this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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Anarchism

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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:

Why Your AI Is a Terrible Anarchist

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[–] dubs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 hours ago

Your strawman arguments bore me. No you muppet, I KNOW humans can spread misinformation, and LLMs make it so that it’s 1000x easier, and allow corporations to do so through their product without any accountability.

What strawmen? I'm just pointing out how your arguments against LLMs aren't unique to them, and can be used by humans, and other tools, as well. Do you think Zines, Newspapers, Podcasts are bad? because they make it easier for corporations to spread misinformattions 1000x easier without any accountability.

Flat out no they dont. They use electricity to make pictures in the style of human art. Because all they can do is copy the effort of humans that have unwillingly been used as training data.

We have a word for "pictures in the style of human art." We call it: Art.

I don't see how machines making art is different from humans making art. If you can't tell which one is done by a machine, and which one is done by a human, is it any less "art" ?

Because all they can do is copy the effort of humans that have unwillingly been used as training data.

Once again, that's not inherent to LLMs. That's how some of them were chosen to be built, but many of them are built with data that was willingly given to be trained on. If a human learned to create art by copying stuff that other humans didn't permit them to copy, do you think they can't create art?

Yes, your smartest friends aren’t throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, theyre using their combined knowledge and experience to discern an accurate answer to a problem and if they don’t have the answers they can use that knowledge to find the answer efficiently. LLMs will guess the right words to say, then tell you they have the answer but immediately fall back the second its told that the answer was wrong.

...theyre using their combined knowledge and experience to discern an accurate answer to a problem and if they don’t have the answers they can use that knowledge to find the answer efficiently...

That sounds an awful lot like probabilistic modeling.

LLMs will guess the right words to say, then tell you they have the answer but immediately fall back the second its told that the answer was wrong.

Many humans do this too.

LLMs can’t do this. Yes, you are correct, and that is entirely my point. Why do you have one standard for humans, and another for LLMs? It seems to me that you should judge them by the same standard.

They are neither cheap nor accurate, they can merely use their training data to mimic human output.

They are cheap. I've used them plenty to do these things, and it cost me much less than a human. Humans are also not accurate.

These things all require humans that have trained to use these tools to perform their task accurately.

And LLMs require "humans that have trained to use these tools to perform their task accurately." How are those tools any different?

I’m done with you, keep shilling for corporations to carry on ruining the planet for the sake of profits, politicians and the richest people alive all you like.

When did I ever do that? Can you point to a single instance? I never supported corporations, nor environmental destruction, nor politicians, nor the rich. I'm generally against all of those.

You seem angry about problems in our society, angers that I share: Wealth disparity, elite non-accountability, workers being mistreated, the rich and powerful leeching from society, etc. But I don't see how LLMs are the cause of any of those. All of these things exist because of capitalism, imperialism, corruption, etc.