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:
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.
Correct, although why you would want to use an LLM for in-place calculations is beyond me. That's the wrong tool for the job. I also think using hammers on screws is a bad idea, but I don't see how that makes hammers "a tool of the Epstein class"
Sure, but that's a capitalism problem, not an AI problem. Thats about artificial scarcity, not statistical probability calculations.
Uh wut? There are absolutely bugs. I don't know of anyone who has ever said that LLMs don't have bugs.
No, actually I don't. Please explain further
I could say the same thing about calculators, or waterwheels, or books. Do you think those things are "inherently hierarchical and anti-worker" ?
Yeah, a powerful tool used for evil goals is going to have an evil outcome. AI psychosis is not inherently a part of LLMs. That's how they are specifically built in order to make people use them more. Once again, this is a problem with capitalism.
That's not true at all. Many of them are trained on data that has been made freely available by the creator of the data.
So, like books, and online videos, and comics, and articles, and blogs, etc? So do you think those are also "inherently hierarchical and anti-worker" ?
Again, wut? Do you think books are a destruction of knowledge because they replace scrolls, or direct conversations from the writer? I feel like I really don't understand what you mean here.
Going from "this isn't comparable to a calculator/algorithm/book" to "therefore it is a tool of the Epstein class" wasn't part of my original comment, LLM's are a tool of the bourgeois because they destroy community building, and isolate people, which directly hinders building actual power.
And while you don't see why LLM's would be used in calculations, a lot of newer students in universities think they have a good reason to, i have to deal with that as a fellow student, i want you to think about the consequences of this technology: I can't really work on a problem with anyone else, if i need someone to justify a step in a formal proof, they most likely will go "gemini this, gpt that, actually i have a local model yada yada" and i really wish the local model people weren't the most annoying of the bunch, but it's probably bias on my part since people around me know my stance on FOSS, in another era, maybe i would have gotten "this theorem appears in this and that book/lecture/presentation/website", but as of now i don't get this luxury.
This is a prime example of what this technology does right now, to people who should "know better", as in studying computer science or software engineering, and a close friend tells me the same is in maths, and yes even the people studying about LLM's, so safe to say even if people knew how these work, they would "misuse" them, so not really a capitalism specific problem.
Books being destroyed is not a capitalism problem, it's a power problem, and it wouldn't disappear in an anarchist society, companies who develop LLM's want control and power, not specifically money, and they know they can get that by stealing information from the public (stealing from the commons, not as in intellect property), and making the public dependant on an alternative they control, in capitalism this means money, but only because money is power, natural consequence of this is destruction of books.
About bugs, LLM's don't have a well defined problem they solve, so you can't say "this test failed, therefore i can reverse engineer how it fails and point at a wrong instruction", you also can't say that because the math may be correct all throughout the calculation, with LLM's you don't get an incorrect answer, you get an answer you don't like, which means you need to train (or re-train) a model to get "better" parameter weights, by "better" i mean perceived to be better because you can't really comprehend the amount of weights themselves and their purpose, meaning again you can't just pick one and change its value and also know the consequences of it. So no, whatever this output you don't like is, it's not a bug, also note how i didn't have to even mentioned reproducibility in all this.
I won't elaborate on why an LLM is different to a car or power tool, because my previous explanation applies to hardware problems as well, and what i said about having a well defined problem and solution also applies, and while i really am trying to be serious and explain, i feel like you really don't by asking me to explain something trivial, i assume you didn't mean for me to take it this way and i take no offense, but i thought you should be aware of how this looks.
Take my personal experience as an example, assume i need to make some heavy calculations for a group assignment or whatever, if someone doesn't understand how i reached a specific value, i can show steps, and show i did the calculation on a calculator, if i did do something incorrect, contrast with the use of LLM's in which you are likely to get LLM output copy pasted as "reasoning", meaning you can't trust what your partner says and have to verify everything from first principals because no one is going to make the job shorter. In an actual workplace, this pits workers against each other, easy to see why, it takes no effort to make garbage for someone else to verify, obviously this will result in alienation from other workers, more than someone like me feels alienation from fellow students.
The same applies to books, articles and blogs, let's take another example from the field of software since it is what I'm familiar with: one of the main ways i improve my craft is with books, articles, blogs and videos of conferences which document how real, hard problems were solved, each of these points me at a person who labored at writing the article/blog/presentation, the people involved in the teams, the people who are inspiration to those people and so on. LLM's just don't do that, they can't* give a source, they take the problems and the solutions out of their context, which makes reasoning harder, they can't point you at "extra reading".
Also to your point about scrolls, the alternative to scrolls is something that contains the same information, just stored in a different manner, which reminds me, i don't remember when was the last time i listened to music from a CD, they, and scrolls, are, once again, not comparable to LLM's.