I use arch btw

Credibly accused of being a fascist, turbolib, commie, anarchist, child, boomer, pointlessly pedantic, imperialist to my very core, zionist, a Russian psychological warfare operative, and db0’s sockpuppet.

Pronouns are she/her.

Vegan for the iron deficiency.

  • 49 Posts
  • 1.88K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle










  • My arthritis is playing up, if I come across as terse forgive me.

    Technological development isn’t intrinsically harmful though, and that includes so-called “AI”. It’s the ways in which capitalism exploits new (and old) technologies that is harmful, because of the way capitalists use those technologies to drive down labor costs and eliminate jobs.

    I don’t want to argue a strawman position (i.e. that technological development is intrinsically harmful) but I do adopt the position that certain technologies lend themselves more readily to good, and conversely bad, ends. I think this is extremely obvious and won’t bother explaining further unless asked.

    In the field of so called AI I will admit that the underlying technology, the transformer model, is freaking awesome. Huge step forward, unlocked giant leaps in computer vision among many other things. The chatbots and diffusion algorithims? not so much, genuinely I struggle to think of positive social impacts. Most people give me are based on fundamental misunderstandings of how they are made and what they do, e.g. they are an appalling way to learn a topic or improve your writing (see semantic ablation if you need that last one explained https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/semantic_ablation_ai_writing/).

    Mass manufacturing anti-information not only misleads people but also buries real information in a tide of slop. They are fundamentally designed to seem plausible, aka to deceive a user that information/communication/language/art is happening when it is not.

    There are many open source models available.

    This is a popular refrain and it based on a misunderstanding of what they are. They are open weight models, the source (the information used to make them) is not shipped. They are more like shareware. In theory you could tweak them, like you could go to neuron 65423455 and tweak the weight but as the models are by nature inscrutable this is not a useful exercise. You cannot study what training went in, analyses sources for bias, replicate the creation, or anything else a truly open source model would be, you can simply run the finished product.

    Hobbyists and anarchists can deploy a locally hosted AI to work against capitalism, with none of the downsides. It’s perfectly possible to use AI tools ethically and responsibly.

    Can you? The technology is fundamentally nondeterministic, impossible to analyse, extremely convincing which makes disinfo/bullshit (in the Frankfurt sense) much more dangerous. Further because of the compute required to train them and the lack of source these models rapidly become outdated and of diminishing use. I think capital is better undermined by building solidarity, sabotaging these machines/their training, and making sure you retain your ability to operate without tools created by them.

    But folks aren’t fighting against them by complaining to us, they are instead directing their energy to fighting with an anarchist instance which is dedicated to fighting against capitalism, including corporate abuses of “AI” tools.

    I don’t think anyone is trying to harm the instance, simply convince people. Are people ddosing you guys? doxing people? If you believe someone is doing something harmful you basically have a moral duty to try and convince people don’t you?

    Are we responsible for any of the harms associated with corporate AI? No. And we have never “promoted” AI, at most, we have just defended the way in which we use it, because it isn’t harmful in that context. And yet…

    The horde is interesting but I do think that it is dependant on capital as outlined above, and that in general using these things devalues language/art/humanity and harms your brain.

    In terms of relative harms, the anti-GenAI crowd on lemmy has done way more actual harm than anyone on this server has by posting an AI image.

    There are many devoted leftist that are against this stuff, there are many horrible techbro types that love it. It is not reasonable to smear a position based on the worst people that hold it.




  • This doesn’t engage with the point at all. There are places and times to fight particular battles.

    fwiw i think slop machines are boardline useless and largely culturally harmful but even if they worked well. Like if extruded images were worth looking at and chatbots were reliable for things other than lie and cause psychosis then promoting them at this stage would be harmful.

    Capital controls them, it is intrinsic to the approach that massive amounts of hardware and energy are needed to create them, as well as input data and unpleasant human labour. They will be used to crush labour, making revolutionary action harder, and atrophying skills and becoming dependant on them is placing yourself at the mercy of silicon valley freaks.

    Resisting further degration of working conditions and bargaining power through imperfect means is a good tactic. Disney or whatever gets way more power from being able to fire all the writers, animators, and actors than keeping control of some fucking cartoon for another few years.





  • What is the point of this remark? It seems overly literal. The post isn’t saying that some point is carved into the stuff of the universe, nobody thinks if you get a powerful enough microscope you’ll see “make art and fornicate” written in little wiggling molecular strands. We’re all raised in the same postmodern world lol.

    There is subtext to all human communication, in this case the subtext is “Inasmuch as humans find reasons for existing beyond simply a biological aversion to suicide the outlined reasons are not satisfactory. Nonetheless society is hostile to acting out other goals, this is a problem.”

    So why make the remark? Do you think people don’t know that there is no cosmic purpose? Do you want to stand out as having been exposed to ideas from nihilism and absurdism? What do you add?