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:
dbzer0’s general tolerance for genAI is the main reason I will never create an account on that instance. This is ridiculous. These people rant about the environment, ethics, genocide, and Big Tech, and then happily devour AI slop.
EDIT: For those of you who are ready to comment about “wonderful” local LLMs, see this.
We dont have a “general” tolerance. We have a tolerance for local non-corporate models.
Ai isn’t killing the planet, people are
You lost me at stolen training data. You seem like yet another liberal for copyright. That is the primary thesis of your argument. Which is pathetic. I hope you are aware that most of us consider unlicensed usage of training material a feature not a bug. This is home of !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com don’t act so surprised we aren’t morally outraged like you are that someone pirated images or books to use in training data. Many of us would freely do it ourselves. Some of us do do it ourselves.
It’s probably a good thing you didn’t make an account here. Liberalism isn’t tolerated well.
How can one of the points from the link I provided to the general list of LLM issues be my main argument? Do you think I’m the one who compiled that list?
And to label me a liberal based on that sole baseless conclusion is absolutely ridiculous. I hate copyright and support piracy just as much as next person.
Somehow I’m not convinced because the only ones really relevant to local AIs are the copyright ones, and the other shit is about the AIs hosted and trained by the big tech companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Like the majority of the shit in here is shit the AI companies are doing and you cite it as a reason why people on dbzer0 using their own home grown or even home built models are bad people?
Don’t tell me you aren’t trying to do that. You called out Local LLM users in your edit:
No, it is about lack of consent. The open models are all trained through non-consential heavy web scraping, killing off smaller web servers by the thousands and driving server admins to despair by their use of (ususally non-consential) residential proxy bot networks.
The total lack of respect of any consential boundaries is the real problem. It is a pure strawman to claim that this is about copyright.
There are plenty of them that are not trained through non-consential scraping. Just because some of the people making AI models are assholes don’t mean everyone making AI models is an asshole.
Name one that is actually useful 🤷
You want me to do a basic internet search for you?
Fine: https://www.fairlytrained.org/certified-models
A cursory look shows that those are either toy models with no real usability and/or closed, so not at all what we are talking about here. Try a bit harder, because so far you are just proving my point.
archive.org
edit nvm i thought you meant web scrapers not model builders. theres plenty of useful llms not gonna bother listing them
You haven’t heard people whine and complain about art theft as much as I have. I agree with what you’re saying about large companies scraping data but you are being too charitable to these people. People do indeed bitch and moan about art theft and I have no tolerance for that level of liberal apologia.
So it is fine to ignore the consent of artists? Sure, they usually talk about copyright, but what most mean is consent and not the legal construct.
Also, “bitch and moan” is pretty mysogynist language, especially in this context.
You’re right. I’m sorry about that. I should have known to avoid language like that. I changed it to something better.
As for the other thing though. I’m not on board with that either. That’s just a socially enforced version of Intellectual property. It all converges on the idea that people are allowed to own intangible stuff like ideas, or bits. It’s the same liberal idea and expectation as copyright law just with different enforcement. Not so different though, they both expect blind compliance and assume moral superiority.
So you would be ok with sharing nude pictures of a person without their consent? The photos are just intangible stuff, right?
Putting shit on the web is giving consent to scrape it