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:
Which legal/ethical framework are you talking about where one needs the author's consent to read public text? edit: added ethical
Training a LLM is not the same as reading a text. Please don't try to gaslight me with such an obviously flawed analogy.
Well, your argument is that that LLMs are against anarchist principles because ... the company that trained them using publicly available data didn't ask permission first. Does that sum it up? I get that in an ideal anarchist world we would expect consent to have been respected, I agree with you on that. But I also think there's a vast difference between coerced to give your labour to some random LLM company, vs them taking a digital copy directly off the internet to train their model. If digital piracy is not theft, then it's hard for me to fathom what the moral injury is here.
I feel like they might just be clinging to Intellectual Property ideas because they hate AI emotionally and desperately want to justify it. That or they are not the leftist they think they are, and lean way more liberal. I mean they do think that violation of intellectual property is equal to sharing non-consensual porn. I think that second option is more likely.
You know that stalking someone is also not very respectful? And please explain what you think is "liberal" about being against another genocide?
I think you are not the leftist you think you are if you thoughlessly use mysogynist language and desperatly try to find justifications for clear consent violations that are necessary for some toy you like to use. And again, I am not talking about a legal concept like interlectual property. Why you you keep clinging to a strawman like that? This smells a lot like you can't emotionallly accept that you are a perpetrator and are DARVOing me and artists in general here.
Disengage
Holy shit, nobody is arguing for a genocide of Jews, we are just demanding Israel stops committing genocide against Palestinians. Both sidesing genocide is really not a good look, especially when Israel is clearly the aggressor.
If not intellectual property then why intellectual property shaped though? You haven't really articulated how your version of "consent" is functionally any different from the concept of IP.
I am not both siding anything. Please do not misrepresent what I said in such a crass way. I am fully with you that Israel needs to stop their genocide of Palestinians. But asking for the involuntary displacement of an entire group of people also fulfills the definition of a genocide. Two wrongs don't make a right.
"Intellectual property" is a legal concept developed to commodify immaterial goods for the benefit of the capitalists that can appropriate them from the people those labour actually created them. This is like leftism 101. I find it really difficult to understand why that isn't obvious to someone claiming to be an anarchist.
Whoa there, tiger. It is obvious. You don't need to throw definitions at me.
Begging your pardon your majesty. But that's what it looks like from over here.
You realize that we are not solely talking about taking image and text from the web, but that LLM etc scrapers purposly circumventing anti-scraper protections through residential proxies and intentionally hiding the identities of their scraper bots? And the so called open-weight model creators like Meta and various Chinese providers are especially prone to do so? (For which I have clear evidence in my server logs by the way.)
You can't wash your responsibility of these extreme forms of intentional consent violation if you use these models. Ends don't justify the means.