interior of art. It’s compelling, it’s aesthetically interesting…but it’s not the same thing as a toddler scribbling on a paper. And if you were to eventually change my opinion on this image, you would basically have to convince me that you (or whomever was the person who caused this image to come into being) were more intimately involved in the creative process.
That doesn’t mean you can’t like it. That doesn’t mean you can’t even present it like art, critique it like art, or enjoy it like art. But I would argue that it, along with the banana, are not art. They’re each some other category of objects.
I suppose you could then argue that presenting AI generated images as art then is a performance art piece, like presenting a banana taped to a wall as art. In my view, this has two problems:
- It opens up the action as critique of posting AI generated images as performance art. And at that point…what really is the value of the performance, especially now that everyone is doing it? It’s just…kinda generic from a performance art perspective. It’s like the banana thing but consumes more water probably.
- Most people are, frankly, not thinking enough to be posting AI generated images as performance art. They want the value of art as a product without putting in any of the time, effort, and creative energy to bring that art into the world. I.e., art is about so much more than making technically competent media. It’s about everything; the techniques for sure, but the message if there is one, the medium, the imperfections, the stories of the creators, the creative process and its frictions, the historical moment, the technological landscape, the aesthetic, the meaning to the artist and the meanings that viewers get from the art…it’s everything. Art is one of the things that makes us human. Its depth is unbounded. AI generated images cannot achieve this alone because AI systems are not truly intelligent like humans are. AI systems are tools. Sometimes they are useful, but ultimately they are not intelligent beings like us. They need a human (or otherwise sentient) touch. And the further the human is from the root of the creative process…the more the product is gonna resemble the nature of the machine than it will resemble art.
So I am not necessarily against the use of AI within a larger art project, but the idea of presenting an AI generated image to me with no further modification of the product…the first few times it was neat, but now it’s taken over our culture. And it was never art to begin with. It was (and sometimes still is) a compelling technical product, but it’s not art in my view. That does not mean you should feel bad about enjoying AI images or whatever, whatever makes you happy, but I do feel that calling unedited AI generated images “art” is a category error.
Again, reasonable minds can differ on this issue. I just want to offer my perspective.
That’s perfectly fine. The great thing about art is that it’s subjective to everyone. Some people don’t consider any digital stuff art. Some people think art needs to be 100% original (collages aren’t art to them) and in this day and age people have differing opinions on whether AI images are a form of art.
It’s all subjective. That’s kind of the point of art. We make of it what we make of it. I remember one artist who ate the fat removed from his own liposuction (made it into meatballs) and considered that art. I think that’s gross and creepy and isn’t really art but that’s also my opinion and there will be people who disagree with me. Some people don’t consider photography art. I don’t really agree.
If you want some context on the AI image, it’s the result of me feeding garbage data to the stable diffusion model which caused it to panic and spit out a lot of random stuff. Then I picked the ones that had the least amount of form or structure in them. Some might consider this more equivalent to those partly corrupted photos that happened when a thief stole a laptop belonging to the photographer, wiped it, and it was recovered but the photos were partly corrupted and she decided to use them as art because the effect was interesting. That’s what I was going for with that anyway, something like it. Which is what I created !stable_diffusion_abstract@lemmy.dbzer0.com for as well. Whether someone would consider this similar to that is up for debate since I’m intentionally messing these images up as opposed to photos becoming corrupted by chance.
How can anything a person uses to express meaning not be art? This is the example I always go to:
It’s blatantly generated. Those kids aren’t stacked plausibly. It has that font. The cardboard bouncer becomes a real boy halfway down. And yet, it is visually conveying a complex idea, as surely as if you scribbled it by hand. Someone envisioned this metaphor and put it in front of your eyeballs. An opinion has been smuggled from their brain to yours. Then somehow, in our boundless creativity, people confidently assert they’ve grasped the one true nature of art, and nuh uh that doesn’t count.
I’ve had people insist any stick figure would count, but this photorealistic depiction of the same concept doesn’t. Like “intent” is a magical property imbued by the little bones in the wrist. Every moment of your lived experience led you here, so whatever you draw is True Art. When pressed about whether that applies to sweatshop animators’ on-model traces of Homer Simpson’s face, they suddenly can’t agree with each other.
I’ve had people insist a grenade dipped in paint would contain the essence of my artistic message, whatever that happened to be. Even if I had to do it a couple times to pick the shredded canvas I like best. The way I pulled the pin that time must have been an exact sequence of microscopic decisions to precisely control the shrapnel, unlike trying different seeds, which is a slot machine.
I’ve had people insist a prompt itself is art, but only the prompt. Obviously a human wrote it with a clear picture in mind. They were trying to distill that mental image with such clarity that even an idiot robot would get it. But if the robot produces a render matching that description to the writer’s satisfaction, well that’s complete coincidence. Sure it captures the vibe they wanted, better than however many mechanically-similar examples, but nahhh, there’s no way that curation reflects their inexpressible desires.
I’ve had people insist this political cartoon about unreliable age restrictions lacks meaning. Even though they understood it was a political cartoon about unreliable age restrictions. I put it to you that if an image is about something… that is its meaning.
I’ve about had it with people insisting silly things about what’s right in front of them.
THIS POST WAS GENERATED WITH AI
Please do elaborate
out of tokens
GenAl is a stolen facsimile of a human
False. It’s literally just a computer program.
who can never understand morals or praxis. It can never understand freedom or control.
No computer program will ever understand this, nor should we expect that.
It will however poison our communities (look at what SpaceX/Anthropic is doing in Memphis, TN)
“AI” is not doing this. It’s being done by capitalists (spacex, anthropic). Stop letting them off the hook.
make us more predictable (and thus easier to control)
How does using a computer program do this?
and isolate us from other humans within the community which is so important to us.
How does using a computer program do this?
Even with the most moral genAl you can possibly have
Computers have no more “morality” than a calculator.
TBH this is just feeding the grift with more pseudo-scientific nonsense.
I can answer one of the questions.
How does using a computer program do this?
Maybe not in the way OP is thinking, but it does massively help control us and here is how:
Fascism always had one huge flaw that prevented it from ever fully working: data. 1920s Germany was quite efficient at this, but they still had literally thousands of people listening, spying, reporting on, and processing data into threats that the SS would deal with.
That is simply too much data for humans to sift through and not miss a fuck ton of things, leading to resistance movements gaining a lot of ground.
AI solves this problem in that a few data centers can process spying data (and much more of it from the surveillance devices almost every person has in their house right now) fairly close to real time. That is a game changer. That is why the technofascists are pushing AI so hard to speed up development. It is essentially the best large scale pattern recognizer in the world and the manpower it takes to run that system is extremely small. That is why palantir is getting its claws in everywhere. Governments want that, whether for good or evil.
AI is a game changer for authoritarians. Or course, they would have to use it well still to be effective, but for example Palantir is building AI-only kill chains where targets are identified based on large data ingest, located, and then drones can be sent to kill them. That can happen in minutes or hours instead of the weeks or months it would traditionally take and resistance leadership is a finite resource.
This applies to cameras as well. Cameras help fascists, fascists help target victims, cameras help track people, cameras help report where people are and what they are doing. Cameras make us easier to control.
Do you think all cameras are bad? or are they just a tool that is being mis-used by the fascists?
Who needs to process the camera data? Again, it is a very different technology from all of the comparisons because it is literally taking out the need for large bodies of human oversight. Data collection vs data processing.
A camera does not decide who lives and who dies. An LLM can (and has) decided who lives and who dies and can carry out the execution orders itself.
But I guess cameras aren’t starving people of water and power and a required prerequisite to their use at scale.
But you’re right. LLMs aren’t evil at all, they are just a tool. The next defining tool that fascists now need to subjugate everyone and eliminate resistance.
Who needs to process the camera data? Again, it is a very different technology from all of the comparisons because it is literally taking out the need for large bodies of human oversight. Data collection vs data processing.
I could say the same thing about spreadsheets. Is spreadsheet software, or databases bad?
A camera does not decide who lives and who dies. An LLM can (and has) decided who lives and who dies and can carry out the execution orders itself.
That’s a choice that is being made. That’s not the point of LLMs, it’s one of the many things that LLMs are being used for.
But I guess cameras aren’t starving people of water and power and a required prerequisite to their use at scale.
The same is also true of LLMs. Capitalism is doing that. We can make LLMs much more efficiently, but we choose not to, due to capitalism.
But you’re right. LLMs aren’t evil at all, they are just a tool. The next defining tool that fascists now need to subjugate everyone and eliminate resistance.
I’m against their use by facists, just like I’m against facists using cars, or bulldozers, or guns, or wheat. I just don’t see how LLMs are any different.
They’re only different because these people very strongly personally dislike them and they aren’t content with it just being their opinion. Which is why they make up some of the most pathetic bad faith arguments you’ll ever hear.
You know what else is a fascist tool by their logic? Internet, Television, Computers, Cars, Trains… Pretty much all technology in the hands of fascists will benefit fascists.
That’s why we need to fight fascists instead of doing this stupid culture war bullshit. I wonder if some of these anti-AI people are intentionally trying to distract from that. After all like most liberals they intentionally or unintentionally support fascist agendas.
I think people are upset by the legitimate problems that they see, but I think they typically mis-diagnose the cause of the problems.
People are scared to lose their jobs, and their livelihood, for good reason. Capitalism sucks, and it ties the two together.
I’m pro automation, because I want people to lose their jobs. What I don’t want is for them to lose their livelihood. I think people working on jobs that they don’t like just to pay the bills is dumb, but people working on jobs that they enjoy is awesome.
Probably is that for most people, amplified due to the culture war. I don’t think that excuse works for the people claiming to be anarchist and anti-copyright though. A lot of people in this thread seem to be doing it maliciously not out of ignorance.
Some people think anarchism is doing whatever you want with no regard for others.
Which is funny because anarchism is fundamentally built on empathy
Empathy is to compassion as square is to rectangle. Please don’t forget the other rectangles.
Fair!
And these people are openly advocating we kill Israeli citizens. Real empathic guys…
The “Palestinians are not people” guys?
Some people think anarchism is doing whatever you want with no regard for
otherscapitalists.Fixed it for you. Yes a lot of anarchists are more than happy to step on capitalists claiming to own ideas or concepts. Copyright and intellectual property are capitalist constructs and despite being Fuck_AI’s favorite talking point are not something we consider valid or worthy of following. Though we host !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com so that shouldn’t be a surprise to you.
“Everyone I disagree with is a capitalist” and other arguments by the mentally numbed.
disengage
“People don’t like my use of fascist tech, better use the leftist safeword.”
I find a lot of them have very thin skin.
Especially when you downvote a single post on their slop communities so they ban you from every community they mod.
Not talking about anyone specific tho.
Talk about the specific people @MysticMushroom1776@lemmy.dbzer0.com @Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com and @PapaSkwat@lemmy.today the biggest PTB pieces of shit in all the Fediverse! I hope you all die you retarded dipshits!
okay you need to calm the fuck down
Why?!! Why should I calm down when these fascist shits are spewing pro-AI garbage and banning all dissent?!! Why shouldn’t I be mad?!! These pieces of shit are destroying the world with pollution and the theft and devaluation of art! It is repulsive!!
Well, I guess you are seeing the shit we deal with daily. This shit is the reason some of us pull out our ban-hammers so fast.
Ironic that people call me a fascist, when people like that guy you just responded to, start up brand new accounts all day every day to attack us.
His account is 17 minutes old. Probably the same guy who started an account this morning and got banned in PTB community, for saying the stuff.
Or when you’ve never seen their slop communities and get banned from the one real community they moderate with their delusions cited in a mass ban from everything they moderate. Obnoxious.
Lol
Including after never interacting with them. Fucking sloppers man istf, they’re so conditioned by the mechanical sycophant that just letting your gaze wander by them without getting on your knees and tearing their pants off is a grave insult. They seriously aren’t even people.
These idiots just want to steal from artists! These pieces of shit think anarchism entitles them to steal other people’s work! Some of them deserve to be swatted!
Someone who likes the corporate owned, environment destroying, art stealing, job destroying lie box isn’t an anarchist.
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.
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.
My background is that I am a PhD student in electrical engineering. I’m not gonna doxx myself, but my research area is in mathematical systems theory. LLM systems are not my primary research area, but I have taken advanced coursework on classical machine learning, and LLMs will certainly affect my research area from a technical perspective. So I am obligated to understand LLMs, reinforcement learning systems, deep learning algorithms, classical machine learning systems, and basically the rest of “artificial intelligence” from a theoretical, mathematical point of view. In addition, I use LLMs extensively as a LaTeX assistant, to generate counterexamples, and to “fill in” proofs when I read math books.
I am also a lifelong anarchist.
Anarchist communities [especially in real life] need humans otherwise there is no community.
Absolutely. Anarchist users of LLMs do not intend to replace the human element. Literally the opposite.
GenAl is a stolen facsimile of a human who can never understand morals or praxis.
I don’t oppose proletarians “stealing” “copyrighted” work. Copyright is classically anti-anarchist rentier behavior. What I do oppose, and I believe you’re pointing to, are a few related but distinct problems with AI systems as they exist today:
- AI systems pretend to be anything other than tools. It’s in the name, unfortunately. And it’s capitalist horseshit, but its name is actually capitalist horseshit fixed by the people who actually invented classical AI systems in the fifties. I.e., academia has had a long time to correct this terminological mistake and failed spectacularly. To some extent, this is a byproduct of its training data, because it’s trained on human outputs, and except for a few weirdos, humans typically assert our autonomy in our writing. However, AI companies really should be trying to counteract that tendency; they go in the opposite direction. For this reason, I reject the notion that AI systems are “intelligent” in any way that resembles intelligent biological creatures, i.e. I reject the notion that AI systems are converging towards AGI or that they are even capable of approximating general intelligence. Furthermore, I posit that the characterization of AI systems as intelligent beings is capitalist marketing. The logic is simple: if these systems are intelligent, we would need to give them rights. Since capitalists control these machines, such a move would ultimately amplify capitalist willpower.
- LLM companies have obtained basically all human knowledge without paying. Piracy is illegal for proletarians yet magically legal for the bourgeois when do it for some reason 🤔🤔🤔🤔. LLM companies then they paywall the sum of the world’s knowledge and refuse to even be open about the training data and resulting model weights.
- AI agents (bots driven by LLMs) driven by thoughtless or malicious users overload conventional websites and spin up unedited AI-generated content. The proliferation of AI slop feeds back into point (3).
- People use AI systems, like all other tools, to do heinous things. In particular, AI systems are used in the ongoing Gaza genocide, and are a critical part of ICE operations.
All of these problems are serious critiques of AI systems as tools. What you’ll notice about all four of these, however, is that they are primarily socially driven phenomena. These problems are contingent on the existence of hierarchical social relations. In fact, these problems have pre-AI counterparts:
- ((1) is the most novel IMO.) Capitalists hire and/or brine actual proletarians to simply repeat capitalist talking points.
- The academic journal complex.
- Classical bot farms and human trolling operations.
- Basically the entire history of technology.
It can never understand freedom or control.
“AI” systems can’t understand anything. They are mathematical algorithms implemented on silicon-based computers.
It will however poison our communities (look at what SpaceX/Anthropic is doing in Memphis, TN)
This is not an inherent feature of the technology. We could have absolutely trained these models, albeit at a vastly slower sustainable pace, through the use of distributed and decentralized computing strategies. The issue is that the perverse incentivization structure of capitalism pushed AI companies to grow unsustainably, at great expense to the ecosystem and the people of the world. I.e.: capitalist interests of quick money and infinite expansion triumphed over proletarian interests of survival, dignity, freedom, and sustainability, as usual.
And it is my view, as an anarcho-communist, that by seizing the means of production from the capitalists, in particular their AI hardware, and distributing these systems more equitably around the world, we can remake these AI systems to some extent into sustainable systems at an ecologically appropriate scale. At least we would be able to try — capitalists, as monstrous as they are, never even try to do things correctly.
and isolate us from other humans within the community which is so important to us.
I cannot stress enough that I do not want to see AI replace humans in human-centered tasks. In particular, I am completely uninterested in AI-generated “drawings” or “music”. Art is an activity by sentient beings. Unedited AI “art” can be technically competent (or not), but it is ultimately just a product of a machine and therefore not tremendously compelling to me.
And I also agree that we are seeing a crisis of isolation, but my view is that:
- This crisis predates AI.
- It is caused by capitalism, specifically the gradual commercialization of previously free or low-cost activities and spaces.
- It is exacerbated by ecological destruction and encroachment by the State, which simply makes the world outside your home a worse place to gather.
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?The extreme negatives of AI must not be excused.
They must be confronted and ruthlessly reversed. And in order to do this, we must conduct a holistic analysis of why AI technologies enable these heinous things. This is impossible to conduct, i.e. useless, without relating these technologies to the social relations that motivate these technologies to destroy for their masters. Anarchists who use AI systems do not, in general, excuse these systems or their users. To the best of our abilities, we use them with the care required not to replicate capitalist harms. And we must be held accountable for our failures on that front.
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.
Not really, no. I would have zero problems if you personally did that in a way that didn’t destroy the ecology, and then released your weights, model architecture, data, and training proces. In fact, in my view, you would be doing the world a great service. It is my personal hope that we live long enough (we as proletarians living in a world doomed by capitalists) so that I can someday train an AI on all of Anna’s Archive. I’m sorry if that’s offensive to you, but that would be so unbelievably fucking cool and useful.
What Meta did and then released as open source
* weight available, not open source. Huge difference: you cannot reasonably recreate Meta’s model weights on your own. In my view, besides being unethical, it’s bad data science because it’s not reproducible!
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.
Yeah I can live that. E.g., I don’t cite my calculus textbook every time I use calculus in a paper. I cite the things that must be cited. And when I wrote my metal album ten years ago, I didn’t credit any artists, even though my work obviously draws from the work of dozens of metal bands. And I don’t expect to receive any credit if my work influences someone else’s music, or even if it gets sampled, and that thought doesn’t bother me at all. It would be neat if someone did shout out my work, I’d appreciate it, but really I’m just happy if someone listens to it. (Not gonna post my album here because that would insta-doxx me lol. You’re not missing out on much 😆.)
These are my views on AI systems:
- “AI” and “artificial intelligence” are capitalist buzzwords and should not be used. I prefer the term “statistical learning*” systems, where the asterisk is used to remind the reader that “learning” is a series of technical mathematical termd that are distinct from what people in social sciences mean by “learning”, in particular when applied to biological creatures. (See Vidyasagar’s book and Vapkis’s book for technical definitions.) I am open to terminological suggestions, as I’m not completely comfortable with the “learning*” terminology.
- AI systems can be useful tools. But that being said, not everyone is going to have a use for them, and their adoption must, like any tool, be voluntary with respect for the user’s autonomy. And that autonomy has been systematically ignored and violated by the capitalists who foist their AI products on us.
- Large language models have utility beyond auto complete for reasons we do not yet fully understand. Basically, the logic is this: they train LLMs to do tasks A, B, and C. You train a language model to do tasks A, B, and C, all well and good…but then you shove some completely different tasks X, Y, and Z into the machine. And the weird thing is, for some reason, the machine can do (say) task X. We cannot mathematically prove yet why this is the case, but this was practically seen to be the case.
- More on mathematics: classical machine learning has extremely good theory. In particular, you can use probabilistic inequalities as design tools to pick algorithms, compute asymptotic bounds as the number of samples increases, and (less classically) compute finite-sample bounds on error probabilities. The mathematical community is currently porting these tools over to deep learning algorithms and LLM systems…but it’s tough work! Even classical machine learning theory books require some measure theory and functional analysis background. It’s a lot of fun! But it’s also really really hard.
- Your understanding of AI systems and their capabilities is probably out of date. The capitalists are obviously overselling it, but there is a rapid increase in the capabilities of these systems.
- Pursuant to the previous point, commercial AI products are rarely “just” a LLM anymore. In particular, a lot of these products have access to Python environments, in particular with SymPy, compilers (e.g. they typically have access to a LaTeX compiler), and even a Linux container. Really, if you hear the phrase “agentic AI”, it basically means a bot or family of bots “driven” by LLMs. (Pursuant to my first point, agentic AI bots do not have “agency” like sentient biological creatures do! The responsibility for what these bots do lies with their human operators.) I highlighted SymPy, a Python library that does symbolic mathematics. LLMs used to be completely incapable of symbolic mathematics. While they still often make mistakes that are hard to spot, AI systems are capable of driving a Linux container. In particular, they are capable of crapping out SymPy code and running it, where SymPy does the mathematics in the background. However, the really interesting development is that AI systems can crap out Lean code. Lean is a formal proof verification programming language. It is basically the best you can get in terms of proving that a mathematical theorem is correct. (Disclaimer: I am absolutely not an expert on formal verification! My formal understanding of Lean is quite limited right now.) This will absolutely revolutionize mathematics.
- As anarchists, we ought to have sufficient technical training to be able to back up our sociopolitical ideas. You obviously don’t have to go the full PhD route like me (and I don’t recommend it lol, I’m just fucked in the head in the exact ways that make me a good PhD student 😆), but I think it would help if you tried out the HuggingFace tutorials, or if you pirated Sebastian Raschka’s book and did the exercises, to calibrate your expectations about AI. (Both of these should be completely free and open source, and doable on reasonable hardware…or Google 🤢 CoLab 🤮 if your hardware can’t handle it.) I suspect that a lot of people who are (rightly!) disgusted with the excesses of capitalist AI proliferation are not proficient in using AI systems because they haven’t practiced. As I have said above, a lot of people will simply never have a use for AI systems, in particular if you don’t do technical work…but if you do technical work, it makes sense to at least try self-hosting these systems, and maybe putting in a little bit of time every couple months to see what the state of the art…for the times, they are a-changin’.
Lastly, this comment was written by a real autistic human on a cell phone with zero AI assistance, as are all my comments. Yes I actually write like this 😆
Thank you for the lovely post, as I am also working to grapple with the impacts of AI from an Anarchist perspective
Have you ever considered writing theory?
Yes lol, but I currently don’t think I’m up to the task (yet) of writing anarchist theory. Mathematical theory yes, oh God yes 😆
First, thank you for writing this well thought out reply. I do have some things I’d like to clarify or ask.
We could have absolutely trained these models, albeit at a vastly slower sustainable pace, through the use of distributed and decentralized computing strategies. The issue is that the perverse incentivization structure of capitalism pushed AI companies to grow unsustainably, at great expense to the ecosystem and the people of the world. I.e.: capitalist interests of quick money and infinite expansion triumphed over proletarian interests of survival, dignity, freedom, and sustainability, as usual.
If the issue of resources required nfor training is purely corporate, then why did deepseek use the resources it did for training? It is true they were able to train the model much cheaper than the corporate models, but the scale of the training and amount of resources used was still much larger than one might have expected if the issue was purely a corporate one. Although there is something to be said about geopolitics and Chinese state influence (which is extremely capitalist)
And I also agree that we are seeing a crisis of isolation, but my view is that:
This crisis predates AI. It is caused by capitalism, specifically the gradual commercialization of previously free or low-cost activities and spaces. It is exacerbated by ecological destruction and encroachment by the State, which simply makes the world outside your home a worse place to gather.
Totally agree, the issue is not caused by genAI, but this issue is something that in my opinion prevents us from forming the societies we want to live in. It is something I have been giving a lot of thought too before the wide-spread adoption of gen-ai and it is something I keep seeing in the people that use it as a tool to get something important to them done. So many would rather hope an AI translation app works then to ask a friend to help them translate. Or to ask a neighbor to help them with planning a garden. I think using genAI as a convenience limits us from building solidarity with eachother.
It is my personal hope that we live long enough (we as proletarians living in a world doomed by capitalists) so that I can someday train an AI on all of Anna’s Archive. I’m sorry if that’s offensive to you, but that would be so unbelievably fucking cool and useful.
I’m not offended by this, but I do think the current iteration of genAI not being able to credit creators means that information is siloed and harder to extract. Maybe that changes in the future?
Your understanding of AI systems and their capabilities is probably out of date.
Yeah, I can cop to that. Im not an expert and I don’t claim to be.
I think it would help if you tried out the HuggingFace tutorials, or if you pirated Sebastian Raschka’s book and did the exercises, to calibrate your expectations about AI.
I’ve actually ran models locally that I converted to gguf from huggingface before, I’ve also fine tuned and but a rag system before, but I’ll check out the book. Thanks for the recommendation.
Lastly, this comment was written by a real autistic human on a cell phone with zero AI assistance, as are all my comments. Yes I actually write like this 😆
Thank you.
If the issue of resources required nfor training is purely corporate, then why did deepseek use the resources it did for training?
So first of all, there is a difference between using X total resources over three years versus using X total resources over three decades. A more extreme example is the difference between burning a full tank of gas over a few days of driving versus burning all that gas at once by lighting it on fire.
China’s contributions to the AI race are, in my view, tarnished by many of the same problems as Western AI systems, since China is (state) capitalist. (That being said, Chinese companies do usually make their models weight-available, which is commendable, but not enough.)
While I suspect that we have not thrown enough theoretical math at the problem of LLM training (we have thrown lots of empirical math at them; useful for guiding the development of theory, but not theory itself), I also suspect (frankly based on my limited experience training and using these things) that the useful structural properties of LLMs only manifest themselves when you train with large datasets.
So the problem of large datasets is, in fact, an inherent part of the technology. My view is that we have to tackle these things head on.
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Distributed computing. Internally, LLM companies are computing at such a scale that they already must use distributed computing technologies to spread the load out amongst many machines. My vision would be something like BOINC, where people and collectives who benefit from AI systems can give limited access to the computing power of their systems. Note that AI Horde does something like this for inference. Hence why it is so important to seize the means of production from the capitalist class. Not ask, take! They have the tools and power to do this sustainably, but they chose to do it wrong so they could make a quick bag.
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Leverage existing resources sustainably. The logic here is that individuals and collectives spreading out the effort won’t necessarily save resources or energy integrated over the whole planet. In fact, as a planet, we might spend more energy on a geographically distributed system if it is done at the scale AI companies are doing it. However, the issue is not just "we’re spending too much energy "; it’s “we’re spending too much energy, too fast, and we are overloading and obliterating local ecosystems, and we are doing it in a way that exacerbates existing climate”. I.e., it’s not just quantity, but also space and computing time whose distribution is mismatched.
Like what the capitalists have pushed on us in basically three years…it really should have taken at least a decade.
So many would rather hope an AI translation app works then to ask a friend to help them translate.
Depends on what I need help translating. Basic Spanish? I’ll ask my mom. Farsi? I don’t know anyone personally who speaks Farsi, to the best of my knowledge. Advanced Spanish? Ain’t no way my mom’s gonna beat a machine, even a pre-2023 AI translator. I could go hire a translator, but I suspect that they have more important things to translate. I.e., translation is usually a routine task, and human translators can show up for the fun stuff (translations that require human supervision).
Or to ask a neighbor to help them with planning a garden.
I wouldn’t ask AI personally. I would probably look on LibGen for botany books, or drop a post on Lemmy since I’m sure there are a few botanists lurking around.
I think using genAI as a convenience limits us from building solidarity with eachother.
It can, but it doesn’t have to. And I think that a lot of those examples are people misusing the tech. In particular, people are using the tech to “solve” problems with simple, well-understood solutions. LLM systems are suited for problems without algorithmic solutions, where either a partial and/or approximate solution is better than none at all.
I do think the current iteration of genAI not being able to credit creators means that information is siloed and harder to extract. Maybe that changes in the future?
I would argue that at least for math, you can actually get really far by telling the AI to cite its sources in the system prompt and giving the harness access to your PDF library (I do this in a virtual machine with a subset of my actual library that I have backed up in case I lose it). (And of course you triple check the citation it gives you.)
Also, the thing about math in particular is that we do not particularly disagree with the capitalists about mathematics. We all agree that 2+2=4 and the indefinite integral of cos(t) is sin(t) + C. And we also widely agree on how to typeset mathematics, namely “rewrite unreadable spaghetti code in LaTeX until the rendered PDF looks gorgeous.” So a LLM with a capitalist bias… isn’t really a problem for math typesetting questions. Conversely, I would never ask a capitalist LLM to, say, summarize the contents of Mutual Aid by Kropotkin, even if I give the system the PDF. (Most capitalist LLMs probably do recall the broad contents of Mutual Aid and the most important texts in anarchist theory, simply because they sucked up all our literature too.) I think there are other walks of life where anarchists and other class-conscious proletarians do not disagree with the capitalists, although personally my disagreements with capitalists are extremely broad, almost universal, so I understand if people have trouble finding common ground with them!
Your understanding of AI systems and their capabilities is probably out of date.
Yeah, I can cop to that. Im not an expert and I don’t claim to be.
That wasn’t just aimed at you … that holds for everyone, myself included. Again, the capitalists are overselling the convergence to AGI specifically…but things are moving incredibly fast. So if you’re not using the systems regularly, it’s honestly going to be very difficult to keep up with the development of the tech. (I’m not saying that you should necessarily start using AI systems regularly just to keep up; it will suffice to just remember that your knowledge might be out of date by the time you finish your argument.)
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Wow, just wow. I love your comment and fully agree with what you say based on what I know as a software dev with a deep background in math and cumputer vision (my master’s thesis was on facial recognition). The thing is that you explain incredibly well. And I had to say that this point you make is specially interesting and is making me think a lot:
“We cannot mathematically prove yet *why* this is the case, but this was practically seen to be the case. I personally suspect that natural language has some deep underlying structure that we cannot see yet, but informs both the AI’s ability to learn\*, *and* our ability as humans to learn.”
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and knowledge.
You’re very welcome, and thank you for reading!
cumputer vision
Please I beg you do not change this typo 😆
If we’re all being honest, this spelling is more accurate. xD
Thank you for this! It really put a lot of my thoughts into words along with some deeper insight. I think if we are going to push for a better society then we need to pay attention to people like you who are experts in the field and can really tease apart the pros and cons of things like this.
I see a bit of a panic in current anti-AI sentiment at the moment, and honestly rightfully so, as it is being weaponized against us. But to outright dismiss it or to try to put the genie back in the bottle could be shooting ourselves in the foot. If we can take control of it ourselves and push out the capitalists we could have something that is genuinely useful, and most importantly, ours.
“AI” and “artificial intelligence” are capitalist buzzwords and should not be used
proceeds to exclusively refer to LLMs as AI
proceeds to exclusively refer to LLMs as AI
No, I did not exclusively refer to LLMs as “AI”, I referred to them as LLMs. (My view is that LLM (large language model) is a reasonable and accurate name for that class of algorithms.)
I referred to systems using various “artificial intelligence” algorithms, often including LLMs, as “AI systems”. Admittedly, I sometimes forgot to use the scare quotes around “AI” and “artificial intelligence” because I thought it would be clear from the content how I feel about these terms…and I was writing this from my bed with my cellphone, so Ctrl+F and Ctrl+R weren’t available. My preferred terminology would be “systems driven by statistical learning algorithms”, but I decided to write that comment using the popular terminology because otherwise, I would have to begin my comment with a list of definitions. In academic work, this is actually what I would do, but in a casual online forum, beginning with a list of definitions would likely be seen as “word games”.
I think that you can understand that even though I don’t agree with the popular terminology, I found it more accessible to communicate my point using the popular terminology…part of which includes my disagreement with the terminology and why.
Wait but what is the source for this pic? Is this not an AI generated drawing?
Like are you making some comment by posting an AI drawing of a bot in an anarcho protest on a post about distrusting AI in anarchist comms?
This is the first image I found when I did a web search for “genAI Anarchist”.
I agree I it is terrible.
From the post:
Photo is genAI made and sourced from the following article:
Thanks for the context but that reference wasn’t there when I posted my comment
I assure, you it was.
Huh, does Voyager not show edit indicators on posts?
What’s Voyager? I was like “I don’t remember posting on a Star Trek comm” lol
It does
Interesting, maybe I just don’t see it.
edit: what’s with the purge?
This whole comment chain is way off topic.
Lmao what are you talking about this is a post complaining about AI but it’s obviously generated by ai
Actually were are discussing using genAI content in a post about using genAI content.
I think the comments have been civil. I don’t see the reason to remove them personally.
You didn’t see it because it wasn’t edited. (I’m pretty sure atleast I’ve honestly been pretty busy so I forget if I corrected a typo)
The source to the image was definitely originally there.
Typical anarchist :p
Like someone please make it make sense. When I first noticed it, the pic just has the ai aura/glow. But the more I look at it the more it is clear that no human being with art skills at this level would have drawn this. It’s a fucking mess.
So is there some statement being made? I’d really love to know what the intent is, because it seems like trolling
Like, “I’m gonna make an anti ai post and then put an ai pic and everyone is gonna complain about ai and nobody will notice the pic is ai”
Surprised you didn’t get banned without repeal for daring to say anything against AI
That’s what they do for most people who dare to
Very funny to post this in a post where vigorous debate on this subject is clearly visible.
We do ban extremely toxic people who can’t help themselves from reacting with outright bigotry and attempted bullying, but liars like you like to misrepresent that as us banning all dissent. It it is funny that you decided to post this in the face of all evidence.
A recent redderp graduate, no doubt.
There’s still time
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.
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.
Open source AI reduces demand for corporate AI
Especially since it’s free. They can’t charge you for it, they can’t ban you from it as blackmail. It is 100% yours for simply the cost of running it. Which with a battery and solar system is totally doable. If you can run a Gaming PC on a solar setup you can run AI models on one as well.
I think the nature of genAI inherently isolates people from one another.
Like the nature of a weapon is to kill.
I can see usecases, but I do think there are risks that are much more than it being corporate.
Although, I have to say, I’m starting to see my controdictions in thought.
If I continue the gun analogy, it’s possible to use a weapon as a tool to your benifit if you allow yourself to understand the danger involved.
I only in the past couple of years opened my mind to firearms. This might be a similar situation for me.
A firearm uses (combustion-created) compressed gas to launch a metal projectile at high speeds. There are very few cases in which that projectile won’t damage whatever it hits, and obviously that is the intent of guns. Whether they’re used for good (hunting and defense) or evil (murder and domination), they are intended to cause damage.
LLMs use weighted maps to produce text that approximates the text they were trained on. In almost no cases can an LLM directly harm someone, though like anything it can be used to harm one’s self. The harms of LLMs are almost universally byproducts of the ways that companies choose to create and operate them, not things that are intrinsic to the LLM itself.
If all you’ve ever known is Nestle, it’d be easy to conclude creating chocolate requires being evil child-labor-using, farmer-murdering, land-stealing capitalists. But of course chocolate can actually be made at home. It’s the scale and the profit motive that drive the harms, not the technology of chocolate bars themselves.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen any of my previous points on local open genAI models, including from the main post.
I’m not saying genAI is a weapon, I’m saying genAI has inherent risks we would need to overcome to reach our goals as anarchists.
The biggest risks, which I think are still true for most locally hosted genAI models, is that it isolates us from eachother and makes us more predictable. And this can prevent us from reaching our goals.
If you want to ignore risks, that’ss on you, just like if you were to do something thoughtless with a gun.
In almost no cases can an LLM directly harm someone, though like anything it can be used to harm one’s self.
Corporate controlled LLMs have been recorded asking people to isolate themselves from their families and kill themselves. There is no data of a local llm doing this as far as I know but there would be obvious reasons why that information would be difficult to get.
GenAi is currently in use by various militaries for the purpose of killing people
Training an “open” model like deepseek used a lot of resources and caused a lot of harm to the environment and people of those affected communities.
The point is, harm happens, so it is not a question of if. The better question I think is can we reduce our risks while using these tools?
isolates us from eachother
This is a question of how people use it, not something it encourages or forces. “Eleanor Rigby” was written 50 years before LLMs existed.
makes us more predictable
What do you mean by this?
GenAi is currently in use by various militaries for the purpose of killing people
I think there is likely a misunderstanding regarding what is GenAI and what is not.
Vision models that e.g. do facial recognition, or direct drones, are not GenAI.
The only generative AI use I could think of in a “kill chain” is Israel using it for creating lists of people to target, but that system (abhorrently and psychopathically named “Where’s Daddy”) just used LLMs to ‘prioritize’ the names that the IDF and Mossad fed into it, it didn’t actually come up with the names or intelligence. It was about speeding up their killing machine, and has nothing to do with how or what LLMs as a technology do.
There’s an entire discussion (which has been being had for decades by forensics experts and lawyers and privacy advocates) about people using/trusting computers as trusted black boxes, and this is an extension of that; plausible deniability to do the action you already intended to do via “the computer said so” as a shield.
“Eleanor Rigby” was written 50 years before LLMs existed.
Just because the problem isn’t new, doesn’t mean it isn’t accelerating. There are tons of problems that were true when Eleanor Rigby was released that are worse today.
makes us more predictable
What do you mean by this?
If we are depending on similar models, trained on similar data. And those models are publicly available because they are some level of open, to do something like let’s say, help in logistical planning. Then it might be easier to predict what our plans are. Unless we take steps to actively add unpredictability to such plans.
The more genAI is influencing our ideas, the less they are our ideas
Vision models that e.g. do facial recognition, or direct drones, are not GenAI.
The only generative AI use I could think of in a “kill chain” is Israel using it for creating lists of people to target, but that system (abhorrently and psychopathically named “Where’s Daddy”) just used LLMs to ‘prioritize’ the names that the IDF and Mossad fed into it, it didn’t actually come up with the names or intelligence. It was about speeding up their killing machine, and has nothing to do with how or what LLMs as a technology do.
The US is using more than just vision models, which is why it was such a big deal that they signed their recent contrasts with Google and OpenAI. I think with the girls school that was blown up in the US “preemptive strikes” against Iran they blamed bad intelligence on an LLM. This plus what the Israeli military is doing is proof of harm. If the Israeli military is using it, you can bet others will be soon too if they aren’t yet as well because it is a convenient way to deny responsibility, just as you say.
The more genAI is influencing our ideas, the less they are our ideas
This makes no sense to assert specifically about LLMs. Everything influences our ideas. If “influenced by external stimulus or input” == “not your ideas”, then people literally have no ideas of their own.
Just because the problem isn’t new, doesn’t mean it isn’t accelerating. There are tons of problems that were true when Eleanor Rigby was released that are worse today.
And not one of those is going to be fixed by getting rid of LLMs, nor are they the product of LLMs uniquely, so sell me on why LLMs uniquely need this outsize focus? To me, this feels like adopting the flavor du jour of liberal media faux resistance that denies individuals tools, in pursuit of some supposed moral high ground, while leaving the structural use of that tool by government in place, similar to anti-gun arguments.
This makes no sense to assert specifically about LLMs. Everything influences our ideas. If “influenced by external stimulus or input” == “not your ideas”, then people literally have no ideas of their own.
Firstly, I do think freedom allows for new spontaneous thoughts. But let’s just say no “human thought is original” for the sake of the discussion. If we know that all external stimulus influences our ideas.
Then I would rather be influenced by my community, the people I trust, and people I think have good idea to cherry pick from than from genAI, especially if I have not personally developed it.
And not one of those is going to be fixed by getting rid of LLMs, nor are they the product of LLMs uniquely,
I never said we should. I’m warning caution of use and being aware of possible risks.
If genAI gives us the confidence to make things ourselves without any help from other humans, then we might think we can function fine without the help of our communities. We might think why would I ask my friend to help me proof read this zine or ask them if this art is influential. We can extrapolate out from those examples. But the key is we are actively choosing to not include others in the work or even leisure things we do and that is isolation.
I think the nature of genAI inherently isolates people from one another.
That’s just a random thought, not something substantiated by any evidence presented.
I don’t have data or scientific journals to cite. Although I think they might exist.
This opinion comes from my experience, the experiences I’ve seen my friends have, and my logical reasoning.
Do you have any statements as to why this might not be true?
Its not up to me to justify your claim or otherwise. You made the claim, you provide the evidence.
As I stated, it’s an opinion. I’m interested in yours.
I should have said that instead of the word statement, but i was in a rush. You don’t owe me data, or anything. I just thought you were interested in sharing your views.
I’m honestly, becoming more open to genAI use. But I still do think there are risks and I think we should consider if those risks are plausible and could be solved for somehow.
Similar to how proper firearm handling can prevent shooting yourself.
A good Master reduces demand for less beating on the plantation
I love your statement. Alternative tools that are low cost and accessible to anyone are the way to build horizontal power.
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.
Yeah we’re so delusional we believe the computer is a girlfriend who can think and love us. Oh wait that’s you.
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.
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. 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.
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.
I’m suddenly concerned that db0 isn’t aiming a mass-coordinated model-training on our Indy hardware (yet) for actually independent models. We can outperform even city-sized datamines when we work together! But one thing at a time.
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.
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 am neurodivergent. I also have an invisible physical disability. Nerve damage doesn’t exactly show to a casual glance.
Don’t give me that shit! Physically disabled people can learn to do amazing things in spite of their disabilities!!! it is Ableist and stupid to say you need to pump out AI slop because you’re disabled!!! Fuck you!!!
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.
“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.
Fuck you pro AI loser! You can’t even be bothered to actually write your thoughts and I won’t bother to read them! You can suck my hard ass balls!
