cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world/p/1758477/using-fascist-technology-to-fight-fascism-still-promotes-fascist-technology
Using fascist technology to fight fascism still promotes fascist technology.
I believe this discussion is important, just the other day I was sad about people colluding inference and training like if both were having the same carbon footprint. I am not defending Sam Altman or anyone else. But we need to look at the facts for what they're. Running a quantized local model, accepting latency and all, can make your use of LLMs as low as playing video games. I already said that in the past, and I only got downvoted. Maybe because everyone is hurt bout this technology, which is having detrimental consequences. I am not saying there aren't any problems... but I am accepting the world for what it is, as GPT4 has said ~3 years ago: confetti has left the cannon. So, we need to deal with this reality.
Fine i'll steal code the old fashioned way
What's funny about this?
It's a tool like any other. It can be used in a destructive and immoral manner or used where it works to improve the lives of people. Think about the alpha fold project and other such use cases.
Lmfao no it isn't you rube. It's the most concentrated avatar of Capital in history. It's constructed on endless desecration of art, music, poetry, literature, science, and more, all to give you shitty summaries of websites and your boss an excuse to fire you for a chatbot. Never before have the forces of Capital worked so hard to destroy the proletariat.
That's one use of neural networks we do need to react to accordingly as a populace but it's not the only use of those algorithms. I gave the example of alpha fold which has essentially solved the very hard problem of protein folding unlocking the door to developing cures for many diseases. The issue isn't the tech, the issue is in some cases how it is being used. Think of nuclear power. We could have functionally limitless and clean power or we can end life on earth. The problem isn't nuclear power, the problem is the actions of people.
Batman uses AI too (Alfred Intelligence)
Replace with him breaking a brain and you have me
These are sloppy & ugly, they're tools of cowards
My fucking company mailed me a flyer today to remind that I got access to a AI fitness trainer that is totally free just download an app to my phone. I so fucking pissed ripped in tiny fucking pieces. I fucking loath how they just blatantly assume we want use AI for everything. The very thing that if they could would replace us with it.
This is the weapon of the enemy. We do not need it. We will not use it.
-Batman, imaginary cartoon
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
-Mao Zedong, founder of the country eating everyone's lunch.
Also, what the fuck does AI even mean in this context? LLM's? Stable Diffusion Models? Yeah, they're not great, they may get more accurate, but the evidence is currently pointing to them running out of road. Their uses are limited, that's why most people don't really use them, not because they're "the weapon of the enemy".
I imagine any historic materialist seeing this meme cringing so hard. Thanks for this comment so I can feel less insane about, you know, not swallowing idealistic imaginary nonsense.
Always glad to help. And yes, the cringe was palpable and something needed to be said.
Then use it, maybe get one of those Chinese models and hack the fash into oblivion! Don't use it to generate AI slop propaganda, either in text of image form, you're just eventually signing off your writing and art skills to the machines, and especially big tech.
AI is analogous to guns... how? Just because this meme is about Batman snapping a gun in half?
As for your other point, AI means those machine learning models that keep eating up all the electricity and water and computer parts we can feed them and making places near where datacenters are built worse places to live and allowing bosses to fire creative workers because while their output may be worse, it's a lot cheaper, and encouraging their users to confide in them and being sycophantic and deliberately giving them an outsized opinion of their own abilities and whose makers are endeavouring to promote as a substitute for human connection with a worrying degree of success.
most people don't really use them
Lol. Lmao. Roflmfao. ChatGPT's monthly active user count is triple the population of the United States. People are asking LLMs for meal plans, exercise routines, recipes, write greeting cards for them, do their school essays for them because they think it's a better writer than they are, bouncing ideas off it to see if they're good (yikes!), you name it they're doing it.
Also more than half the flyers going up around my university are obviously AI generated.
The meme presupposes the usefulness of AI, which is why everyone's taking it as a given. If it isn't useful, you don't need to use normative arguments to stop people from using it, people will just naturally never find an opportunity to do so.
Also if you really can't think of any ways to use a chatbot to advance your political goals you need to think harder. It just shows a lack of adabtability.
If people who didn't know/didn't care about all the ethical issues with ChatGPT didn't find it useful, it wouldn't have 900 million weekly users.
Obviously they're useful. They still shouldn't be used. Both because they do a bad job that is difficult for their users to see as bad, and because they're 17 different kinds of unethical.
Fascists don't create, they corrupt. Technology is neither fascist nor antifascist, those labels only make sense in the context of humans.
Be thoughtful about the services you use, the money you spend, and the data you entrust to others. Do your best to understand your tools as fully as you can. Strive to help others and do no harm, in your immediate impact and in your downstream effects. Don't trust to heuristics like labeling certain technologies "fascist"; they are not and the more non-fascists there are who understand technology, the better equipped we will be to fight fascism.
I don't know man, surveillance tech seems pretty fascist to me.
There are definitely fascist technologies out there, that's why we can say don't build the fucking torment nexus.
Mass surveillance, torture devices, hostile architecture, the slanted toilet, the panopticon, those can only be used for evil.
The torment nexus isn't a discrete thing. You can't make thumbscrews without screws. Are the screws evil? If not, when does the composition of components become evil? I don't think LLMs are evil for the same reason I don't think thumbscrews are evil in and of themselves. Thumbscrews, like LLMs, lack the capacity for evil. It's the people who turn technology against their fellow humans that I hold as my enemy, not the trappings of their mischief. Remove them from the equation, and the torment nexus becomes so much harmless scrap, ready to be beaten into plowshares.
I can see the argument for local or at least open source models, but most people who use LLMs are using ChatGPT and other Big Tech LLM services, which are clearly run by fascists.
Yes, but it is very important to distinguish between LLMs, which are amoral math, and OpenAI et al, which are corporations run by fascists that offer LLM-based public surveillance / disinformation platforms. There is no technology on earth that cannot be bent to malign purpose if malicious people are inclined to do so. LLMs are just the popular useful technology du jour.
Thank you. I just wrote this in another comment:
I've been an AI researcher for 12 years now. I work primarily in climate and environment, and right now I'm using AI for super resolution of wind field predictions, to better forecast wildfire spread. Prior to this project I was using AI and remote sensing to monitor and predict wheat crop health in northern India to feed into various food security monitoring systems (e.g. FEWSNET). There are millions of AI use cases that tangibly improve the world.
At the same time, those same underlying principles of AI are being used to develop tools to better surveil people, control them, and profit off of them so the tech fascists can gain even more control. Both things can be true. It's the billionaires who are funding these massive investments that are evil. It's always the billionaires.
Steel can be used to construct buildings and can also be used to construct weapons. You wouldn't say steel is evil right?
AI is not evil. AI is being used to find cancer cures, fusion research, climate and environment research, materials science, literally every possible industry. It's also being used to control and surveil people, and profit more from every corner of life. Both are true of AI.
The part that's evil is that the people with the most money who are funding the large AI investments want to use AI to support their tech fascist desires. As usual, it's not the thing itself, it's the billionaires. It's ALWAYS the billionaires. They are the evil.
AI as a term is essentially vaporware. The ways that it's being used to describe real, useful, and frankly niche technologies, that people rightfully find good and useful, and to describe the consumer facing slop machines that swallow an entire lake just to make a shitty image of an anime girl with 3 tits, is purposeful so as to poison the well, and make discussion about the subject more difficult.
AI means, and has always meant, artificial means of doing what before computers seemed only possible with real, human intelligence. Another good way of looking at it is algorithms for problems for which it's not practical to explicitly write an algorithm to solve.
It's meant this since Turing. That's a remarkable foresight if it's "purposefully poisoning the well."
LLMs don't cure cancer. That's the kind of AI everyone refers to these days. Not ML projects.
No, but I believe machine translation is now powered mainly by LLMs, which is a damn useful application of the technology.
I was surprised to learn recently that a few of my friends pay for Claude to help with personal projects and things like that. This particular AI tech is quite new so it's surely too early to declare axiomatically that it has no uses. That sounds like an emotional reaction to me.
Nah, redstone valley is right, this meme is very clearly oriented towards generative ai. If you know enough about ai to know that ML and expert algorithms exist and that they are different from gen ai, you know enough to distinguish between an attack towards gen ai and an attack towards the whole of ML.
I've been an AI researcher for 12 years. Generative AI also has many applications that tangibly improve the world. For example, I'm using diffusion models for super resolution of surface wind fields to forecast wildfire propagation. It's not "just" generative AI that's the problem. The exact same transformers or CNNs used for Capital to try to finally triumph over Labor can also be used to do all kinds of amazing things.
My point is that the incentive structure is fucked. It's just more apparent with a powerful and widely known technology like "AI" these days.
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