Noticed some AI evangelists try with the same kind of fake centrism, that was pretty popular during the Gamergate era. In this case, they try to set up people spamming genAI slop against “fanatical anti-AI people”. But just as many loves to pretend moderates are “far-left”, as their past-Gamergate selves pretended Anita Sarkeesian demanded state censorship of sexist videogames, as they are now pretending Hasan Piker is the most radical leftist living today (there are much worse even within the content creator sphere, such as Badempanda) to illustrate the “horseshoe theory”, the table is tilted in favor of AI adoption.
tl;dr 1. I just don’t see “AI” panning out as anything but a fucking waste of time, energy, and resources. 2. I might consider AI as something to tolerate IF the “AI” techbro’s pay a “fair” amount to the copywrite owners whose material was sourced to “train” their models. Say $100,000 per picture or $300,000 per short story of text would be fair. Maybe $100 for each text “comment” collected from various sites. Plus of course ongoing licensing fees.
Using a chatbot (codebot?) for writing software is always going to be a bit frustrating because it will do a great job right up until you let your guard down and it proceeds to invent an entire system service with API (imagine Google Maps sending you down a forest service road to a building that doesn’t exist but insists you need to go to the third floor, suite #324!).
As for AI customer service, it works really well until stumbling at the same difficult problem as conventional customer service, how to handle a problem there is no existing policy for. Conventional support can do a risk/reward assessment of whether to involve someone higher up in the company. The “owner” or the person who swore this AI shit was going to be so much better and save a lot of time is incentivized to always fuck over the customer unless the perceived risk is obviously dire.
AI content is ultimately derivative slop. The funniest thing I’ve seen made by AI is a video of two cats jousting with toilet bowl brushes in barbie hot wheel cars while a typical “valley girl” rages about it being 3am and stop fighting. What made this work was the human being that thought that absurdity up. Also this clip was very short which doesn’t expose AI’s weakness of being terrible at execution and pacing. Same problem as AI and coding, short controlled snippets are amazing, but if you try to get too greedy it will crap out these weird but impressively also really boring incomprehensible fever dreams.
Last point. The people trying to sell “AI” are these dweeb super villains that have literally stolen almost every piece of human intellectual creation made in say the last 100 years. They just shoved it all into a form of holographic storage medium and have it shit out mashups of what they stole. As we learned with all the torrent lawsuits, copying is theft and should be punished; I don’t see any difference with AI.
Your point about copyright is similar to one i keep coming back to. The data centers are already a huge cost sink, especially when you consider the rate their hardware will need to be upgraded/replaced over time. If you make them pay royalties to copyright holders whose material they constantly reproduce, pay a team of people to manage that inventory of works and authors, etc… The operating cost skyrockets. I see a regulation like this as being something of a nail in the coffin for AI. But I’m also a cynic and I don’t see a fascist nation like the US siding with the little guy artists against the tech giants who paid for their election.
The most widespread “AI” propaganda is the myth that “AI” exists.
The actual problem is people who debate around the premise that “AI” is real. Whether they’re on the pro or anti side, they’re promoting disinformation from inside a propaganda bubble.
🤓☝
People “selling their book” by hook and by crook on social media is an extremelly common thing since almost the turn of the century.
I mean, just look at most crypto discussions or the talk around TSLA. from just a few years ago.
The “I’m invested in this so I want ever more suckers to put money in it so that my investment is worth more and I’ll tell random people on the Internet whatever bullshit it takes to convince them” crowd never changes, they just move around from one fashionable ponzi-like speculative investment to the next.
Its been a thing since before the internet was a thing. The “Honest American” who states theyre for other “honest Americans” and blames and shuns anyone who disagrees as “dishonest, cowardly” etc. (See “dont be a sucker” for this example)
The rational adaptation discourse is something I have seen too. I ignore it though because they never say anything interesting.
My main gripe is still those who spam the forums with comments like “I have created big applications and automated my job” without showing any proof or source code, and no one calls them out about it.
I have seen the same, for example on lobste.rs . The argument is more or less that the debate is polarized and that people should try to find a middle ground.
What is true is that polarized debates can break communities. But the problem is, debates need to be rooted in facts. If one side is just assuming unproven things, or comfortably believing pure PR, or even believing falsehood, there is no reasonable middle ground left . What should be the middle ground between a satellite engineer and a flat earther? They won’t come to an agreement.
In the case of AI and software development (as an example) this missing factfulness is the claim of large productivity improvements. It is completely unproven, and so the whole thing becomes very much a belief system.
People really going for the “center” would try to establish facts.
That is the lazy centrist alogorithm: whomever can least passionately posit their argument while blandly acknowledging other arguments is “correct.”
Benefits to this algorithm are:
a) emotional maintenance. getting upset about anything is proof you’re being emotional and not being rational.
b) limits your need to take seriously anyone who has suffered real harm (“you say you were raped tonight, but it’s hard to take you seriously when you’re acting this emotionally”)
c) encourages systemic blindness. “things are horrible” is automatically wrong because it is extreme.
d) any systemic solutions are likewise easily painted as extremist.
Podcast recommend: CitationS Needed
The argument is more or less that the debate is polarized and that people should try to find a middle ground.
This is so idiotic. No real values, just taking positions based on what positions other people take and how polarized they are.
until they can rationalize the trillions invested for - what? - yeah, it’s all bullshit.
Few things will get me from 0-150 on the anger scale in record time than a centrist telling me we have to accept incremental change, especially after watching Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani empirically prove them wrong.
Anyone claiming to be an “enlightened centrist” are either a bot or right winger who doesn’t want to be associated so openly with it.
Sadly I’ve met actual “centrists” in person. They genuinely believe that a good compromise between someone who wants the whole cake and someone who wants only half of it is to give ¾ to the first and ¼ to the second.
That’s still a moniker of still being a right winger. I’m sorry you had to suffer the insufferable, though.
Dig down on the beliefs of a genuine “centrist” and you’ll always end up in “As long as I and my mates are alright, I don’t care about the rest”, i.e. almost pure rightwing values.
Yep.
Keep seeing “Local AI has zero of the ethical concerns of corporate AI” from self-described Leftists too
Since “AI” doesn’t exist, “local AI” could mean anything. People say that image filters are “AI”. I don’t see a problem with local image filters, etc.
A major problem with wholesale support or opposition to “AI” is that “AI” doesn’t actually exist.
Well, specifically LLM-based image generation AI, and LLMs.
And almost everyone knows that’s what’s actually meant by AI, nobody’s like “the CPU players in my fighting game have AI! Evil!” cause they know it’s the older definition of the term of just simple routine loops.
I never understood that. Are they suddenly not using stolen works? I grant them that it has fewer of the ecological concerns, but it still has all of the ethical concerns (potentially more, considering deepfakes aren’t being restricted).
Are they suddenly not using stolen works?
Are you assuming that “AI” is always based on stolen works? Since “AI” doesn’t exist, there are many supposed “AI” applications that don’t use stolen work. Weather models for example…
Cool project, but you know as well as anyone else that weather models is what not what anyone is talking about here.
You know exactly what people mean when they say AI.
“Defining” terms for no reason is just onanism.
Anarchists dont recognize copyright as a moral or ethical framework.
Which I would be up with if we lived in the theoretical left-wing anarchist utopia, otherwise big corpos will just sell independent artist’s works as their own.
I don’t see it as an issue of copyright but of consent and plagiarism.
No, but we do recognize scabbing, plus lets not forget the effects AI has had on people’s mental health. I would also argue there is a moral and ethical issue with taking other people’s work without crediting that goes beyond just copyright. Particularly so when trying to profit off of it.
Lastly, to build off of my scabbing point. If we look at prior historical cases that are comparable, like the automation that sparked the Luddite movement, I think that its easy to see how anti-AI is pro-worker. AI (like industrialization) costs workers jobs, and while we live in a society that requires you to work to live, that is bad. It is not to say industrialization (or AI in this case) is inherently bad. Just simply that until society no longer works this way, it is harmful to workers. And in case it needs clarification, artists are workers.
Also there’s the whole “people should have access to the essentials of life” ethical angle.
The societies we live with the rule systems we have will totally fuck anybody who loses their job to even otherwise ethically trained and operated Machine Learning systems.
There are far fewer fully ethical ML uses possible when in a social and legal system were losing a job to AI might mean ending up living under a bridge.
for me it’s the one-two punch - built off of theft, that then puts the people it stole from out of work. but a) it’s not accurate, and b) it’s costing trillions (and jacking up the price for components, WATER AND POWER. So why are we even going further down this silly broken road…
PewDiePie tried that, his PC dedicated for the AI learning almost burned his flat down.
He’s always rubbed me the wrong way, there’s a disengenuine vibe about him
It Pewdepie, he’s dominated the YouTube scene for most of a decade and is still posting. I highly doubt anything he’s published recently has any genuine content
Obviously he’s been bought out by Big Linux.
Jokes aside the who Linux/FOSS arc he’s going through feels very genuine/stereotypical for someone who just recently “got” Linux.
So it was almost a happy story
Well, local AI trained only on data willingly provided for that purpose by its creators and in an environment where there is Universal Basic Income and good quality free Adult Education, has almost zero ethical concerns.
Of course this excludes most of the Machine Learning stuff, including all of the “AI” being pushed in this bubble (either not local or requires so much training data that it’s definitelly not the case that all data is “willingly provided for that purpose by its creators”) plus the broader societal environment we live in means that people who lose their livelihoods when replaced by even those limited purpose AIs are fucked.
local AI trained only on data willingly provided for that purpose by its creators and in an environment where there is Universal Basic Income and good quality free Adult Education, has almost zero ethical concerns.
Yeah, and living in a fantasy castle made of clouds in Imagination Land has no ethical concerns either, what’s your point?
People losing jobs to AI is also an ethical concern, not just the sourcing of the data for training AI or the dependency on 3rd parties (i.e. non-local).
One one side, that means that for some kinds of Machine Learning were the other ethical concerns do not apply, there are still ethical concerns against their use.
On the other side, if that one too was addressed, then the whole “artists are loosing their jobs” concern might become a non-issue (practicing Art as a job is generally a “have to” situation, not a “chose to”) at which point some further kinds of ML would be acceptable.
A blanket “X is bad, period!” rejection of all Machine Learning is simplistic and reductionist.
The fake centrists and progressives are thick on Reddit. It was funny watching them try to throw mud on Platner.
Might want to wait until he actually takes office before taking a victory lap on that one.
Maybe this time it’ll be worth ignoring all of the giant red flags. I honestly hope it is.
The only thing weirder than people who obsessively hate dude is the people who obsessively pretend there’s nothing wrong with dude.
I don’t pretend there’s not anything wrong with him. But he’s not a stinking Republican or a diet MAGA like Fetterman, at least not yet. Besides, it may be tough to beat Collins.
Can’t speak to what you do or do not pretend, but I can say that this site has a sizeable contingent of people who would lose their shit (before the primary) if you dared to bring up legitimate concerns.
