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:
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?
Most of the labour that goes into art is immaterial by definition. You are seriously trying to reduce art to the physical paint on a canvas? Sure, then if you don't take away the cavas you are not appropriating the labour of someone else. You know who else argues in reductive ways like that about appropriating the fruits of labour? Capitalists...
I am not arguing that there is some sort of natural law that forbids you to do something, but rather that anarchist principles say that just because you can take something (because you are in a position of power and priviledge) doesn't mean that it is right to do so.
Yes I am seriously reducing that specific type of art into physical paint on a cavnas. I didn't stop them doing labour. I didn't steal their canvas. They still retain the skills they trained doing it. If it's digital they can still see and share their original digital image. I didn't take away shit! They lost nothing except these fantasy rights you assigned to them by fiat.
Non sequitur.
Copying is not "taking" anymore than it is "stealing". And training LLMs is even less than copying, nevermind "taking". The most unprivileged person can see an image and be inspired by it to make a derivative in their own excrement if they have to. And I'll be damned if I let the copyright-brained tell them "Uhm, achsually, you need to seek permission from the artist first"
If a skilled worker produces a good, the good embodies the skill, as it clearly can not be produced without it. A capitalist is unfairly appropriating this embodied skill, and an LLM is maybe the clearest example of appropriating skills by capitalists that exists so far.
This has nothing to do with being copyright brained. As I wrote elsewhere, I am an anti-copyright activist for 25+ years and understand the issues with copyright very well; one of which is corporations appropriating the embodied skill of goods produced by artists via copyright transfer.
The LLM is not appropriating the skills, because the artist still has those skills. That's not how appropriation works either. It isn't anymore than any other artist getting inspired by and redoing your art style is "appropriating your skills" either.
You are making the argument that anything that makes different art easier is deskilling those who invested in those skills. It's not true. The only way one could even claim to appropriate art is by faking attribution.
People making some images to enjoy on their own are expropriating artists whose styles they copy is an absurd statement on its face.
Clearly not well enough, otherwise you wouldn't be making an argument right now that if copyright transfer wasn't possible, copyrights would be just fine and dandy.
No, I am not making that argument. Developing skills is labour. Taking those skills without fully compensating the person that developed those skills is labour theft. A LLM is not developing its own skills, it is distilling the skills embodied in the works of humans, and those humans are neither asked if they are ok with that nor are they compensated for their labour.
No, you clearly do not understand what copyright even is. Copyright is a legal construct to commodify and ultimately appropriate the right of workers to their labour. By creating copyright, capitalists were able to trade and appropriate largely immaterial goods that artists created. Therefore copyright is always wrong, as it is an extension of capitalism and the appropriation of surplus value from workers, but being against copyright doesn't mean you are ok with anyone taking artistic goods that people created.
You're also not "taking" those skills. That's not what those words means. The artist still has those skills. Capitalists aren't bad because they copy workers labour. They're bad because they're exploiting it. You make a product, the capitalist sells it and gives out only part of it. Stop equivocating completely different things ffs.
Great.So there's no need for you to mention "transferring copyrights" on what's wrong with it. It is always wrong. We agree. So any "Rights to copy" are wrong. And by extension any "Rights to inspect or learn from".
And since we're not "taking" anything away, we agree again.
Glad we finally see eye to eye.
So what is an immaterial good in your opinion? And taking that immaterial good without compensating the person that created it is not labour theft? You are either claiming that immaterial goods do not exist, which really doesn't make much sense, or you are willfully ignoring the implications because it doesn't fit to your very narrow interpretation of the idea that copying isn't theft.
And to be clear, I agree that copying isn't theft. Because copying is about the physical part of a good. The physical original copy is indeed unaffected by the act of copying it. But that is entirely irrelevant to the immaterial part of said good.
There is no such thing. Or if you want to define one such thing, then one cannot "take" it due to the fact that it's immaterial.
That's exactly what I claim. There is no such thing. Of course, we're humans. We can define anything we want. I can assume what you mean by that, but if I assume correctly, then you cannot "take" them!
It seems to me you're just making an egregious equivocation fallacy based on your own personal definitions that you assume everyone shares with you.
That you can copy something from one medium to another proves that immaterial goods exist. Because what exactly is it that you are copying then? Clearly it isn't the paint etc itself and obviously if there wasn't something that your are copying then why would you consider the one copy to be related to the other?
You might call it an idea, but ideas can be typically generalized and thus do not really fulfill the the requirement of being a good. So the idea might be that it is a portrait, but not the specific portrait that you would recognize in a copy on another medium.
This is a well established philosophical idea and not something I am making up here 🤷
No? You're copying a sequence of bits. It's very material. They take storage and modify hardware. Are "immaterial goods" something that can only exists in digital media, in your mind, or do you have any examples of an "immaterial good" that can exist outside of digital storage? Is a book "immaterial good"? Is a sheet of music? I'm sorry but this all sounds quite absurd.
Sounds like something vague and nothing that I'd use to create ethical imperative around. nevermind trying to enforce those ethics on others who don't accept the premises.
Conversion of an idea from one physical medium to another means there is something that is independent of those physical media. You can call it "information" if you like. Claiming that this doesn't exist is absurd.
And an idea or pure disembodied information becomes an immaterial good if it is a clear artifact of a human mind as opposed to a mere concept that can be described in many ways. A story is an artifact of human creation, what might include some ideas and concepts, but it isn't merely that in its entirety.
There is nothing vague about this and frankly speaking you just don't seem to like the clear implications of this as it exposes the hypocrisy of being a leftist in favour of capitalist exploitation tools like LLMs.
I'm not claiming "information" doesn't exist. I'm claiming you cannot "take" information in way that jives with the meaning of "take". I was pretty clear with my comment ealier about this. You can copy, or internalize information, but you cannot claim it for yourself once you share it. It then belongs to everyone who knows it.
You can absolutely take information. You can not (easily) take it away, but that is not the sole meaning of take.
And basing your entire argument one some semantic destinction just so that you can avoid confronting your self with the fact that that information is often a good produced by labour and taking it without compensation is labour theft is pretty sad IMHO.
No take means that someone else doesn't have it. The word you want is copy or learn or inspire. I don't play semantic games. I explain exactly why I reject your premises, even though you've by now discarded so many positions already and the last thing you got left is desperately trying to treat ideas like material goods. It think this discussion has run its course.