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:
Open source AI reduces demand for corporate AI
Especially since it's free. They can't charge you for it, they can't ban you from it as blackmail. It is 100% yours for simply the cost of running it. Which with a battery and solar system is totally doable. If you can run a Gaming PC on a solar setup you can run AI models on one as well.
I love your statement. Alternative tools that are low cost and accessible to anyone are the way to build horizontal power.
I think the nature of genAI inherently isolates people from one another.
Like the nature of a weapon is to kill.
I can see usecases, but I do think there are risks that are much more than it being corporate.
Although, I have to say, I'm starting to see my controdictions in thought.
If I continue the gun analogy, it's possible to use a weapon as a tool to your benifit if you allow yourself to understand the danger involved.
I only in the past couple of years opened my mind to firearms. This might be a similar situation for me.
That's just a random thought, not something substantiated by any evidence presented.
I don't have data or scientific journals to cite. Although I think they might exist.
This opinion comes from my experience, the experiences I've seen my friends have, and my logical reasoning.
Do you have any statements as to why this might not be true?
Its not up to me to justify your claim or otherwise. You made the claim, you provide the evidence.
As I stated, it's an opinion. I'm interested in yours.
I should have said that instead of the word statement, but i was in a rush. You don't owe me data, or anything. I just thought you were interested in sharing your views.
I'm honestly, becoming more open to genAI use. But I still do think there are risks and I think we should consider if those risks are plausible and could be solved for somehow.
Similar to how proper firearm handling can prevent shooting yourself.
A firearm uses (combustion-created) compressed gas to launch a metal projectile at high speeds. There are very few cases in which that projectile won't damage whatever it hits, and obviously that is the intent of guns. Whether they're used for good (hunting and defense) or evil (murder and domination), they are intended to cause damage.
LLMs use weighted maps to produce text that approximates the text they were trained on. In almost no cases can an LLM directly harm someone, though like anything it can be used to harm one's self. The harms of LLMs are almost universally byproducts of the ways that companies choose to create and operate them, not things that are intrinsic to the LLM itself.
If all you've ever known is Nestle, it'd be easy to conclude creating chocolate requires being evil child-labor-using, farmer-murdering, land-stealing capitalists. But of course chocolate can actually be made at home. It's the scale and the profit motive that drive the harms, not the technology of chocolate bars themselves.
I'm not sure if you've seen any of my previous points on local open genAI models, including from the main post.
I'm not saying genAI is a weapon, I'm saying genAI has inherent risks we would need to overcome to reach our goals as anarchists.
The biggest risks, which I think are still true for most locally hosted genAI models, is that it isolates us from eachother and makes us more predictable. And this can prevent us from reaching our goals.
If you want to ignore risks, that'ss on you, just like if you were to do something thoughtless with a gun.
Corporate controlled LLMs have been recorded asking people to isolate themselves from their families and kill themselves. There is no data of a local llm doing this as far as I know but there would be obvious reasons why that information would be difficult to get.
GenAi is currently in use by various militaries for the purpose of killing people
Training an "open" model like deepseek used a lot of resources and caused a lot of harm to the environment and people of those affected communities.
The point is, harm happens, so it is not a question of if. The better question I think is can we reduce our risks while using these tools?
This is a question of how people use it, not something it encourages or forces. "Eleanor Rigby" was written 50 years before LLMs existed.
What do you mean by this?
I think there is likely a misunderstanding regarding what is GenAI and what is not.
Vision models that e.g. do facial recognition, or direct drones, are not GenAI.
The only generative AI use I could think of in a "kill chain" is Israel using it for creating lists of people to target, but that system (abhorrently and psychopathically named "Where's Daddy") just used LLMs to 'prioritize' the names that the IDF and Mossad fed into it, it didn't actually come up with the names or intelligence. It was about speeding up their killing machine, and has nothing to do with how or what LLMs as a technology do.
There's an entire discussion (which has been being had for decades by forensics experts and lawyers and privacy advocates) about people using/trusting computers as trusted black boxes, and this is an extension of that; plausible deniability to do the action you already intended to do via "the computer said so" as a shield.
Just because the problem isn't new, doesn't mean it isn't accelerating. There are tons of problems that were true when Eleanor Rigby was released that are worse today.
If we are depending on similar models, trained on similar data. And those models are publicly available because they are some level of open, to do something like let's say, help in logistical planning. Then it might be easier to predict what our plans are. Unless we take steps to actively add unpredictability to such plans.
The more genAI is influencing our ideas, the less they are our ideas
The US is using more than just vision models, which is why it was such a big deal that they signed their recent contrasts with Google and OpenAI. I think with the girls school that was blown up in the US "preemptive strikes" against Iran they blamed bad intelligence on an LLM. This plus what the Israeli military is doing is proof of harm. If the Israeli military is using it, you can bet others will be soon too if they aren't yet as well because it is a convenient way to deny responsibility, just as you say.
This makes no sense to assert specifically about LLMs. Everything influences our ideas. If "influenced by external stimulus or input" == "not your ideas", then people literally have no ideas of their own.
And not one of those is going to be fixed by getting rid of LLMs, nor are they the product of LLMs uniquely, so sell me on why LLMs uniquely need this outsize focus? To me, this feels like adopting the flavor du jour of liberal media faux resistance that denies individuals tools, in pursuit of some supposed moral high ground, while leaving the structural use of that tool by government in place, similar to anti-gun arguments.
Firstly, I do think freedom allows for new spontaneous thoughts. But let's just say no "human thought is original" for the sake of the discussion. If we know that all external stimulus influences our ideas.
Then I would rather be influenced by my community, the people I trust, and people I think have good idea to cherry pick from than from genAI, especially if I have not personally developed it.
I never said we should. I'm warning caution of use and being aware of possible risks.
If genAI gives us the confidence to make things ourselves without any help from other humans, then we might think we can function fine without the help of our communities. We might think why would I ask my friend to help me proof read this zine or ask them if this art is influential. We can extrapolate out from those examples. But the key is we are actively choosing to not include others in the work or even leisure things we do and that is isolation.
A good Master reduces demand for less beating on the plantation