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:
All of your responses here are either wrong, or keep side-stepping my points: Yes, LLMs can give sources, and often do. Yes, people do shitty things with LLMs, but how is that inherent to the LLM? Yes, LLMs don't have a well-defined problem, and can't do direct calculations, that's not what they are for.
I still fail to see how any of that makes LLM's inherently bad. The things you blame LLM's for are social problems, or capitalism problems, or something similar. I don't see you blaming other tools for the problems they create when they are mis-used.
If LLM's don't have a well-defined problem to solve, how does one misuse it, if they are not for "direct calculations" you keep talking about, what are LLM's for?
Also there is a point to make that if a tool is mostly "misused" then it is a bad tool, though I'm not sure it applies since you first need to define misuse.
I've given you a few problems that aren't capitalism specific, I'm not going to recount them, if i was more rude I'd suggest getting an LLM to fetch a few bullet points, but it's more healthy to just take a few more minutes to re-read what i just took time out of my day for you all to read.
And the reason you don't see me blaming other tools is just because this was your only interaction with me, I'm learning software engineering, because i like the subject, and in software almost all we do is complain about tools, the documentation for said tools, the setup required to use a tool and the like, critiquing work is part of what makes an engineer, that's how we get better, usually though, i don't need to argue that something is not even a tool.
The neat part of a screwdriver is that i can say: "this is a screwdriver, it drives screws", and mean it, because there are implications if it doesn't, like where it will probably be broken, and what needs fixing.
They are for statistical analysis and probabilistic modeling. They give general responses, based on statistical inference.
It's always amazing to me when people accuse me of doing what they themselves are doing. I read what you wrote, but you aparently didn't read what I wrote. I never claimed that you only gave capitalism specific problems. I'm not even sure where you got that from.
I don't understand what you mean by this. I explicitly pointed out tools: scrolls, waterwheels, hammers, etc as examples of tools that can be misused to be anti-worker, and hierarchical, but aren't inherently so. Are you saying that you do think that they are "inherently anti-worker and hierarchical" ?
Please explain it to me, because I don't see how that can be true.