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.
Fine i’ll steal code the old fashioned way
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.
Agree, AI is just a computer.
LLMs don’t cure cancer. That’s the kind of AI everyone refers to these days. Not ML projects.
No, but I believe machine translation is now powered mainly by LLMs, which is a damn useful application of the technology.
I was surprised to learn recently that a few of my friends pay for Claude to help with personal projects and things like that. This particular AI tech is quite new so it’s surely too early to declare axiomatically that it has no uses. That sounds like an emotional reaction to me.
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.
Asking this group to be discriminating in their hate for AI is never going to win you votes, but you’re completely correct.
The best kind of correct.
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.
Cool, then go after the corporations shoving tech in places we don’t want it.
Go after the data centers that are displacing families and wasting resources.
Go after the media for misrepresenting reality and distorting truths.
Those are all real harms with real actors. Getting angry at the camera because someone took blackmail photos of you is nonsense.
That sounds an awful lot like victime blaming.
You’re right. Anybody that is angry is allowed to condemn literally anything they want indescriminantly.
Somebody mugged me yesterday, so I’m going to demand shoes be outlawed, as they used shoes to run away.
If you tell me I’m being unreasonable, you’re victim blaming.
I’m not saying angry people are right. I’m saying you sound an awful lot like those people in ivory towers saying the plebs don’t get it, instead of trying to understand why all the anger and questioning themselves and how they could maybe try to communicate better.
Instead they sound like assholes.
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.
And yet it’s LLMs doing these things, not only ML. People don’t cure cancer either, but the things that get close (eg. AAV viruses) are currently being done with LLMs.
AI as a term is essentially vaporware. The ways that it’s being used to describe real, useful, and frankly niche technologies, that people rightfully find good and useful, and to describe the consumer facing slop machines that swallow an entire lake just to make a shitty image of an anime girl with 3 tits, is purposeful so as to poison the well, and make discussion about the subject more difficult.
AI means, and has always meant, artificial means of doing what before computers seemed only possible with real, human intelligence. Another good way of looking at it is algorithms for problems for which it’s not practical to explicitly write an algorithm to solve.
It’s meant this since Turing. That’s a remarkable foresight if it’s “purposefully poisoning the well.”
Nah. The math is all the same, the models can be the same, it’s all just the application. We don’t like AI applied to bullshit capitalist profit driven goals, but those exact same models are being used to tangibly improve the world in other applications.
It’s like saying hammers are evil because people can murder people with hammers, which is ignoring the entire industry of construction workers. It’s just in the case of AI, it’s way more powerful than a hammer, so the implications are much larger depending on the application.
My fucking company mailed me a flyer today to remind that I got access to a AI fitness trainer that is totally free just download an app to my phone. I so fucking pissed ripped in tiny fucking pieces. I fucking loath how they just blatantly assume we want use AI for everything. The very thing that if they could would replace us with it.
Batman uses AI too (Alfred Intelligence)
That is a very good point, Master Wayne. Thank you for calling me out. Going forward, I will try to avoid such mistakes.
Stupid af take tbh, especially the commentary. Tools are just tools. Stop stupidly turning them into your boogeymen. Technology, scientific advancement, and evolving knowledge do not care for who contributed to them. Otherwise just get off your programmable computer brother because the first one was made by literal nazis (Konrad Z3) along with a huge laundry list of other technologies fascists have developed. Political ideology and tech do not go hand and hand just because the tech is being used as a tool to facilitate the former.
Nobody who uses AI treats it like a tool, they treat it like an employee they can claim credit for. And most tools aren’t actively detrimental to the user to the point of proven intelligence drops, lawsuits and environmental destruction. Also, the enemy charges you money to use it.
The only person who benefits from AI is the person selling it. So why are you trying to defend it?
Respectfully, you have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve been an AI researcher for 12 years now. I work primarily in climate and environment, and right now I’m using AI for super resolution of wind field predictions, to better forecast wildfire spread. Prior to this project I was using AI and remote sensing to monitor and predict wheat crop health in northern India to feed into various food security monitoring systems (e.g. FEWSNET). There are millions of AI use cases that tangibly improve the world.
At the same time, those same underlying principles of AI are being used to develop tools to better surveil people, control them, and profit off of them so the tech fascists can gain even more control. Both things can be true. It’s the billionaires who are funding these massive investments that are evil. It’s always the billionaires.
Steel can be used to construct buildings and can also be used to construct weapons. You wouldn’t say steel is evil right?
Brother you can run that shit local and all of your claims have so many asterisks attached that they’re essentially pointless. Everything you claimed is entirely true of base computers no ai. Hell even just internet access has been shown to have all the same negative effects. And I’m defending it because I’m not stupid and it’s a useful technology. Run your shit local. The tech bro goons don’t own the technology.
The tech bro goons don’t own the technology.
They do own ChatGPT and other commercial LLM services, though, which is what most AI users use, and they made the hardware to run local AI models prohibitively expensive for a lot of people.
Cool so don’t use chatgpt and tools have costs? Idk what you want? Free compute and a lolly? Like I don’t disagree that those tech bros fucking suck and I personally don’t use their service but I’m not going to turn an entire technology into a boogeyman just because some fuckwhits with too much money and not enough empathy are fucking about. The underlying technology is solid and useful as a tool, regardless of the hardware you have. You can run local models that produce useful results on even a raspberry pi. It does not matter who contributed to it to assess it as such.
You cannot run it locally and have the same thing that oligarchs and big-tech have at their disposal.
You literally can. Kimi k3 is fist for fist punching at both sol and fable levels. The smaller qwen 3.8 27b is benching well against gpt 5.4 and opus 4.7. There are unreleased internal models you cannot run locally but you also can’t buy them. Additionally, big models are generally bad tools, you’re much better off tuning a local model for your specific task (Wendel from level 1 has a good video on this). If you’re gonna make claims at least do a Google search.
If you want something useable you need a decent amount of RAM/VRAM and a modern GPU, things that aren’t exactly accessible these days. That Kimi model is apparently half a terabyte in size and requires 100s of GB of VRAM, so I don’t know why you’re saying it’s a ‘local’ model.
That is patently untrue. You can have useful ai on a esp32, a $10 chip. https://github.com/slvDev/esp32-ai It will not be as capable as kimi k3 in general generic tasks but you can fine tune models for certain workflows (literally how “distillation” works) and you can run them on affordable and available hardware. Just because you don’t understand a tool or how to properly use it does not mean someone else doesn’t.
Just because you don’t understand a tool or how to properly use it does not mean someone else doesn’t.
You brought up the Kimi model up in a conversation about local models being viable, something that requires 8 Nvidia GB300s as a prerequisite. And I’m sorry I don’t follow you’re little hobby close enough for you, I did try it and it sucked.
There’s also Colibri which runs large models off of a SSD at a much slower speed than corporations. The large high-quality stuff has been gated by big-tech with gigantic GPUs. Colibri, if nothing else than a proof of concept, shows that high quality stuff can run on anything with a hit to speed.
a few tens to hundreds of thousands is all it takes to run models that are better than what big-texh was selling last year
Ok, you have a local model… but did you train it yourself? On what data?
Sadly, modern generative AI is a tool that’s built on top of the exploitation of other people’s work.
Actual human beings put blood, sweat and tears into their words, art and music, only for it to be used without consent or compensation by unskilled lazy misanthropes to generate an infinite sea of unwanted slop.
There is theoretically an ethical way to do AI (using public domain, creative commons, licensed or original data), but it seems to me that almost nobody is doing that.
Personally I don’t care how “useful” people want to claim AI is. For one, I’m not seeing things getting better faster, if anything they’re all getting worse. And regardless, the ends don’t justify the means, so if we’re exploitint people to generate slop I don’t really care how nice the slop is.
Slop is a consequence of tool use, not a design feature of the tool. There are vast amounts of ethical data to train against. Etc, etc, etc. I could go on but you don’t really care, you care selectively. Or you wouldn’t be using the computer (the tool in front of your hands) undeniably built upon exploitation and compromise. It is a tool. It exists. You can’t stuff the genie back in the box. Work to make shit better instead of needlessly complaining about shit you can’t control like it’s some sort of generalized target you can paint on every iteration.
Slop is a consequence of tool use, not a design feature of the tool.
To me “slop” is a description that reflects the supply and demand imbalance of all generative AI output: there’s a practically infinite supply of AI generated stuff (to put it kindly), but very little demand.
For example, someone could generate a book with an LLM faster than any person could actually read it (assuming anyone actually wanted to read it in the first place…), and that represents a fundamental logical problem with regard to the value of things that AI produces.
There are vast amounts of ethical data to train against.
Of course there are. Like I said in the comment above: works in the public domain, works licensed cc-0, original works, works licensed for training, and so on. Ethical AI is possible.
But is that what your local AI is trained on?
If so, cool and good for you, you’re using the tool ethically.
But that’s not what I’m seeing from >99.99% of AI users out there generating Ghibli-core slop for an audience of 0. Stealing all of Kazuo Oga’s background art is not curing cancer or doing anything good for society, it’s just blatant exploitation of one man’s life’s work and legacy so frauds and billionaires can make a quick buck off of people who can’t tell the difference between AI slop and human art.
I could go on but you don’t really care, you care selectively. Or you wouldn’t be using the computer (the tool in front of your hands) undeniably built upon exploitation and compromise.
This comparison isn’t exactly working in your favor…
Even assuming some of my PC parts were made in a sweatshop in Asia, how many people were exploited to make it? How badly were they exploited? Were they payed something for their time and effort?
Odds are that the model you’re using was trained off a mountain of work from of untold numbers of people, all over the world, who didn’t see a red cent for their skills, time or effort. Not only is their work being exploited for other people’s profit, nobody even bothered to seek consent to do it in the first place.
This is exploitation of labor on an industrial scale. AI turns the whole world into a sweatshop for every person in the creative working class. Forget talking about the “means of production”, creative types today aren’t even able to control the fruits of their labor anymore.
It is a tool. It exists. You can’t stuff the genie back in the box.
Like every technology, it can and should be regulated to prevent abuse, exploitation and other forms of negative impact. Every new technology introduces new problems, challenges and implications. But unlike what happened with oil and nuclear technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, we shouldn’t wait 50-100 years to consider them.
The big problem I have with most AI stans is that you are all so infatuated with the subjective utility of the “tool” that you’re unwilling to even have a good faith conversation about the objective impact of this technology on the world and society.
You just conceded my entire point. Ethical AI exists, it can be regulated, and the problem is how a tool is built and used, not the mere existence of the tool. The rest is meaningless boogeymaning. Your “99.99%” figure came directly out of your ass, and abundant supply does not make something worthless. Additionally, nobody said Ghibli knockoffs cure cancer. You picked the dumbest use case you could find and are pretending it defines the whole technology. You also turned “your computer is built on exploitation too” into “well, my exploitation is probably smaller and somebody may have been paid,” which is not remotely moral. I think it’s extremely smart to do some of what you mentioned though: regulate training, require transparency, license protected work. Great. None of that supports “do not use AI" or invalidates it as a tool. Oh and ending a comment full of invented statistics, cherry-picked examples, and arguments nobody made by accusing everyone else of bad faith is honestly… 🤌
Don’t worry, the large social media companies will have you agree to provide them with a license to train off all the data you upload to them on page 9,000 of the TOS or EULA, because for some reason there is not a length limit on contracts that have unilaterally decided terms
all of your claims have so many asterisks attached that they’re essentially pointless
No they don’t, but say whatever you need to ignore me. That’s definitely what someone arguing in good faith would do.
internet access has been shown to have all the same negative effects
Citation needed.
it’s a useful technology
Quite the opposite, actually. It causes enormous problems and has no benefits that aren’t better served by existing technologies that lack those problems.
Citation needed*
- provides no citations for his own dumb ass claims.
Well I’ll be the better man I guess… Okkkkkaaay so, first off, I’ve included a few studies published before the rise of modern ai, one from 2011 making extremely similar claims towards Google searches, but hey I can find more if you really want. Additionally, I’d love to see you work to replace several modern llm integrations with “existing technologies” because I’m here to tell you it cannot fucking be done and I’m willing to cite several fields but why don’t you just take a look at mathematics where ai has advanced the field several times over the past few months, or biology where ai has gotten so good at predicting protein fold structures that work for certain requirements that there is literally no alternative technology capable of the same feats.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6866412/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7099936/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20617
https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/dwegner/files/sparrow_et_al._2011.pdf
https://aiinstitute.hbs.edu/navigating-the-jagged-technological-frontier/
That’s a gross overreach and obviously wrong. Selection bias at its finest. The people who act as you have described are loud and easy to spot. The people that treat it like a tool don’t go around telling everyone about it. You’re conflating improper use and corporate abuse with ANY use. By that logic we should outlaw X-rays entirely, since when they were first discovered they were used fuckin’ EVERYWHERE, and quite a lot of people got sick because of it.
Humans are bad at moderation. When a shiny new toy is presented, we obsess to our own detriment. Over time, a balance is found. This has happened over, and over, and over, and over.
This is the weapon of the enemy. We do not need it. We will not use it.
-Batman, imaginary cartoon
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
-Mao Zedong, founder of the country eating everyone’s lunch.
Also, what the fuck does AI even mean in this context? LLM’s? Stable Diffusion Models? Yeah, they’re not great, they may get more accurate, but the evidence is currently pointing to them running out of road. Their uses are limited, that’s why most people don’t really use them, not because they’re “the weapon of the enemy”.
I imagine any historic materialist seeing this meme cringing so hard. Thanks for this comment so I can feel less insane about, you know, not swallowing idealistic imaginary nonsense.
Always glad to help. And yes, the cringe was palpable and something needed to be said.
You know what AI means, don’t play dumb.
AI is owned and used by major corporations and has horrible effects on pretty much everything, so people using it for “revolutionary” purposes are just giving more power to the powers that be.
Also, like, a real human writes lines for Batman. So a real person can be quoted for that line.
Then use it, maybe get one of those Chinese models and hack the fash into oblivion! Don’t use it to generate AI slop propaganda, either in text of image form, you’re just eventually signing off your writing and art skills to the machines, and especially big tech.
What’s funny about this?
As much as I hate “AI” myself, rhetoric like this does more harm to movements resisting “AI” than to help them.
This is so meta because Frank Miller’s Dark Knight is a child abusing fascist.
I believe this discussion is important, just the other day I was sad about people colluding inference and training like if both were having the same carbon footprint. I am not defending Sam Altman or anyone else. But we need to look at the facts for what they’re. Running a quantized local model, accepting latency and all, can make your use of LLMs as low as playing video games. I already said that in the past, and I only got downvoted. Maybe because everyone is hurt bout this technology, which is having detrimental consequences. I am not saying there aren’t any problems… but I am accepting the world for what it is, as GPT4 has said ~3 years ago: confetti has left the cannon.
So, we need to deal with this reality. The training done on data like open source code, or even copyrighted materials, will always be a debt.
Just like colonialism. And yet, we are not hating each other for “simple” stuff like eating chocolate or drinking coffee which is most often than not unethically sourced. OR the minerals that make our electronic devices…
Again, it’s not that I am vouching to ignore the issues. But I rather have us take the conversation as a debate or dilemma. Not just start attacking one another.
This all seems like that caricature of a vegan that hates the vegetarians for eating some cheese.
Look at the common ground. Here, on lemmy, more often than anywhere else, we have a big chunk of values and ethics in common.
Every time someone fires a confetti cannon I have to stay one or two hours longer after closing and clean that shit up. Every piece of it.
I do not want It everywhere and it can be a hazard If it goes in the wrong places.
Fighting local models is playing right into enshittification, though.
They WANT people to be scared of “AI.” They want people to keep talking about it as this existential anthropomorphized danger, not a tool theyve enshittified.
Because the thing that keeps Altman/Modi up at night is the proliferation of trifty, dirt cheap open weights models. Ones presented as tools, not intelligence. And every bit people rail against them is more ammunition to regulate those open models away, so they have a monopoly.
I was just talking about confetti. I only fight drunks. Don’t care what everybody does on their computer at home.
These are sloppy & ugly, they’re tools of cowards
deleted by creator
Replace with him breaking a brain and you have me
Nah, change with the times or get left behind.
I’m not afraid, give me those yummy downvotes.
Every AI-forward dev I know is worse at their job than the ones who don’t like it. They all think they’re doing something smart, but their output sucks and they end up being deadweight that people who actually think and work have to carry. Maybe its not that way everywhere, but it is undeniably the reality at my employer.
Yeah, could very well be. The “do absolutely everything with AI no matter what” idea is a circlejerk, too. (Just in very different spaces from this one)
On my project right now, I’m doing everything by hand. It just seems unlikely hallucinate-and-cull would be any faster at producing useful and well-architected networking logic. On the other hand, when it comes time to write a UI, spinning something up is probably worth it.
It’s a tool like any other. It can be used in a destructive and immoral manner or used where it works to improve the lives of people. Think about the alpha fold project and other such use cases.
LLMs existed before the AI craze. Sure, they’re useful in certain specific use cases. They aren’t a good substitute for a search engine or an artist or a therapist or any of the other myriad misuses now prevalent.
True, it’s just a tool and should be used where it best provides a real benefit. That’s essentially the core of my argument.
Lmfao no it isn’t you rube. It’s the most concentrated avatar of Capital in history. It’s constructed on endless desecration of art, music, poetry, literature, science, and more, all to give you shitty summaries of websites and your boss an excuse to fire you for a chatbot. Never before have the forces of Capital worked so hard to destroy the proletariat.
That’s one use of neural networks we do need to react to accordingly as a populace but it’s not the only use of those algorithms. I gave the example of alpha fold which has essentially solved the very hard problem of protein folding unlocking the door to developing cures for many diseases. The issue isn’t the tech, the issue is in some cases how it is being used. Think of nuclear power. We could have functionally limitless and clean power or we can end life on earth. The problem isn’t nuclear power, the problem is the actions of people.
Shut the fuck up you technofascist bootlicker. Claude is never going to love you, no matter what it says.
This doesn’t really have anything to do with what I’m talking about. Nuclear energy is awesome, nuclear bombs not so much. AI in applications where it works and makes the world better is awesome. AI in applications where it’s stealing, dehumizing, monitoring, degrading society not so much. It’s fundamentally just a mathematical structure with no intrinsic behavior on its own. What we use it for is up to us collectively.
Understand that the “AI” framing is pure marketing. It’s meant to get you to accept using LLMs to replace humans for every cognitive task. You have to decouple LLMs as a technology from the AI tech-bro hype train.
In the last few years it has taken on that connotation but the term artificial intelligence is much older than that and has a linguistic use. If for instance we digitize a full fruit flies brain that’s artificial intelligence or similarly if we develop other models with equally complex behavior. We can even go all the way back to mechanical automaton although mechanical systems are quite limited in performing dynamic and complex behavior.
Oof. I think you need to find a better example than nuclear power.
Why? Nuclear power is amazing for actually producing enough energy for global society and being clean. Renewables are amazing where they can be used.
