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:
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.