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:
I am also against genAI.
I've heard many arguments for it, mainly from tankies, but also from leftist spaces and anarchists. The ideological idea seems to be that it is a way to allow everyone to have access to things they weren't skilled enough to do. Something like the "democratization" of labor.
I am obviously against that statement, mainly in 2 fronts.
First, we have skilled labor for a reason. Some people dedicated years of their life to perfect a skill or a trade, and they are trustworthy experts with experience in the matter. It would be unfair for those people if they got replaced by a sloppier version of themselves, after spending so much time and effort into their skills.
I would also not trust a machine like I would a human, because the machine has no experience and can't make decisions. We're removing the human value of a skill, while also reducing its quality, when we could promote collaboration between humans, and make them feel valued while getting a better result.
Second, AI was built on stolen labor. Even if you use a self hosted model, running on old hardware that was thrown away, using solar and wind energy, its usage is still morally wrong.
The truth is, all the current models were trained on databases of data mined without consent, in many cases to the detriment of its providers.
On top of that, even if the models are used locally (and even if they are tuned locally), the initial training happens on massive datacenters that consume lots of resources. And what you get isn't the first attempt at making a model. For every successful model out there, thousands of other models were trained and abandoned.
AI is also currently making us dumber, and multiple studies have already shown it. A lot of pro-AI people have already become dependent on it, and because of that they will defend it. Even if it would have been against their morals. It's normal, we as humans tend to get defensive in those cases. But it means a lot of pro-AI discussion in leftist spheres is driven by that.
I think we should be really careful of AI because of that. AI is like a drug, and once you become dependent, you can't easily go back. Our brains are wired to offload their thinking to AI, and once they do that, picking it back up is a big effort.
I also haven't gone into the artist rabbithole. Of course, genAI harms artists. All kinds of them. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians, etc. People are replacing human art with synthetic slop, to the detriment of artists.
Sometimes it's because they don't know better. Sometimes it's because they feel like they couldn't be able to create something without the "help" of AI. But art is not the end result, art is the process. And by using AI, you're destroying the process to end up with and end result.
I feel like the same arguments above apply to genAI usage for "art". People are replacing artists with the lower effort and lower quality versions of them, which wouldn't even be possible without stealing the art of those artists in the first place.
This comment is already long and ranty enough, and it's late at night, so I don't expect it to be very coherent. So I won't go deeper.
However, as an aside, I'll mention that I've been blanket banned before from communities, genAI related and not, by MysticMushroom, for making anti AI comments somewhere else. I have asked another mod for an unban in a non genAI related community ( !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com ). Afaik MysticMushroom unbanned me after asking, so credits for that.
Is it "unfair" to bakers that I make my own bread at home with a bread machine? What about using a calculator? Or a dishwashing machine?
Well, it's not all built on stolen labor. A lot of it is built on data that was given away freely. You also didn't really provide a reason why it would still be morally wrong.
They don't have to use massive resources, we just choose to do them that way because of capitalism. Cities use massive amounts of resources, and many of them aren't successfull on the first try. Should we stop building cities?
The rest of your post is more of a complaint about capitalism, and misunderstandings of how we choose to make AI models, not how they inherently have to be made.
The sloppers are gonna delete this. I posted something really similar earlier. Don't talk to sloppers like they're people. They're not. Their brains are rotted and they're incapable of honesty. Online they are very similar to fascists, though differences do come up in person.
Dehumanization is the tool of the enemy