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:
It’s a neural network man it’s just a computer.
Don’t take this as a slight because I know I type like I’m mad when I’m being serious but this conversation immediately derailed itself by not understanding what “AI” is. It’s just a neural network- we’ve had them forever. OpenAI and Google and probably a handful of others found out how to efficiently process a massive neural network through decades of research and now we have LLMs. There is nothing wrong with LLMs. There is plenty wrong with what corporations are doing with it. Corporations are burning the planet to chase this new gold rush they’ve invented. The individuals who are also using the technology are not burning the planet by using it. It literally does not burn any more or less of the rainforests if I run or train local models. The alternative is I play videogames that also require beefy graphics cards.
The problem is not the computer, it is the incentive structure around the computer that rewards corporations for fucking the planet. You can have AI in an anarchist utopia, but it would be doing actual work, accelerating medical research, instead of answering search engine queries and making non-consentual deep-fake porn.
As long as this incentive structure stays, corporations fuck the planet. LLMs was just one of a never-ending series of gold-rushes that will continue to happen as long as they have permission to molest society.