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:
I think this is a lot more complex and nuanced than either of your are being.
Copying a piece of publicly-accessible art online is an action that occurs without inviting any cost to the artist (unless you’re subscribing to the idea of “lost potential profit”, in which case their criticisms about liberalism would be valid). Many Anarchists consider publicly-placed property to have very low criteria for abandonment, which is I think an important concept that applies here, because art that is placed out on the public web is arguably much closer to being art that’s been placed on the street corner than art that’s e.g. sitting in someone’s living room.
Your argument makes perfect sense for something like hacking into someone’s computer and taking art stored there (which is especially relevant to the discussion of private intimate images). But the kind of durable ownership you’re talking about for scraped media is akin to expecting something placed on a park bench to be left alone rather than consumed as desired. And I think that framing an artist’s request not to touch the publicly-placed, unattended thing, as being a violation of consent is a bit of a perversion of the concept: art is not an extension of the artist’s body, and consent as it applies to one’s person is very specific, whereas you are seemingly combing the colloquial meaning of consent as a general concept, to make “doing anything someone asked you not to” as the same as e.g. sharing intimate images of their body nonconsensually. And an object you produce is never an extension of your body or person.
On the flip side, dismissing all costs that scraping creates as intrinsically acceptable is ignoring the differences between human and bot scraping. Bots interact with web content differently than humans, including doing redundant link spidering, revisits, and content downloads at a (literally) inhuman rate. That has an impact on server performance, which impacts other visitors. It’s perfectly reasonable, and perfectly anarchist, to expect visitors to your space to respect the space and respect other visitors, and scraper bots don’t do that, but keep in mind that scraper bots are not actually LLMs, nor are they actually necessary to build or operate LLMs; they’re a tool being misused by LLM companies.
My objection is the dismissive attitude towards other peoples work and effort. Artists spend many hours of their life practising and planning artworks and a carefully crafted grafitti in public place is not abandoned or unattended. The artist placed it there for public enjoyment or as a political statement, and their wishes should be respected.
It is true that Anarchism places a higher burden of proof on personal property and expects people to forgoe their personal attachments to properties they stopped using if someone else can make better use of them, but this is a two way street and one can expect a certain level of respect and accomodation towards personal attachments even if you personally disagree that they are valid.
That’s funny, because as a former writer, we absolutely expect our stuff to be painted over, tagged over, covered with tarps, etc. And yes, they are 100% unattended and usually abandoned (I only ever touched up a tag once, that I was particularly proud of).
But more importantly, downloading art online doesn’t destroy the art. That’s the biggest problem with your analogy; you’re trying to equate “copying something against the artist’s will” with “causing damage”, and that’s not how copying works.
No, you are misunderstanding my argument.
Nowhere did I imply that grafitti artists claim to own the space they paint on or are against other artists doing what they did in the same space. But I am pretty sure most grafitti artists would object to their art being taken out of context and transformed into a commodity product.
And anyway the argument isn’t about destroying art or copying it, but about respecting the wishes of a person that spend a good portion of their life honing a skill and creating artworks. Regardless of what their wishes actually are or if you agree with them on technical grounds.
This attitude of just disregarding other people (as opposed to corporations) and violating consent is what I am objecting to.
Which is an argument against commercial AI, not open source AI.
This is just making a copyright argument from a moral paradigm rather than a legal one. Stealing a physical painting from that artist is wrong. Defacing a physical painting of that artist’s is wrong. Making a digital copy of a digital image is not wrong. You are creating a moral argument for ownership of an IDEA, even if it is a very specific and unique idea.
“Intellectual property” is not anarchist, no matter how much you insist it’s mean not to treat it as such.
I’m 90% sure they aren’t an anarchist. This isn’t the first time they’ve parroted liberal ideas or made bad faith arguments in favor of liberal rhetoric.
Let’s not do this. We have enough libs calling us tankies and tankies calling us libs. We don’t need to do this to each other because we don’t agree with a very specific take.
Fair enough. I guess I don’t actually know that about them, it was an assumption based on past and present behavior.
DeepSeek, Meta etc that release open-weight models are not doing so out of the good of their heart. Those are commodity products, just under different licensing conditions. Don’t fall for their open-washing attempts.
No, I am not arguing for intellectual property. You are free to try and convince the artist about your idea of free culture and many artists actually agree (the bigger problem is that they are forced to sign away their copyright to large media corporations). My argument is that if you just take something without consent of the person that created it, you are being an asshole and can not be trusted around in a community because you clearly have issues with respecting consent in general.
And just to be clear, with “taking” I don’t mean the act of copying. Making a private copy is usually fine and very few artist object to it. I mean taking it and converting it into something else, and especially into a commodity product like in the case of LLM models.
Trying to exclude people from anarchist communities because they don’t respect copyrights is extremely fucked up.
There’s no consent issue here. The act of copying and modifying art doesn’t affect the artist. This is copyright-brain. Once you shared art it’s you don’t get to control how it’s consumed. Or do we need consent to modify art? How about parody? How about parody which is extremely against the artist themselves? How about being inspired by it?
The only reason copying or making LLMs out of art can be argued harms the artist is because of the effects of capitalism.
Again, this isn’t about copyright. Why do you keep bringing up this strawman argument?
Is it really that hard to understand that artists have a moral right to the fruits of their labor? Of course there are certain contexts where exceptions can be made, and you can make an argument that in certain situations the general good outweights the moral rights of an individuum, but just by default disregarding the moral rights of an individuum because you think you know better is not very anarchist at all.
Because you’re making arguments that are the same that support copyrights and worse, go even further than them by asserting rights to control who is even allowed to be inspired and make derivatives of it.
Nobody took their labor away. They still have their art. Or are you asserting also “intellectual property” as if it’s a thing that would exist in anarchism?
It is very anarchist to not allow to set up rights that determine what I can do with the content I’ve seen. It’s not up to you to grant me “exceptions”. This is copyrights-brain.
What the fuck does this even mean? Are you asserting some sort of natural law of ethics?
Those are open weight models. There are also open-source models. Which is what I said. Which are not commodity products.
Link to one that isn’t a tiny toy model 🤡
Before I spend time on your potential moving target, how about you tell me the parameter size that you consider the cutoff to not be “tiny toy model[s]”?