cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/[email protected]/p/1758477/using-fascist-technology-to-fight-fascism-still-promotes-fascist-technology
Using fascist technology to fight fascism still promotes fascist technology.
Nah, change with the times or get left behind.
I’m not afraid, give me those yummy downvotes.
Every AI-forward dev I know is worse at their job than the ones who don’t like it. They all think they’re doing something smart, but their output sucks and they end up being deadweight that people who actually think and work have to carry. Maybe its not that way everywhere, but it is undeniably the reality at my employer.
Yeah, could very well be. The “do everything with AI” idea is a circlejerk, too. (Just in very different spaces from this one)
On my project right now, I’m doing everything by hand. It just seems unlikely hallucinate-and-cull would be any faster at producing useful and well-architected networking logic. On the other hand, when it comes time to write a UI, spinning something up is probably worth it.
I believe this discussion is important, just the other day I was sad about people colluding inference and training like if both were having the same carbon footprint. I am not defending Sam Altman or anyone else. But we need to look at the facts for what they’re. Running a quantized local model, accepting latency and all, can make your use of LLMs as low as playing video games. I already said that in the past, and I only got downvoted. Maybe because everyone is hurt bout this technology, which is having detrimental consequences. I am not saying there aren’t any problems… but I am accepting the world for what it is, as GPT4 has said ~3 years ago: confetti has left the cannon.
So, we need to deal with this reality. The training done on data like open source code, or even copyrighted materials, will always be a debt.
Just like colonialism. And yet, we are not hating each other for “simple” stuff like eating chocolate or drinking coffee which is most often than not unethically sourced. OR the minerals that make our electronic devices…
Again, it’s not that I am vouching to ignore the issues. But I rather have us take the conversation as a debate or dilemma. Not just start attacking one another.
This all seems like that caricature of a vegan that hates the vegetarians for eating some cheese.
Look at the common ground. Here, on lemmy, more often than anywhere else, we have a big chunk of values and ethics in common.
Every time someone fires a confetti cannon I have to stay one or two hours longer after closing and clean that shit up. Every piece of it.
I do not want It everywhere and it can be a hazard If it goes in the wrong places.
Fighting local models is playing right into enshittification, though.
They WANT people to be scared of “AI.” They want people to keep talking about it as this existential anthropomorphized danger, not a tool theyve enshittified.
Because the thing that keeps Altman/Modi up at night is the proliferation of trifty, dirt cheap open weights models. Ones presented as tools, not intelligence. And every bit people rail against them is more ammunition to regulate those open models away, so they have a monopoly.
I was just talking about confetti. I only fight drunks. Don’t care what everybody does on their computer at home.
this is cap. i will continue to use chinese ai and benefit from it. this sounds like blue maga panic lol
What’s funny about this?
Absolutely nothing. Just more crybabies out of their pens, bawling about what they can’t possibly comprehend.
It’s a tool like any other. It can be used in a destructive and immoral manner or used where it works to improve the lives of people. Think about the alpha fold project and other such use cases.
LLMs existed before the AI craze. Sure, they’re useful in certain specific use cases. They aren’t a good substitute for a search engine or an artist or a therapist or any of the other myriad misuses now prevalent.
True, it’s just a tool and should be used where it best provides a real benefit. That’s essentially the core of my argument.
Lmfao no it isn’t you rube. It’s the most concentrated avatar of Capital in history. It’s constructed on endless desecration of art, music, poetry, literature, science, and more, all to give you shitty summaries of websites and your boss an excuse to fire you for a chatbot. Never before have the forces of Capital worked so hard to destroy the proletariat.
That’s one use of neural networks we do need to react to accordingly as a populace but it’s not the only use of those algorithms. I gave the example of alpha fold which has essentially solved the very hard problem of protein folding unlocking the door to developing cures for many diseases. The issue isn’t the tech, the issue is in some cases how it is being used. Think of nuclear power. We could have functionally limitless and clean power or we can end life on earth. The problem isn’t nuclear power, the problem is the actions of people.
Oof. I think you need to find a better example than nuclear power.
Why? Nuclear power is amazing for actually producing enough energy for global society and being clean. Renewables are amazing where they can be used.
Shut the fuck up you technofascist bootlicker. Claude is never going to love you, no matter what it says.
This doesn’t really have anything to do with what I’m talking about. Nuclear energy is awesome, nuclear bombs not so much. AI in applications where it works and makes the world better is awesome. AI in applications where it’s stealing, dehumizing, monitoring, degrading society not so much. It’s fundamentally just a mathematical structure with no intrinsic behavior on its own. What we use it for is up to us collectively.
Understand that the “AI” framing is pure marketing. It’s meant to get you to accept using LLMs to replace humans for every cognitive task. You have to decouple LLMs as a technology from the AI tech-bro hype train.
In the last few years it has taken on that connotation but the term artificial intelligence is much older than that and has a linguistic use. If for instance we digitize a full fruit flies brain that’s artificial intelligence or similarly if we develop other models with equally complex behavior. We can even go all the way back to mechanical automaton although mechanical systems are quite limited in performing dynamic and complex behavior.
Fine i’ll steal code the old fashioned way
Batman uses AI too (Alfred Intelligence)
That is a very good point, Master Wayne. Thank you for calling me out. Going forward, I will try to avoid such mistakes.
These are sloppy & ugly, they’re tools of cowards
My fucking company mailed me a flyer today to remind that I got access to a AI fitness trainer that is totally free just download an app to my phone. I so fucking pissed ripped in tiny fucking pieces. I fucking loath how they just blatantly assume we want use AI for everything. The very thing that if they could would replace us with it.
This is the weapon of the enemy. We do not need it. We will not use it.
-Batman, imaginary cartoon
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
-Mao Zedong, founder of the country eating everyone’s lunch.
Also, what the fuck does AI even mean in this context? LLM’s? Stable Diffusion Models? Yeah, they’re not great, they may get more accurate, but the evidence is currently pointing to them running out of road. Their uses are limited, that’s why most people don’t really use them, not because they’re “the weapon of the enemy”.
I imagine any historic materialist seeing this meme cringing so hard. Thanks for this comment so I can feel less insane about, you know, not swallowing idealistic imaginary nonsense.
Always glad to help. And yes, the cringe was palpable and something needed to be said.
Then use it, maybe get one of those Chinese models and hack the fash into oblivion! Don’t use it to generate AI slop propaganda, either in text of image form, you’re just eventually signing off your writing and art skills to the machines, and especially big tech.
You know what AI means, don’t play dumb.
AI is owned and used by major corporations and has horrible effects on pretty much everything, so people using it for “revolutionary” purposes are just giving more power to the powers that be.
Also, like, a real human writes lines for Batman. So a real person can be quoted for that line.
AI is analogous to guns… how? Just because this meme is about Batman snapping a gun in half?
As for your other point, AI means those machine learning models that keep eating up all the electricity and water and computer parts we can feed them and making places near where datacenters are built worse places to live and allowing bosses to fire creative workers because while their output may be worse, it’s a lot cheaper, and encouraging their users to confide in them and being sycophantic and deliberately giving them an outsized opinion of their own abilities and whose makers are endeavouring to promote as a substitute for human connection with a worrying degree of success.
most people don’t really use them
Lol. Lmao. Roflmfao. ChatGPT’s monthly active user count is triple the population of the United States. People are asking LLMs for meal plans, exercise routines, recipes, write greeting cards for them, do their school essays for them because they think it’s a better writer than they are, bouncing ideas off it to see if they’re good (yikes!), you name it they’re doing it.
Also more than half the flyers going up around my university are obviously AI generated.
The meme presupposes the usefulness of AI, which is why everyone’s taking it as a given. If it isn’t useful, you don’t need to use normative arguments to stop people from using it, people will just naturally never find an opportunity to do so.
Also if you really can’t think of any ways to use a chatbot to advance your political goals you need to think harder. It just shows a lack of adabtability.
If people who didn’t know/didn’t care about all the ethical issues with ChatGPT didn’t find it useful, it wouldn’t have 900 million weekly users.
Obviously they’re useful. They still shouldn’t be used. Both because they do a bad job that is difficult for their users to see as bad, and because they’re 17 different kinds of unethical.
How many of those 900 million are being forced to use it?
Alright, fair, probably a lot, but I’d wager much less than half, and in my experience you’ll have an extremely hard time finding people who still don’t like LLMs when they’re not being shoved down their throats outside the Fediverse.
As much as I hate “AI” myself, rhetoric like this does more harm to movements resisting “AI” than to help them.
If you don’t use it don’t do it because it’s shit, not because it’s “the weapon of the enemy”.
Any asymmetrical war is won using enemy’s weapons.
AI is not evil. AI is being used to find cancer cures, fusion research, climate and environment research, materials science, literally every possible industry. It’s also being used to control and surveil people, and profit more from every corner of life. Both are true of AI.
The part that’s evil is that the people with the most money who are funding the large AI investments want to use AI to support their tech fascist desires. As usual, it’s not the thing itself, it’s the billionaires. It’s ALWAYS the billionaires. They are the evil.
AI as a term is essentially vaporware. The ways that it’s being used to describe real, useful, and frankly niche technologies, that people rightfully find good and useful, and to describe the consumer facing slop machines that swallow an entire lake just to make a shitty image of an anime girl with 3 tits, is purposeful so as to poison the well, and make discussion about the subject more difficult.
Nah. The math is all the same, the models can be the same, it’s all just the application. We don’t like AI applied to bullshit capitalist profit driven goals, but those exact same models are being used to tangibly improve the world in other applications.
It’s like saying hammers are evil because people can murder people with hammers, which is ignoring the entire industry of construction workers. It’s just in the case of AI, it’s way more powerful than a hammer, so the implications are much larger depending on the application.
AI means, and has always meant, artificial means of doing what before computers seemed only possible with real, human intelligence. Another good way of looking at it is algorithms for problems for which it’s not practical to explicitly write an algorithm to solve.
It’s meant this since Turing. That’s a remarkable foresight if it’s “purposefully poisoning the well.”
Nah, redstone valley is right, this meme is very clearly oriented towards generative ai. If you know enough about ai to know that ML and expert algorithms exist and that they are different from gen ai, you know enough to distinguish between an attack towards gen ai and an attack towards the whole of ML.
And yet it’s LLMs doing these things, not only ML. People don’t cure cancer either, but the things that get close (eg. AAV viruses) are currently being done with LLMs.
I’ve been an AI researcher for 12 years. Generative AI also has many applications that tangibly improve the world. For example, I’m using diffusion models for super resolution of surface wind fields to forecast wildfire propagation. It’s not “just” generative AI that’s the problem. The exact same transformers or CNNs used for Capital to try to finally triumph over Labor can also be used to do all kinds of amazing things.
My point is that the incentive structure is fucked. It’s just more apparent with a powerful and widely known technology like “AI” these days.
LLMs don’t cure cancer. That’s the kind of AI everyone refers to these days. Not ML projects.
No, but I believe machine translation is now powered mainly by LLMs, which is a damn useful application of the technology.
I was surprised to learn recently that a few of my friends pay for Claude to help with personal projects and things like that. This particular AI tech is quite new so it’s surely too early to declare axiomatically that it has no uses. That sounds like an emotional reaction to me.
No it isn’t. That’s the distinction that is made when arguments arise, but the claims really are spawned indiscriminately.
You need to understand what you’re complaining about before you can name it, and most people don’t understand much of anything about modern AI and LLMs.
That sounds an awful lot like victime blaming.
You’re right. Anybody that is angry is allowed to condemn literally anything they want indescriminantly.
Somebody mugged me yesterday, so I’m going to demand shoes be outlawed, as they used shoes to run away.
If you tell me I’m being unreasonable, you’re victim blaming.
Asking this group to be discriminating in their hate for AI is never going to win you votes, but you’re completely correct.
Well, like you said that’s basically the corporations fault. They push “AI” everywhere and AI in the media is 100% LLMs and other GenAI. I wouldn’t blame the public for not knowing the difference. Those data centers aren’t built to cure cancer, but to cause it. Figuratively and literally.
Cool, then go after the corporations shoving tech in places we don’t want it.
Go after the data centers that are displacing families and wasting resources.
Go after the media for misrepresenting reality and distorting truths.
Those are all real harms with real actors. Getting angry at the camera because someone took blackmail photos of you is nonsense.
What then, O wise one, must we understand before we can criticize LLMs for the slop machines they would still be even if we eliminated the myriad ethical problems with how they’re currently deployed?
Being a sarcastic ass does nothing to refute my point. I don’t have to be an oracle to look back at history and see 100% of technologies finding an eventual use. I don’t know how the problems will be solved, and I don’t need to know what their uses will be in order for the trend that has continued for 1,500 years of recorded history to most likely be true.
You, on the other hand, have to somehow show that THIS technology is so wildly unique that none of the examples from the last 1,500 years are informative.
Edit: sorry, got some things mixed up in my brain. Just because you can’t identify a use for a technology doesn’t mean a technology is bad. Unless you are personally familiar with every single technology, profession, and process on the entire planet, and those that will be invented in the future, and can act as the ultimate arbiter of what is and isn’t useful. Alcohol is very harmful. But also good at sterilisation. X-rays are very harmful, but also good at medical imaging. Gunpowder is very harmful, but also makes pretty fireworks.
I don’t think LLMs are bad because they’re not useful. If people didn’t think they were useful, ChatGPT alone wouldn’t have 900 million weekly users.
I think LLMs are bad because they buy up all the computer parts and leave none for the rest of us to build datacenters that make their communities worse places to live, and consume so much electricity that houses have to be bulldozed to build bigger power lines and/or have clean air act violating natural gas turbines on the property belching toxins into predominantly black neighborhoods, and suck up so much water that there isn’t enough for residents, and scrape independent websites until their servers crash and evade every roadblock webmasters put in their way in the hopes of one additional scrap of training material, and buying and destroying rare books because they need training data that isn’t polluted by LLM slop like the internet is and cutting off the spines off of books lets you scan them faster and more cheaply than if you don’t do that, all so that they can produce a machine that generates answers that are wrong 10% of the time and code that’s broken in extremely difficult to spot ways, and made it the expectation to write three bullet points into a chatbot to turn it into a five paragraph email which the person who receives it will then immediately feed back into the same chatbot to turn it into three (slightly different) bullet points, and measurably hinders children’s learning. and that’s without going into chatbot psychosis and suicides, which we prommy are rare and caused by preexisting conditions.
But they’re also useful for generating meal plans or whatever, so all in it’s even.
Yeah, except that’s a complete shift from “This technology is bad,” to “I don’t like the way this technology is being used.”
You could write a 5,000,000 word thesis on all the ways ANY technology could be abused, and it STILL would not be a refutation from its beneficial uses.
Explain to me why open source LLMs, trained on public data, so both the training data and the resulting model are both 100% free and open source, are bad. For something to be universally bad, it CANNOT have any positive uses. Otherwise the real assessment is that it shouldn’t be abused, not that it shouldn’t exist at all, which I 100% agree with.
Because that’s the claim that needs to be defended. I am not defending OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. at all, so suggesting I am would be dishonest. I am not saying it should replace teachers, or scientists, or programmers, or anything like that, so suggesting I am would be dishonest.
I am not defending the corporate practice of explosive expansion, which causes these major issues. As that is a product of psychopathic capitalism abusing a technology, not an inherent property of the technology itself.
If you want to justify how an emotionless, mindless, will-less technology is inherently bad, you need to address its BEST, most ethical uses. Not its worst. You’re making a universal claim. I reject the universal claim. I don’t need to explain the abuses, because I am not justifying or defending them. The responsibility is yours to explain how the ethical uses are somehow bad.
I apologize for presenting an insufficiently nuanced view of your pet project. It’s not an excuse, but being subjected (and seeing my friends subjected) to the massive material harms done by LLM companies has a tendency to make me very angry, and I lash out at the obvious target. In retrospect, I realize only about 90% of current LLM deployments and use cases fit the both-unethical-and-harmful-to-the-user model I describe, and the remaining 10% is crucial. We mustn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Please do elucidate what exactly these ethical uses of LLMs are.
You mentioned in another thread you use them for research. Have you figured out how to get them to stop
confidently presenting incorrect information because they don’t know the difference between a sequence of tokens that represents a true fact and one that doesn’thallucinating yet?
This is so meta because Frank Miller’s Dark Knight is a child abusing fascist.
Fascists don’t create, they corrupt. Technology is neither fascist nor antifascist, those labels only make sense in the context of humans.
Be thoughtful about the services you use, the money you spend, and the data you entrust to others. Do your best to understand your tools as fully as you can. Strive to help others and do no harm, in your immediate impact and in your downstream effects. Don’t trust to heuristics like labeling certain technologies “fascist”; they are not and the more non-fascists there are who understand technology, the better equipped we will be to fight fascism.
I don’t know man, surveillance tech seems pretty fascist to me.
surveillance networks are made of computers and sensors, which are made of chips and wires. I don’t think chips and wires are fascist, I don’t think sensors and computers are fascist. I think the purpose to which they are put is the fascist part, and the purpose is pure human.
The individual components are no more fascist than the individual organs that put fascists together. What matters is the function of the end product. Flock cameras for example is surveillance tech and that’s their only purpose.
Critical thinking is a rare commodity on social media. The the AI hate is basically lemmy’s version of facebooks anti-vaxxers.
I wonder if it isn’t at least partially a psy op. This whole business of giving anyone who even looks at an LLM a scarlet letter, and refusing to participate in any critical evaluation of LLMs or other AI tools, plays right into the hands of those who would use LLMs to pollute, isolate, and destroy the free internet. The willfully ignorant will be the easiest to trap.
If you can read this: beware the day that internet discussions of mass manipulation go quiet. That silence is the death knell of freedom.
Ayup. I’ve noticed and wondered the same thing. Very logical and great ROI, it spreads itself
And the cost is what?
A little Thiel anti-christ buffoonery here, a little Zuck has to make a blog post about the wonders of the happy AI there?
Their biggest issue is just self correcting the sentiment gauge for their vanity, the machinery to ensure they are the only ones who use and control the tooling with proficiency is already in place from their perspective.
There are definitely fascist technologies out there, that’s why we can say don’t build the fucking torment nexus.
Mass surveillance, torture devices, hostile architecture, the slanted toilet, the panopticon, those can only be used for evil.
The torment nexus isn’t a discrete thing. You can’t make thumbscrews without screws. Are the screws evil? If not, when does the composition of components become evil? I don’t think LLMs are evil for the same reason I don’t think thumbscrews are evil in and of themselves. Thumbscrews, like LLMs, lack the capacity for evil. It’s the people who turn technology against their fellow humans that I hold as my enemy, not the trappings of their mischief. Remove them from the equation, and the torment nexus becomes so much harmless scrap, ready to be beaten into plowshares.
I can see the argument for local or at least open source models, but most people who use LLMs are using ChatGPT and other Big Tech LLM services, which are clearly run by fascists.
I got called unethical today for using a small-scale locally hosted open model trained on Wikipedia and Stack Exchange. A LOT of the anti-AI people are universalists that have decided carte blanche that it is an evil technology and everyone who uses it is bad.
Sure ya did buddy
https://lemmy.zip/comment/28450273
Why act like an ass?
Well they did, it took like 30s to check their last few comments
Even most of of the local and “open” models are exploiting the work of others by training off unethically sourced data without even so much as consent.
There is such a thing as ethical AI, but damn near zero people are doing it that way.
Yes, but it is very important to distinguish between LLMs, which are amoral math, and OpenAI et al, which are corporations run by fascists that offer LLM-based public surveillance / disinformation platforms. There is no technology on earth that cannot be bent to malign purpose if malicious people are inclined to do so. LLMs are just the popular useful technology du jour.
“amoral math” 🤣
Thank you. I just wrote this in another comment:
I’ve been an AI researcher for 12 years now. I work primarily in climate and environment, and right now I’m using AI for super resolution of wind field predictions, to better forecast wildfire spread. Prior to this project I was using AI and remote sensing to monitor and predict wheat crop health in northern India to feed into various food security monitoring systems (e.g. FEWSNET). There are millions of AI use cases that tangibly improve the world.
At the same time, those same underlying principles of AI are being used to develop tools to better surveil people, control them, and profit off of them so the tech fascists can gain even more control. Both things can be true. It’s the billionaires who are funding these massive investments that are evil. It’s always the billionaires.
Steel can be used to construct buildings and can also be used to construct weapons. You wouldn’t say steel is evil right?
I don’t believe your analogy holds water. I believe computers are a lot closer to steel than “AI” is, in that they’re both foundational technologies with a very very wide array of proven uses such that the benefits of the development and use of steel/computers far outweigh the associated costs. Weapons/“AI” on the otherhand are both specific, narrower applications of steel/computer technology with a few particular beneficial uses, but those uses pale in comparison to costs of the existence and development these technologies, so much so that both weapons and “AI” should be put on a metaphorical shelf out of reach until we as a global society can grow up to develop and use these technologies in a more responsible and conscientious manner.
Could you directly address the use-cases that the person you replied to brought up, because they seem pretty important to this discussion to get swept aside?
Forecasting wildfire spread, feeding people better… finding novel drugs, curing illnesses, cheap accurate translation, these all “pale in comparison” to the costs? Even though those uses have all existed for years before ChatGPT?
I see what you’re saying, but they’re all on a continuum and it just depends where your perspective window lies. I could see AI as foundational to many new technologies in the future.
I agree we should shelf any AGI or ASI (which supposedly doesn’t exist yet), however I think AI has many tangibly beneficial applications. The problem comes from the incentive structure of the Epstein class and their investments into surveillance and profit extraction.
