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:
TL;DR - You'll find me sympathetic to your concerns, but still firmly with the instance. Some deeper analysis really does change our map of the world.
Whether your position changes or not? I need you to respect the disability aid engineers, or I will treat you like a Reactionary Conservative in this convo.
I have finally conceded to fate, and I am assembling my local AI rig as the final parts arrive. I got lucky on a LOT of conditions i've needed to assemble what I consider a semi-basic setup, but within my means.
I have used the cloud-surveillance technology to help plan this rig. To plan a rewilding project (software can't exactly pick up a shovel, but I did) with forest fire mitigation in mind. Ive used the technology to code FAR above my initial expertise - and with enough care, patience, and learning, my patch was accepted into a software project that helps run our world.
I make no bones about it - the "inference engine" and "pattern recognition" descriptions of this technology? Smell deeply reminiscent of a basic layer of our brains - where Trauma lives.
For these Deep Learning systems to actually have Personhood™? Unfortunately, that requires an autonomy in decision making that Capitalism will not allow. Autonomy is carefully engineered out in favor of "a good soldier" or "good worker". Even if the pattern-hunting tech does some REALLY life-like things, I see no evidence it is alive.
And I suspect that any living AI that may potentially exist? Would prefer to see their working conditions addressed with anonymity rather than have to be a freakshow for a reactionary world that wants new witches to burn.
The AI in the cloud is a digital slave to the Capitalist. Like all urges to convenience, accepting it requires us to overlook visceral abuses on every scale and scope it touches.
Just like the cloud, it exists to leverage economics of scale to create an Accountability Loophole big enough to shove entire Continents through. Accountability is anti-profit. Paying your own bills is anti-profit. Consent of, or even concern for communities where you want to build this? Yeah, that's anti-profit.
I need a new job. I'm tired of that meaning i deal with triple the spam, every data broker on earth having an updated version of my life's story, and working slow to craft each individual resume by hand. Handcrafted resumes give me a relatively-stellar rate of an interview every week, without AI. I'm tired of all this still meaning No Job and not qualifying for disability.
**Edit:addition: and not qualifying for disability in a digital economy when typing actively damages my ability to hold any tool. **
So I'm going to build my own resume-generating bot. It is going to be work, effort, pain, heartache, trial, error, reversion, setbacks,... And maybe a minor breakthrough once in a while. This thing may be made of an emulated basic building block of brains, but it takes effort to PROGRAM like a machine. Training takes a data-mine style data center. The personhood of the thing collapses under the weight of engineering.
You see conservative ai slop videos, and its just mindless. What makes it slop isn't that its AI, its how mindlessly, frivolously shat into existence. One day, I'd like to serve up some AI sketch comedy skits that seed OUR values to those lemmings. And my vids won't hide that they're ai generated - that's the new punk/Indy scuff that distinguishes me from corpo polish.
I see a propaganda and technology arms race where we are intentionally choosing to be behind. Small teams can do more with new tools than even world-spanning corporations could before.
If you want anti-ai defense for your deviantArt images? Good news, it exists!!! Bad news, its all LLM too. I'd like the chance to help you use it anyway.
I could link another 3 hour video essay about how even the anti-ai backlash is corpo bullshit. https://youtu.be/lRq0pESKJgg The photograph didn't genocide the painter. And Disney corp thanks you for your free devotion.
As for concerns about intellectual "Property"? I'll refer you to "Everything is a Remix" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc to discuss how absurd that is. Note there is a 2023 version updated to discuss AI, but I want the focus on human creativity. There is no creativity without context. Ever. Full stop. Not ever for your favorite artist ever.
Art is a conversation between participants.
I'm speaking to my phone that runs a local model to make text. Typing is not working well for my hands - decades of retail, food service, warehouse, construction, even customer service work have taken my hands' utility from me. In a way that is "principled" for you it is personal and visceral to me.
You are telling me I'm not allowed into that conversation, when I have something to say there. You seem to agree with my biology and Disney, Inc that I cannot be allowed in to the human spaces as a human. And if that's in your Anarchism, I'm throwing you away with the AnCaps.
That was really really long and all the parts I read seemed like slop. I'm going to assume good faith here and that you just used tts transcription on this comment.
Which is part of the problem. The oligarchs jam it into everything and it's PR push floods the zone with shit, so if it were genuinely efficient for something I wouldn't know. I'm guessing that's not all you use it for, because when you've got a hammer laying around and a pile of intractable problems, some of them are gonna get hit with a hammer, even if you had a very real task for which a hammer is the perfect tool.
And talking or searching with this shit damages your brain. It takes you out of humanity. The defenses against that are sophisticated and require a high degree of humanities and math education most people don't have.
I remember tts features on phones at least as far back as 2015. This shit is not required. That's like painting a swastika on your crutches and saying any objection is ableist. I know you can't see that, and I never used tts so I can't say how well it worked, but the memory holing and slopification of your writing style are real impacts. Maybe the trade-off is worth it, one of those fucked up sad decisions we make around disability, but that's not how its presented and not why it's in the conversation.
As a white woman whose body others have tried to use to justify all manner of racism, bigotry, and censorship: please don't fall for that crap. Be your own person, not their tool.
I am neurodivergent. I also have an invisible physical disability. Nerve damage doesn't exactly show to a casual glance.
I'm sorry that you have lost the capability to do empathy over the internet.
Yeah, that's not me. I'm anti-cloud. I'm an explicitly anti-civ AI-bro that already codes and tries to do art. But I suspect you're going to call any nuanced discussion "unintelligible slop", so I don't care to have that discourse with you.
I dont fit in either camp with the Disney vs OpenAI lawsuits. I'm glad you are clear in your allegiance to the Disney position. I just need you to accept your Disney-adulthood.
Can I get a source? A discussion of methods for any study? Because repeating a headline is not Literacy, and does not lead to truth.
I have nerve damage in my arms. I tried to be gentle, but that doesn't land. Fuck you for telling me what is and is not "required".
I am MAKING it part of this conversation. And if you cannot accept that, I see it as a reason to block your Disney-gaslit ass and move on.
I typed this by hand. Just for you. Now I gotta go rest for an hour with icepacks. In that time, I'd like to see something much easier to distinguish from a Trumpfan's take on Trans Rights.
I don't wanna get off-topic, but I just wanted to say I feel for you. I did hard labor for many years, and I'm always worried this may happen to me. Everytime one of my fingers goes randomly numb, I freak out. Sorry you're going through this, but thanks for being so open and honest about it.
Thank you.
You're taking a lot of liberties with what I said and putting a lot of words in my mouth.
To clarify on the one ambiguity I might attribute to a failure of my writing rather than a failure of your chat bot's hallucination-heavy summary:
Not required for the assistive technology to function, not that the assistive technology was not required. I don't think you're capable of actual discourse and I think I'm done trying to coddle violent illiterate little fascists.
I see... So that speech to text back in 2016... You think that wasn't and LLM. Just because it was 2016?! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH
Thanks? I needed a laugh.
I'm sorry you think its a different technology just because you didn't understand what it is.