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:
How can anything a person uses to express meaning not be art? This is the example I always go to:
It's blatantly generated. Those kids aren't stacked plausibly. It has that font. The cardboard bouncer becomes a real boy halfway down. And yet, it is visually conveying a complex idea, as surely as if you scribbled it by hand. Someone envisioned this metaphor and put it in front of your eyeballs. An opinion has been smuggled from their brain to yours. Then somehow, in our boundless creativity, people confidently assert they've grasped the one true nature of art, and nuh uh that doesn't count.
I've had people insist any stick figure would count, but this photorealistic depiction of the same concept doesn't. Like "intent" is a magical property imbued by the little bones in the wrist. Every moment of your lived experience led you here, so whatever you draw is True Art. When pressed about whether that applies to sweatshop animators' on-model traces of Homer Simpson's face, they suddenly can't agree with each other.
I've had people insist a grenade dipped in paint would contain the essence of my artistic message, whatever that happened to be. Even if I had to do it a couple times to pick the shredded canvas I like best. The way I pulled the pin that time must have been an exact sequence of microscopic decisions to precisely control the shrapnel, unlike trying different seeds, which is a slot machine.
I've had people insist a prompt itself is art, but only the prompt. Obviously a human wrote it with a clear picture in mind. They were trying to distill that mental image with such clarity that even an idiot robot would get it. But if the robot produces a render matching that description to the writer's satisfaction, well that's complete coincidence. Sure it captures the vibe they wanted, better than however many mechanically-similar examples, but nahhh, there's no way that curation reflects their inexpressible desires.
I've had people insist this political cartoon about unreliable age restrictions lacks meaning. Even though they understood it was a political cartoon about unreliable age restrictions. I put it to you that if an image is about something... that is its meaning.
I've about had it with people insisting silly things about what's right in front of them.