- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world/p/1758477/using-fascist-technology-to-fight-fascism-still-promotes-fascist-technology
Using fascist technology to fight fascism still promotes fascist technology.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 make 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 hinder 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.