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:
But they are also "...things which could easily be done by a human, taking away from actual people and putting the benefit of that work into the hands of corporations".
They fit your criteria perfectly.
Tell me you don't know how LLMs work, without telling me that you don't know how LLMs work. Guessing is a very powerful tool, and the smartest people I know spend a lot of their time "guessing".
Video games "waste" electricity. Cars "waste" electricity. Spreadsheets "waste" electricity. Grow-lights "waste" electricity. I don't see how LLMs are all that different.
I have to check the output my co-workers do. Does that make me a "glorified spellchecker" ?
I get that you don't like LLMs, but if you want to convince me of anything, you'll either have to make your values consistent, or come up with something that LLMs damage that is unique to LLMs, and inherently part of their function.
How about human thought. How about the mentap state of the people that use it. How about the general state of both online discourse and in person interaction. How about the level of misinformation being spread either intentionally or by the machine that tells people they're right all the time providing confirmation bias to the people that are wrong.
Tell me you dont understand how intelligence works without telling me you dont understand how intelligence works.
Alright, what I want you to do is have an LLM tell you how to dismantle diagnose and fix a fault in a car, without making mistakes and without breaking anything in the process.
What part of having a tool and skills takes away from humans and puts the benefit in the hands of a corporation in the same way an LLM made by a corporation takes away from those skilled humans?
Video games USE electricity to produce art and provide a source of entertainment. Cars USE epectricity to transport humans and cargo from one place to another. Spreadsheets USE electricity to store data from sources such as shops, businesses and people that want to organise information, grow lights USE electricity to provide light for plants to grow.
LLMs waste epectricity by spending time doing something that could easily be done by a human being at a fraction of the cost. WHILE DOING IT INACCURATELY, forcing a human to read through the outputs to identify those inaccuracies, wasting time and electricity by increasing the work required to get an output that a human could provide.
So you think that humans can't cause bad mentals states to other humans? You think animals can't do that? You think humans can't spread mis-information, or biases? Or do you think we should get rid of all humans too?
Do you have an actual point? or are you just trying to mimic things that you don't understand, in a sad attempt to "own" me?
The vast majority of humans can't do that. I also don't see how that has any relation to the statement you were responding to.
Computers. Printers. Tractors. Cars. Websites. Courts. Guns. Many things do that, yet I still see you only singling out LLMs.
LLMs USE electricity to produce art and provide a source of entertainment. LLMs USE electricity to store data from sources such as shops, businesses and people that want to organise information. LLMs USE electricy to transport information from one place to another.
So humans can analyise large lines of code in a matter of seconds for cheap without doing it inacurrately? Humans can create dozens of pieces of art cheaply, in a matter of minutes without any inaccuracies? Humans can generate dozens of stories, cheaply, and in a matter of minutes with no mistakes?
Interesting, because I've never met humans who can do that.
Your strawman arguments bore me. No you muppet, I KNOW humans can spread misinformation, and LLMs make it so that it's 1000x easier, and allow corporations to do so through their product without any accountability.
Flat out no they dont. They use electricity to make pictures in the style of human art. Because all they can do is copy the effort of humans that have unwillingly been used as training data.
Yes, your smartest friends aren't throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, theyre using their combined knowledge and experience to discern an accurate answer to a problem and if they don't have the answers they can use that knowledge to find the answer efficiently. LLMs will guess the right words to say, then tell you they have the answer but immediately fall back the second its told that the answer was wrong.
LLMs can't do this. They are neither cheap nor accurate, they can merely use their training data to mimic human output.
These things all require humans that have trained to use these tools to perform their task accurately.
I'm done with you, keep shilling for corporations to carry on ruining the planet for the sake of profits, politicians and the richest people alive all you like.
What strawmen? I'm just pointing out how your arguments against LLMs aren't unique to them, and can be used by humans, and other tools, as well. Do you think Zines, Newspapers, Podcasts are bad? because they make it easier for corporations to spread misinformattions 1000x easier without any accountability.
We have a word for "pictures in the style of human art." We call it: Art.
I don't see how machines making art is different from humans making art. If you can't tell which one is done by a machine, and which one is done by a human, is it any less "art" ?
Once again, that's not inherent to LLMs. That's how some of them were chosen to be built, but many of them are built with data that was willingly given to be trained on. If a human learned to create art by copying stuff that other humans didn't permit them to copy, do you think they can't create art?
That sounds an awful lot like probabilistic modeling.
Many humans do this too.
They are cheap. I've used them plenty to do these things, and it cost me much less than a human. Humans are also not accurate.
And LLMs require "humans that have trained to use these tools to perform their task accurately." How are those tools any different?
When did I ever do that? Can you point to a single instance? I never supported corporations, nor environmental destruction, nor politicians, nor the rich. I'm generally against all of those.
You seem angry about problems in our society, angers that I share: Wealth disparity, elite non-accountability, workers being mistreated, the rich and powerful leeching from society, etc. But I don't see how LLMs are the cause of any of those. All of these things exist because of capitalism, imperialism, corruption, etc.