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:
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.