The internet is also a control tool, better get off now - WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE?

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.

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.

AI is a tool, it can be used without contributing to corporate profits via local models.

I would rather people have the opportunity to use said tool, than to hand it fully over to the ruling class who are already wielding it against us.

There are issues with corporate usage and the environmental damages of all these datacentres popping up all over the globe. That is not an issue with AI itself, but with capitalism and authoritarianism.

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.

Some people think anarchism is doing whatever you want with no regard for others capitalists.

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.

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.

“AI” is a tool of the Epstein class. It’s inherently hierarchical and anti worker. Antithical to anarchist movements.

Can you explain to me how stable diffusion models running on our own server with anti-NSFW and anti-CSAM filters is an inherent tool of the Epstein class? Is it that you think all people who use AI are pedophiles? Is it that you equate using other people's intellectual property with sexually abusing children? Or are you just throwing words to try to insult people who use AI, which is, FYI. Fash-jacketing.

Its not art. Its an image without art, like a pie chart generated with Microsoft office. That's fine. Sometimes you want a pie chart or a tits octopus but aren't willing to bug an artist about it. 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’ll also note you have zero comment on any of my corrections of your misunderstandings about LLMs, so I’ll go ahead and move on now.

It's because like the majority of anti-AI people, the "misunderstanding" is largely intentional. To get you to debate them. Hoping they can "win" and when they can't win through their arguments because it's all bullshit they just knock over the chess pieces and declare victory. Which is what this liberal chud is doing right now.

Democratizing tools seems important to creating lasting horizontal power structures.

Open source AI reduces demand for corporate AI

When we get to power, how are we gonna compete with nation states who do use 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'm sure that a lot of the Fuck_AI people have this fantasy that we'll do it with pencil and paper or something absurd like that.
It's funny because a lot of the anti-AI people are hypocrites and use AI themselves when it suits them. Specifically corporate AI models because unlike us they couldn't care less, it's all just AI to them. They used them in the harassment against me to generate offensive derivatives of my avatar in order to attack me, although I've also seen them use it to generate written arguments to help them with debate and sealioning. Which is mildly amusing.

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?

Never, not once on Lemmy, have I convinced a flat anti-AI user to have any nuance regarding local genAI.

And not from a lack of trying. Not even shooting down every ethical or technical issue.

I hate to sound so cynical, but I think the topic is just too polarizing. Which is understandable, given how awful mass/corporate AI is. Its not something debating or presentation is going to break through.

A ton of Fediverse users are going to be unconditionally anti-GenAI. A few will like their self hosting or dev helpers.

The is fine.

Real AI Bros won't use the Fediverse anyway, so we don't have to worry about them, but I think other AI political sects will just have to learn to coexist.

Even within instances, IMO. I dont want to misspeak for another instance, but it seems like db0 can house the spectrum.

I just hope it happens before the capitalists waste the natural resources necessary for living a comfortable life

I love your statement. Alternative tools that are low cost and accessible to anyone are the way to build horizontal power.

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.

Lol

I hate to sound so cynical, but I think the topic is just too polarizing.

Totally agree with you. I actually have Lemmings that follow me around to downvote every single comment I make and talk shit any chance they can, just because I dare to use AI. That's how lame they are and how polarizing the subject is. No amount of talking to them helps. The extremists on here are so fixed in wilding zone, that they just don't want to stop until they see actual blood.

Even though like someone else said a few comments up, "Open source AI reduces demand for corporate AI," the haters just don't want to hear it.

In this very thread there was a guy saying we are fascists because we use AI and that we should die. Another guy said, "Fuck AI. The tool of the tech fascists has no place in freedom from tyranny." When someone is like that, there is no reasoning. He got banned for is comments, but his account was only 17 minutes old when he made those comments. So he's probably waiting to use a new username right now. lol

My background is that I am a PhD student in STEM. 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:

1. 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, the tendency of AI systems to pretend to be human 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.
2. 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.
3. 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).
4. 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. ((1) is the most novel IMO.) Capitalists hire and/or bribe actual proletarians to simply repeat capitalist talking points.
2. The academic journal complex.
3. Classical bot farms and human trolling operations.
4. 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:

1. This crisis predates AI.
2. It is caused by capitalism, specifically the gradual commercialization of previously free or low-cost activities and spaces.
3. 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. 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. (Anecdotally, as an autistic person, verbal language has been the key to my ability to survive for this long. Frankly, I simply lack a bunch of social skills that I can make up for by using language to read books and watch videos and just...not have to spend as much energy on being a social animal.)
• 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 with it as an assertion of their rightful disgust at capitalists' excesses. 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 😆

Meta scraped Anna's archive

Corporation

Right, but Meta's foundational llm is what most "open" LLMs are based on.

If you are running an open model today, you are most likely using this data set.

And it's not that they used annas or pirated media, I don't care about copyright, I use annas all the time. This thing that I think is important is that the wroks were used in such a way that you can not cite it, you can not attribute where an idea came from. I do know there is some interesting research in this area but at the moment we can't ask an llm when if is using the ideas of others or where exactly those ideas came from.

You can be iterating on top of something an llm wrote not realizing that the book you are writing is just some summary of something else.

You can ignore that, but it should atleast be recognized.

Do you have the same seething hatred for computer vision?

I don't actually have a "seething hatred" for genAI. I just think it is the antithesis of what I am trying to accomplish, wich is freedom.

Atleast, I think that is true for the current iteration of genAI. I'm open to change however.

The whisper model is an LLM. Its compact, and has a very specific purpose - to identify spoken audio, take spoken audio and transcribe, and translate spoken audio.

I do think the transcription that the whisper models can do is impressive.

If you needed to understand what someone is saying, and weren't able to ask them then I agree it makes sense to use.

I think it is a more interesting question when we add a translation into the mix from a different language. Sure, there might be times when you need to understand what's being said in a different language immediately. But if you do have the time and ability to find someone that can translate, or even learn the language yourself. Then that seems like a much better method of building trust, solidarity, and understanding between actual people.

Do you host your models anywhere, or have documentation on the methods you used?

Have you ever considered writing theory?

I 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.

I'm actually a supporter of gun control.

I don't know if you quite realize how you sound. Chuds exist. Chuds with guns are a problem. This does not mean "we should ban guns" as chuds don't care about bans. Your ban will disarm an honest, marginalized person to be an easier chud target.

Well now, if chuds are the problem, why not ban them? That probably involves prison or some really stringent background checks.

But I'm sure you wouldn't be in favor of those either.

The simplest way is to ban guns and, put massive penalties on breaking those rules.

Honestl, y as far as ai goes. I'm don't think there is any ethical LLM usage.

Thank you, this is helpful

They aren't really general purpose, so no.

Though I'm working on a new classification model that may be good for more general use, so maybe that one I will.

As far as the methods, these are readily available - Build A Large Language Model From Scratch covers it pretty well. There's another for a reasoning model from scratch, but its more reasoning from scratch and starts with a base model.

But if you do have the time and ability to find someone that can translate, or even learn the language yourself. Then that seems like a much better method of building trust, solidarity, and understanding between actual people.

I speak a little bit of a good number of languages. The few that I'm pretty good at, I can still have trouble discerning especially with some dialects. So personally I find translation helpful still, despite having learned the language.

That said, its one of the few I use that are made by others, usually to transcribe something I recorded on the go. I work from home 95% of the time though, so its pretty rare.

Edit: I originally wrote a big long comment in response to this. I notice that you've been getting dogpiled for your opinions on art. That is bad and I support your right to express your opinions and tastes. So I spoilered the comment so you don't see this massive wall of text because I don't want to pile on, but I do want to have a critical discussion. I don't know...maybe wait until the people have stopped dogpiling you before you unspoiler the original comment? Hope you're doing okay.

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 😆

Right, but Meta's foundational llm is what most "open" LLMs are based on.

I don't think thats true, I think qwen (alibaba) or mistral would take that seat. Not that I think alibaba is some paragon of openness or something, just that I don't think its Meta.

Again though, that has nothing to do with the technology itself.

ChatGPT popularized the assistant model, does that mean any assistant ever would somehow be tainted by the existence of chatgpt? Even for something built ground-up?

That seems to me like blaming technology for the problems of corporations.

Thats the problem I have with the "hard anti-ai" folks. The blame is in the wrong spot. AI is just the current vehicle for what I can only consider malice to the general population, not the cause.

Be anti-datacenter. Protest against construction, speak out at town meetings, take direct action - all valid, appropriate, and fully has my support. We don't have anything close to anarchism right now, and as ive said in other places many times before - take all avenues (mentioned in the context of voting and similar things, but its a universal thought).

To me that is in no way "fighting AI". Its fighting against the corporation-sponsored destruction of our communities, local habitats, and the environment.

I just think the blame should be in the right place - capitalism.

This thing that I think is important is that the wroks were used in such a way that you can not cite it, you can not attribute where an idea came from.

Where that only gets complex is where a single response is formed from 5 or 7 or 20 different sources.

That said, its important to point out that not all llm's are about generating text, images, or video. I think that also gets lost on a lot of folks.

You'll get your gun control when the chuds are mad because the trans girls are armed too. Its how this always works in your spineless liberal government. Gun Control in California really amped up from panic about the Black Panthers. It helped get Reagan into Office, after all.

Which I'm sure is totally okay by you, and you have no need to deconstruct. 😅

Do you use spellcheck? Do you use speech to text? Congrats, you're using an LLM, without knowing-consent. Any of your newsfeeds including most social media (except here and a few other holdouts)...

I don't envy you. The spaces you know and love are being fed to this... Piece of garbage tech that requires DEEP literacy to touch safely. And there's nothing any of us can do about it, because capitalism says "stonk holders" are who matters, not stake holders.

And you have nothing to come back with except, "them's the brakes." Your government will let you march in a circle where nobody has to see you or hear you if they don't want. And you'll still be logged by every Flock Camera along the way, flagged in a Palantir database as a potential "problem", and soon, that can integrate with how your Facebook feed changes!

I would rather die than live there with you. Fortunately, I have another option. I'm mad I can't bring you with me, but that wasn't up to me. It was up to you.

Ima be over here generating ai-tracking-adversarial images for t-shirts, breaking applicant tracking systems with optimization, and poisoning deviantart images so the artist can post THAT and the image hurts any model trained on them.

When you're ready to respect how cyberpunk dystopian we already are instead of pretending you can vote it away, you can join us in the good fight.

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.

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.”

Never, not once on Lemmy, have I convinced a flat anti-AI user to have any nuance regarding local genAI.

That's not really surprising to me since these people resorted to literal harassment campaigns when I began banning them from communities I mod simply because I didn't want to just sit and watch them suppress my community's reach.

They're not the kind of people that will listen to reason or logic. They are the kind of people who have strong opinions and who want their opinions to be facts. I wrote a nice write up on it and people harassed me for it but it essentially called out that they will use facts when not applicable, make shit up, or resort to ad-hominems and ableism to uphold their own opinions as fact.

The is fine.

If it was as simple as having differing opinions and agreeing to disagree. Or even not, just having differing opinions I would agree with that. I couldn't care less what their opinions are. What I do care about is attacks on me and my communities. Straight up harassment, some of which happened earlier today.
That's never going to be okay.

Do you think calculators are a tool of the Epstein class? What about cars? What about books? What about televisions? What about power tools? What about algorithms? What about statistical analysis?

All of those things can be used for hierarchical and anti-worker actions. But I fail to see how those, or AI, are "inherently" hierarchical and anti-worker.

It's funny that they say we're fascist for using open-source AI models, yet they have no issue with transphobic harassment, rape threats, and doxxing when the person in question uses AI. Tactics straight out of the fascist playbook. It's hypocritical.

Uh, what math? There are already good things coming out of it, so I'm not sure how math can show that.

LLMs are fundamentally fascist tech that serve to poison the information ecosystem and erode people's capacity for critical thought.

I might have missed most of it, was busy today.

Remember, I thought you were a fascist for banning me when I said anti-fascist things. But maybe it was just bad luck or a misunderstanding?

I'm going to remove that tag I put on you. I might have jumped the gun. We will see.

That's a fair point. But some tools are inherently dangerous. I think it is good to understand risks.

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.

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.

Out maneuvering your enemy is a proven tactic. So is being unpredictable and having something fight for.

These are some ways genAI could possibly hurt our objectives. Although, I guess there might be workarounds.

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.