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:
"AI" is a tool of the Epstein class. It's inherently hierarchical and anti worker. Antithical to anarchist movements.
Do you think calculators are a tool of the Epstein class? What about cars? What about books? What about televisions? What about power tools? What about algorithms? What about statistical analysis?
All of those things can be used for hierarchical and anti-worker actions. But I fail to see how those, or AI, are "inherently" hierarchical and anti-worker.
I don't agree with the original wording of the person you replied to, but i can do my best to explain still.
Firstly, the obvious meaning for the term "AI" here is LLM's, this makes the following points clear:
Why is this technology inherently anti-worker and hierarchical?
Anarchism, in all its forms (or at least all that i can think of on the spot), rely mainly on community, inter-personal relationships, and the union of means and ends, LLM's form an incentive to not make connections with other people, to not rely on other people's expertise, and sometimes to even doubt your own.
I'm not even giving this justice as these tools are trained to speak like a person, this has psychological implications, I'm sure you've heard the term "AI psychosis" before, this term may be medically dubious, but it does point at a real concern, this technology already isolates people, the vulnerable of us, and undermines expertise and community.
The way these models are trained, requires consuming (again, absurd) amounts of data, that can only be aquired via exploitation, alienation of labor from worker (as in no work gets properly credited, and that the LLM's are used and marketed as a replacement for actual sources of knowledge and expertise), and destruction of knowledge, as when you replace a source of knowledge, the people maintaining it may choose to stop doing so (via perceived obsolescence).
If we actually want to reduce the demand for corporate LLM's, the answer is not FOSS LLM's, as much as i love FOSS software, this technology only really drives us apart, we need to do it the tried and true method: building community, mutual aid, mutual responsibility, we need to perserve sources of knowledge and expertise, we need to keep expertise valuable, and we need trust, this requires community.
Apology for the length of this, in short: The demand for AI is a spook, go do community work.
When we get to power, how are we gonna compete with nation states who do use AI?
Out maneuvering your enemy is a proven tactic. So is being unpredictable and having something fight for.
These are some ways genAI could possibly hurt our objectives. Although, I guess there might be workarounds.
I'm sure that a lot of the Fuck_AI people have this fantasy that we'll do it with pencil and paper or something absurd like that. It's funny because a lot of the anti-AI people are hypocrites and use AI themselves when it suits them. Specifically corporate AI models because unlike us they couldn't care less, it's all just AI to them. They used them in the harassment against me to generate offensive derivatives of my avatar in order to attack me, although I've also seen them use it to generate written arguments to help them with debate and sealioning. Which is mildly amusing.
I just hope it happens before the capitalists waste the natural resources necessary for living a comfortable life
Can you explain to me how stable diffusion models running on our own server with anti-NSFW and anti-CSAM filters is an inherent tool of the Epstein class? Is it that you think all people who use AI are pedophiles? Is it that you equate using other people's intellectual property with sexually abusing children? Or are you just throwing words to try to insult people who use AI, which is, FYI. Fash-jacketing.
With A charitable interpretation I think that comment was just an off-hand insult to the rich and a way to make people think who they're "supporting". It was not meant to label users of genai as Pedos.
I hope not but you never can tell with them.