Good question. I think there’s some truth to it. Somehow a lot of fascist people love AI. For example a certain president posts a lot of gen AI pictures, sometimes videos of himself dropping poo on the citizens. Other regimes just use it to manifest some video surveillance dystopia. And to be frank, there is no other tech to enable surveillance on that level.
It’s also a good tool to manipulate people on a grand scale, make custom propaganda, exploit psychology…
LLMs and related systems are made in a completely top-down way. They’re under control of the Chinese government and a few select US tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and their companies. They get to shape it. And they’re kind of Anti-Robin-Hoods. They steal from the poor, the workers and artists, and give to the rich. They get more power and money. And I didn’t yet mention Peter Thiel and some other companies who are working on some AI assisted version of doomsday, or at minimum some scifi dystopia with predictive policing and that kind of stuff.
Also comes with a few fascist side-effects. Like disposession of land, polluting the environment and poor people get to suffer the consequences of climate change. Rich people can just buy a new house and clean water…
I mean not all AI is fascist. But I see lots of reason to believe it aligns well with fascist wet dreams. And not so much with their opponents’.
On contrary: Space travel helps all of us. I get to learn new science things. Get to use my sat nav in the car… 400 TV channels… a more precise weather forecast… We needed to advance material science for space travel, push solar cell technology, which I can make use of as of today to break free from big oil… I also got to contribute some taxpayer money to make it happen, so it wasn’t just forced upon me by oligarchs…
The printing press has been a crucial tool for fascist propagandists ever since its inception. Does that make the technology fascist?
I just got done reading The Demon Haunted World, and can’t help but draw a comparison. It’s perfectly reasonable to be afraid for the future of democracy right now, but it really feels like people think AI is powered by literal sprites, dancing around on puppet strings at the whim of the fascists who summoned them. It’s math. Math isn’t ideological. It is simply a fact of the universe that an LLM is possible.
Yeah, we have to make sure it is applied responsibly, because yeah it’s a very powerful phenomenon. Yes, they were made using stolen information, and I fully believe that all LLMs and training data should be fully open sourced for public use as a result, and making any profit from them is unethical. It’s stealing from Peter and Paul to sell to Peter and Paul.
But one day fascists are bound to fail, and you know what will still exist in the world that comes next? AI/LLMs/some future iteration of a transformer-based neural network. It’s not the first technology loved and/or invented by fascists, and it won’t be the last. But I think in a panic, people are willing to burn down anything in an 50ft radius of any fascist. Keep the knowledge, ditch the fascism, stop acting out of fear.
I really think those are two different pairs of shoes. The printing press allowed people to make information more accessible to the masses. A lot of people got more educated because of it. Of course as a tool it can also be used for evil. But in reality that’s not what happened. It’s mainly been used for good. It displaced some jobs, but that wasn’t the people’s jobs, but monks in the scriptorium. Other people got to learn to read and write because of it. In fact we went from being able to read as something special, to almost everyone gets to learn to read because of it.
With AI on the other hand (or foot, to stick with the ‘pairs of shoes’ metaphor) it’s gonna be your job and the monks/aristocrats get their scriptorium back to cook up the information of tomorrow, it’s the other way round. It’ll cost entry level jobs. We have reports on how it leads to deskilling. There’s a good chance it’ll make people more stupid. And on average they already got a 30sec attention span thanks to AI’s online predecessors.
And once we adopt it without “fear”, you’ll get schoolbooks with the information/propaganda the ministry of education prompted for.
It’ll also intensify all the biases and stereotypes out there. If you’re gay or black and the AI has been trained on white straight men’s information… Tough luck. It won’t work for you. I already got this, and I’m not even any of that. Called some shitty AI customer service and twice I had some non-standard issues. It’s never of any help with those. It’s good and efficient at handling the standard customer service case. But once you’re the outlier… There’s no training material and no proper procedure in the harness and you’re basically screwed. I think that’s kinda fascist to demand all people are some homogeneous flock of sheep, and the company never makes mistakes while selling something, otherwise consumers (inadvertandly?) get thrown overboard.
We can also see how it’s a burden on my favourite Free Software projects and independent internet infrastructure. We get hammered by the scrapers, bot armies, everyone gets drowned in pull requests and exploits. While Microsoft and Facebook get to make a profit. They also get to release a new Windows version with a botched German translation. But I don’t think I see a lot of yield for the Free Software community. I’ve tried a few AI-assisted and vibe-coded projects. And they’re mostly shit. And/or discontinued after a week. Counterexamples do exist, but they’re really far and in between. While I and my peer group, we’re still at the receiving end of all the harm caused.
The printing press is way more egalitarian. It doesn’t favour printing the bible over any other book. Heck, you can even print radical new ideas. AI will try to push you towards the old stuff it’s seen in the training material due to the way it works. And whatever the tech oligarchs deem acceptable. (And that’s another factor, the printing press isn’t controlled by the Chinese government, nor the corrupt US tech bros.)
I really don’t think it’s a neutral tool. It’s the opposite of that. And many tools aren’t neutral. For example guns. Some countries hand them out like there’s no tomorrow. Issue is, they’re force intensifiers and disproportionately used by criminals, mentally ill people… people with a will to use them for what they’re good at, accidents happen… You can have a look at the numbers and compare it to other countried where the citizens are more fearful of guns. Those put strict regulation on top and get 10x less crime in return. And an ungodly amount less gun violence. That’s because the world isn’t neutral towards small metal barrels which fire projectiles. You’d think they’re just a device. But it’s way more complicated than that once we factor in reality.
But yeah, you’re right. Issue isn’t the maths… It’s the fascists being in control of it. We need to get rid of those. After that we can try to come up with some hypothetical, better version of AI. One that comes with equity, a level playing field. Something which doesn’t reinforce stereotypes. Doesn’t steal from poor people and return investment to the rich and powerful. It’s a massive challenge, and completely science fiction unless we do the first step.
Idk, maybe I’m just more subscribed to realism. I’m not opposed to the existence of the concept of mathematics. But I’ll judge a tool by what it’s actually used for. Not what could happen if the world were a different one than the one we live in.
You’re totally right about the current state of affairs with AI technology. It has been misused for net negative outcomes…
But. The very first application of nuclear fission was wiping out two cities in the blink of an eye. Should we have immediately declared all nuclear tech as evil/facist and thrown it away? Of course not… there was a lot of fear mongering about nuclear power in the years that followed, but i’m glad that we now have clean, reliable nuclear generators and other nuclear enabled tech.
I don’t think this is a valid way to argue. Let’s assume what you say is true, and think again:
Humanity declares all nuclear fission to be fascist tech and never develops mutual destruction, nor nuclear power plants. Now they have some oil crisis in the 70s and they’re forced to invest massively in renewables. Develop high yield solar cells earlier than we did. Now it’s 2000. The whole planet runs on clean energy, in fact there’s cheap energy in abundance. Economy is booming and by 2020 everyone has a flying car. Also the cold war never happened and everyone in the middle east has been living in peace for 50 years because there wasn’t many proxy wars between the US and USSR… Awesome! It was exactly the right move to immediately declare it evil and throw it out.
(Subsequently they have to deal with the massive energy surplus during daytime. That’s bled off in large datacenters and used to calculate the cure to cancer, the flu etc, which is done by 2030. Now they’re calculating the holy grail.)
Are you actually saying nuclear power is an inherently facist technology that should have been ended before it started?
Space travel, satellites, and all related tech are also facist
IBM worked with the nazis, so throw out your phone and your computers…
nothing in this world will ever pass lemmy’s purity tests…
Honestly, i’m pretty sure both of us are on the same page… but lemmy demands that things be black and white, good and evil. You havr to be 100% against AI or be labelled a facist enabler
You laid down a hypothetical situation. It was kinda your idea to talk about an alternate reality where humanity thinks nuclear is fascist… You said lets assume everyone thinks it is, what would be the consequences? And I said, yeah, let’s assume that for the sake of argument. And I went with it. That doesn’t make it my opinion.
I guess what I mainly wanted to say is: We’re writing science fiction stories here. Nobody knows what would have happened if history had been very different. You’re simply asserting it would have turned out bad. But it could also have turned out great. All we know is this timeline. So we’re bound to think every change from the status quo must be worse. But we don’t necessarily live in the best of possible worlds. Maybe the absence of nuclear power would be bad. Maybe it’d be great, as I laid down. Why shouldn’t it?
Please let’s stop with the escalation here. Nobody talked about IBM or space travel. And we’re definitely on the same page with refusing to make everything some radical extreme.
The ONLY point i was trying to make in my top level comment is that maths/technology/physics are not inherently good or bad or facist… we’ve discussed many examples of tech being used for both good and bad.
But it seems lemmy has decided (by downvotes) that AI is indeed 100% facist, with no future possibility of doing anything good
Consider that you’re comparing hundreds of years of the printing press without much lived-context, vs about 3 years of LLMs in the context of the country you live in. It’s not the case that when the printing press was invented, that suddenly everyone had access to a bunch of free, unbiased information. It was a complex piece of machinery, it took decades to be adopted widely, and when it did, it wasn’t in the hands of the proletariat at first. The people wielding it most effectively were kings. And in the present day, if you live in China today, odds are you are not nearly as pessimistic about the advent of AI as people in the west, primarily because your government has actively taken steps to make you feel safe. Most recently, China made it outright illegal to replace workers with AI. Say what you will about China, but I think americans would like to see something even 1/10th this effective right now.
I otherwise can’t disagree with your summary of the current sad state of AI. The only part I would contend with is that, while it can be misused to “make people more stupid”, when wielded correctly it is also a great tool for education. It is able to point you in the right direction of the information you’re looking for faster than any other algorithm. Like with any new information, you have to be trained in the ways of skepticism. You have to know how to vet the output for yourself. But it’s so much faster at finding that relevant information for vetting than combing through reams of irrelevant text, or renting time from a domain expert, if you’re privileged enough to have access to one. Used correctly, LLMs are an incredible accelerator for learning.
And while not all open models are full open-training, there are many viable open-weight models that you can both fine-tune on your own content, and run locally so that no one is MITMing your prompts; and they do rival the best that openai/anthropic/etc. have to offer. There is currently a whole ecosystem of normal people iterating on various open models outside of the purview of the oligarchs. Yes, we’re in a hardware shortage right now, which super sucks, but we’re still talking on the order of thousands to 10s of thousands to have your own model running, not hundreds of thousands to millions.
Outside of LLMs, we are seeing breakthroughs in healthcare. A year ago, doctors were leveraging AI to significantly speed up chemo treatment schedules, leading to a measurable number of lives saved. And just last week we saw Moderna announce a personalized cancer vaccine pass phase 3 testing! The ability to create a personalized vaccine that teaches your immune system how to fight your cancer cells in spite of them constantly mutating was thought to be impossible even 5y ago. Meanwhile, the work is still ongoing, but AI seems promising in its ability to approximate solutions to previously intractable problems in fusion power generation.
Issue isn’t the maths… It’s the fascists being in control of it. We need to get rid of those.
Yep, that’s all I’m claiming. To me, the active ingredient for fascism is fear. The internet could be full of all the slop propaganda that grok can cook up, but if people aren’t afraid of their neighbors or afraid of losing their livelihood, it’s all rendered powerless. We can take 100 specific steps to combat fascism, but to quote one of my favorite metal albums, “the fear is what keeps us here”.
Hmmh. I’m really unsure about how to compare timeframes. Those were medieval times. Everything was slow to impossible. Nowadays I can communicate information from here to America within a fraction of a second. Back then they weren’t even aware of the Americas. And there wasn’t any hardware store to buy the material needed. They had to invent the oil-based paint, have a bunch of workers dig up the metal, cut down trees, carpenters and goldsmiths… Nonetheless within 40 years they went from invention to 110 printing presses all across Europe. I think that’s crazy fast given the situation. And it really took off after that. Not long after we got it to carry the Reformation. And some century later the Scientific Revolution. (And none of those we’re good things for the kings.)
And 3 years ago is an arbitrary point in time. Neural networks were invented 70 years ago. It’s been 50 years since the first AI hype with expert systems. 40 years since the second AI winter. And now 4 years after the breakthrough of LLMs. It’s really difficult to compare the two. And I personally don’t think LLMs are anywhere close to proper AI. They’re great and all. But also fairly limited in what they can do. For example they can’t update their weights while running. So there’s no learning nor adapting to the environment. Even remembering something isn’t really possible and has to be added on top. And I wonder if we can make them reliable enough for some tasks. Seems impossible to me with current tech. We still need some time to develop the first customer service chatbot which isn’t vulnerable to prompt injection or which doesn’t on occasion “hallucinate” terms and services and procedures. And just lie to the customers.
I don’t really get what you mean by fear. It’s certainly a thing. But I don’t think it is mainstream complaint #1 anymore. I come from a culture where we often meet new things with a healthy(?) dose of skepticism. I don’t see anything wrong with that. And a lot of the criticism regarding AI isn’t concerned with fear. It’s about Elon Musk putting up 6 dirty (and slightly illegal) gas power plants next to your backyard. Sam Altman polluting the environment and making electricity, computer chips and everything more expensive for you. And some idiots starting an investment bubble that requires AI to displace 30% of the human workforce by 203x or it will pop and have catastrophic effects on the stock exchange, including your retirement fund. I mean I’m positive we’ll manage to get by in some form… But I think it’s natural to feel a lot of rejection towards all of that.
I’m really unsure about how to compare timeframes.
Totally fair. I think the relevant difference is that we’re still in the middle of the advent of this technology, we still have a hardware shortage that limits access to it, and it began as we were already entering a crisis era and economic downturn. From our vantage point, we only see the damage caused by the tech, not the potential long term impact, and we are (rationally) assuming the worst.
But if a new scientific revolution could happen as a result of AI for the betterment of humanity, do we want to accidentally prevent that by throwing it out with fascism?
(And if that is in our future, the next question historians 500y from now will ask is, could it have even been avoided? Much like we could ask now, was there a timeline where the original printing presses were destroyed out of fear of corrupting the masses? And realistically, how long would that have lasted before a new one was built?)
3 years ago is an arbitrary point in time. Neural networks were invented 70 years ago.
But we both know that when people say “fuck AI” they’re not talking about anything other than generative AI made in the last few years.
I don’t really get what you mean by fear…I think it’s natural to feel a lot of rejection towards all of that.
Fear has defined the Trump era for the last 10+ years. It is why countries all over the world are tilting to the right. It is the necessary ingredient for fascism to gain traction. It happened during the great depression all over the world, even in the US, and it’s happening now.
I’m not saying it’s an unnatural or unreasonable reaction, I’m saying it’s causing democracies to be prone to rash decisions. If you recall, this thread is about the use of AI in FOSS projects. The most prominent sentiment by 99% of people in this thread is “fuck AI, burn it down and anyone who uses it”. And if that fear-based reaction is what prevents well-meaning, intelligent open source maintainers from being allowed to leverage an objectively powerful phenomenon to responsibly and ethically usher in a new scientific/FOSS revolution, we would be remiss to stifle that opportunity out of fear.
Edit: and to be completely honest, I don’t know who is upvoting me, because it’s very uncharacteristic of randos to follow a thread this dense between two people. I get the sense that there are bots in this thread voting for/against their favorite ideologies.
Hmmh. I sometimes struggle to emphasize. I don’t live in the US. Culture and politics are a bit different here. We certainly have those dynamics as well. But I don’t think we’re (yet) at a majority of the population living in constant fear. We Germans tend to be less open towards new technology, though. For other reasons. We always sell our souls to American big tech eventually. But it’s always met with some initial reluctance/backlash.
I’m not sure about your point about fascism. I mean there’s some inflation with how people use the word… But proper fascism is really, really bad. All my grandparents had to suffer through it. Somehow they survived. But it cost like 70 million lives. And most cities here were turned into burning piles of trash. You kinda want to avoid it. Even at a substantial cost. And my place isn’t the only example. We have plenty wars and fascists on earth. Constantly. Fear isn’t the right tool to avoid it, though. Being clever and education are good strategies.
Ultimately it’s certainly hard to judge some hypothetical future. I still don’t see any reason to completely sell out to some specific big companies. I mean they sometimes do come up with good products. Sometimes their path to profit is scattered with dead bodies. Could be anything unless there’s accountability and regulation. And it’s not either/or… We could as well have some less nasty company do the research. Or do it a bit more slowly… Maybe that’ll take 10 years longer but we get less people killed and less permanent harm done to the environment. There’s not just one path forwards.
I fully agree on the atmosphere and sentiment,. It’s really hard to talk about AI. Especially online. Everyone is yelling and doing identity politics. Most people don’t have a clue how it works. And/or they believe in some falsehoods. I think the best way is to just tell it how it is. Quite a lot of people won’t listen. But they’re not listening anyways.
Be a bit careful with the evil companies, though. I don’t think Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, Elon Musk or the Chinese government act in your, or my best interest. I’d advise not to be naïve about that. They always tell nice stories. Promise all kinds of stuff. Politicians do the same thing. It’s their job. It doesn’t have to come true, though, by any means. In fact the more they promise, the more likely it is they’re trying to manipulate you.
This isn’t really connected to the technology and science though. Whether AI is going to succeed and improve from a scientific perspective is yet another can of worms. I still strongly doubt LLMs are going to be the direct predecessor to strong AI or something properly “clever”, but we’ll see about that.
To be clear, I’m saying the opposite. Fear is the necessary ingredient that causes fascism. Everyone is seeing wealth inequality, and jobs going away, and cost of living rising, and (depending on the country) healthcare costs rising and quality getting worse. There is a lot of fear going around all over the world, and that’s the classic environment for a demagogue to step in, point at a scapegoat, and stoke populism. As we’ve learned in the US in the last decade, it’s a short jump from there to fascism, and Germany and Italy weren’t the only countries to learn the same lesson back during the great depression. Canada was about to elect their own version of Trump, but instead elected Carney in direct response to Trump’s aggression. So I’m confident if it wasn’t Germany back in the 30s, it would have been someone else, possibly even the US. We did our own internment camp stuff towards the japanese, and there was famously a pro-nazi rally that was held at Madison Square Garden in NYC in 1939. The fear was everywhere, it just came to a head with Germany first.
You kinda want to avoid it.
Hah, understatement. And yet democracies still reliably fall for it. And the reason is they have fears that make them prone to exploitation.
I still don’t see any reason to completely sell out to some specific big companies…they’re trying to manipulate you.
Absolutely not what I’m suggesting. The opposite. As I mentioned before, I tend to believe that any models trained on stolen public data should be made public domain, and to whatever extent possible, the companies using them should need to license the resulting models from us.
Edit: but I’m specifically against any govts taking a stake in these companies, because that’s effectively a bailout for them. They would love to unload their risk on the people.
I don’t care for sea lions, since I can train a model on my machine today.
Calling out the top-end number of the broligarchs makes you sound like you are either attempting to be sensationalist - or worse are arguing about something you don’t fully understand
I’m flattered you think I have the money for that, but I really don’t. People do all kinds of silly stuff as a hobby. But even engineering an airplane in my garage is more achievable than this. And then they bought up all the computer chips and GPUs to make it even more unaffordable. And the way law works, I’ll go to jail after pirating 20 books. It’s just the tech oligarchy who’s allowed to steal. That’s another level of associated fascism. We don’t get equity. There’s different rules for different people.
For Zuck et al it’s alright to torrent porn, pirate all the Hollywood movies out there, music… Musk can keep his revenge porn service… But @hendrik: Straight to jail if they try.
tools shape our perception of the world, and in turn us. neutrality is tacit approval. when a fascist company develops a technology, and some people say “we don’t want technology developed by fascists”, the “compromise” position is “you could have some technology developed by fascists”
if you look into operation paperclip and all the politics following that, you’ll see that there was a ton of pushback. the german scientists were literal nazis, but in the worst way; they were the compromising kind. only that the compromise was between “kill people” and “don’t kill people”, so the result was “kill some people”. and living in that environment changes your perception of the world. as the song goes, “once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? that’s not my department” says wehrner von braun
Honestly “just a tool” is the same as “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. The phrase frames the context as if EVERY tool can have plenty of reasonable non-destructive purposes.
Honestly it feels like I’m taking crazy pills some days. I run local models on my system, and the technology is legitimately fascinating. I am not talking about the broligarchy, merely the underlying technology is weird and fun to play with.
One thing is for certain - the box Pandora had this thing lying around in has been kicked open, and it cannot be shut. We’ll just have to figure out what that means for all of us.
One argument is that those who make LLMs have a high amount of control their output. It’s giving a lot of control of open source to the whims of those companies to become reliant on LLMs
Think about the potential for providers to add plausibly deniable backdoors, general lower quality code, etc. when they think you are working on a project they care about. The precedent is there with Anthropic publicly stating that Fable was built to intentional sabotage quality when they think you are working on AI research related tasks or distillation. That kind of stuff can be subtly baked into open models as well
i understand there are a lot of facist AI companies, but how can an entire technology be facist?
AI companies and governments are spreading anti-ai propaganda to push for regulations that will benefit them and limit the usage people can do of the technology.
i understand there are a lot of facist AI companies, but how can an entire technology be facist?
That’s like saying space travel is facist because pretty much all of it was built on work by literal nazi scientists.
Do we throw out all the related advances too? Satellite communications, GPS, etc.?
Good question. I think there’s some truth to it. Somehow a lot of fascist people love AI. For example a certain president posts a lot of gen AI pictures, sometimes videos of himself dropping poo on the citizens. Other regimes just use it to manifest some video surveillance dystopia. And to be frank, there is no other tech to enable surveillance on that level.
It’s also a good tool to manipulate people on a grand scale, make custom propaganda, exploit psychology…
LLMs and related systems are made in a completely top-down way. They’re under control of the Chinese government and a few select US tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and their companies. They get to shape it. And they’re kind of Anti-Robin-Hoods. They steal from the poor, the workers and artists, and give to the rich. They get more power and money. And I didn’t yet mention Peter Thiel and some other companies who are working on some AI assisted version of doomsday, or at minimum some scifi dystopia with predictive policing and that kind of stuff.
Also comes with a few fascist side-effects. Like disposession of land, polluting the environment and poor people get to suffer the consequences of climate change. Rich people can just buy a new house and clean water…
I mean not all AI is fascist. But I see lots of reason to believe it aligns well with fascist wet dreams. And not so much with their opponents’.
On contrary: Space travel helps all of us. I get to learn new science things. Get to use my sat nav in the car… 400 TV channels… a more precise weather forecast… We needed to advance material science for space travel, push solar cell technology, which I can make use of as of today to break free from big oil… I also got to contribute some taxpayer money to make it happen, so it wasn’t just forced upon me by oligarchs…
The printing press has been a crucial tool for fascist propagandists ever since its inception. Does that make the technology fascist?
I just got done reading The Demon Haunted World, and can’t help but draw a comparison. It’s perfectly reasonable to be afraid for the future of democracy right now, but it really feels like people think AI is powered by literal sprites, dancing around on puppet strings at the whim of the fascists who summoned them. It’s math. Math isn’t ideological. It is simply a fact of the universe that an LLM is possible.
Yeah, we have to make sure it is applied responsibly, because yeah it’s a very powerful phenomenon. Yes, they were made using stolen information, and I fully believe that all LLMs and training data should be fully open sourced for public use as a result, and making any profit from them is unethical. It’s stealing from Peter and Paul to sell to Peter and Paul.
But one day fascists are bound to fail, and you know what will still exist in the world that comes next? AI/LLMs/some future iteration of a transformer-based neural network. It’s not the first technology loved and/or invented by fascists, and it won’t be the last. But I think in a panic, people are willing to burn down anything in an 50ft radius of any fascist. Keep the knowledge, ditch the fascism, stop acting out of fear.
I really think those are two different pairs of shoes. The printing press allowed people to make information more accessible to the masses. A lot of people got more educated because of it. Of course as a tool it can also be used for evil. But in reality that’s not what happened. It’s mainly been used for good. It displaced some jobs, but that wasn’t the people’s jobs, but monks in the scriptorium. Other people got to learn to read and write because of it. In fact we went from being able to read as something special, to almost everyone gets to learn to read because of it.
With AI on the other hand (or foot, to stick with the ‘pairs of shoes’ metaphor) it’s gonna be your job and the monks/aristocrats get their scriptorium back to cook up the information of tomorrow, it’s the other way round. It’ll cost entry level jobs. We have reports on how it leads to deskilling. There’s a good chance it’ll make people more stupid. And on average they already got a 30sec attention span thanks to AI’s online predecessors.
And once we adopt it without “fear”, you’ll get schoolbooks with the information/propaganda the ministry of education prompted for.
It’ll also intensify all the biases and stereotypes out there. If you’re gay or black and the AI has been trained on white straight men’s information… Tough luck. It won’t work for you. I already got this, and I’m not even any of that. Called some shitty AI customer service and twice I had some non-standard issues. It’s never of any help with those. It’s good and efficient at handling the standard customer service case. But once you’re the outlier… There’s no training material and no proper procedure in the harness and you’re basically screwed. I think that’s kinda fascist to demand all people are some homogeneous flock of sheep, and the company never makes mistakes while selling something, otherwise consumers (inadvertandly?) get thrown overboard.
We can also see how it’s a burden on my favourite Free Software projects and independent internet infrastructure. We get hammered by the scrapers, bot armies, everyone gets drowned in pull requests and exploits. While Microsoft and Facebook get to make a profit. They also get to release a new Windows version with a botched German translation. But I don’t think I see a lot of yield for the Free Software community. I’ve tried a few AI-assisted and vibe-coded projects. And they’re mostly shit. And/or discontinued after a week. Counterexamples do exist, but they’re really far and in between. While I and my peer group, we’re still at the receiving end of all the harm caused.
The printing press is way more egalitarian. It doesn’t favour printing the bible over any other book. Heck, you can even print radical new ideas. AI will try to push you towards the old stuff it’s seen in the training material due to the way it works. And whatever the tech oligarchs deem acceptable. (And that’s another factor, the printing press isn’t controlled by the Chinese government, nor the corrupt US tech bros.)
I really don’t think it’s a neutral tool. It’s the opposite of that. And many tools aren’t neutral. For example guns. Some countries hand them out like there’s no tomorrow. Issue is, they’re force intensifiers and disproportionately used by criminals, mentally ill people… people with a will to use them for what they’re good at, accidents happen… You can have a look at the numbers and compare it to other countried where the citizens are more fearful of guns. Those put strict regulation on top and get 10x less crime in return. And an ungodly amount less gun violence. That’s because the world isn’t neutral towards small metal barrels which fire projectiles. You’d think they’re just a device. But it’s way more complicated than that once we factor in reality.
But yeah, you’re right. Issue isn’t the maths… It’s the fascists being in control of it. We need to get rid of those. After that we can try to come up with some hypothetical, better version of AI. One that comes with equity, a level playing field. Something which doesn’t reinforce stereotypes. Doesn’t steal from poor people and return investment to the rich and powerful. It’s a massive challenge, and completely science fiction unless we do the first step.
Idk, maybe I’m just more subscribed to realism. I’m not opposed to the existence of the concept of mathematics. But I’ll judge a tool by what it’s actually used for. Not what could happen if the world were a different one than the one we live in.
You’re totally right about the current state of affairs with AI technology. It has been misused for net negative outcomes…
But. The very first application of nuclear fission was wiping out two cities in the blink of an eye. Should we have immediately declared all nuclear tech as evil/facist and thrown it away? Of course not… there was a lot of fear mongering about nuclear power in the years that followed, but i’m glad that we now have clean, reliable nuclear generators and other nuclear enabled tech.
I don’t think this is a valid way to argue. Let’s assume what you say is true, and think again:
Humanity declares all nuclear fission to be fascist tech and never develops mutual destruction, nor nuclear power plants. Now they have some oil crisis in the 70s and they’re forced to invest massively in renewables. Develop high yield solar cells earlier than we did. Now it’s 2000. The whole planet runs on clean energy, in fact there’s cheap energy in abundance. Economy is booming and by 2020 everyone has a flying car. Also the cold war never happened and everyone in the middle east has been living in peace for 50 years because there wasn’t many proxy wars between the US and USSR… Awesome! It was exactly the right move to immediately declare it evil and throw it out.
(Subsequently they have to deal with the massive energy surplus during daytime. That’s bled off in large datacenters and used to calculate the cure to cancer, the flu etc, which is done by 2030. Now they’re calculating the holy grail.)
Are you actually saying nuclear power is an inherently facist technology that should have been ended before it started?
Space travel, satellites, and all related tech are also facist
IBM worked with the nazis, so throw out your phone and your computers…
nothing in this world will ever pass lemmy’s purity tests…
Honestly, i’m pretty sure both of us are on the same page… but lemmy demands that things be black and white, good and evil. You havr to be 100% against AI or be labelled a facist enabler
I think this is a bit of a misunderstanding.
You laid down a hypothetical situation. It was kinda your idea to talk about an alternate reality where humanity thinks nuclear is fascist… You said lets assume everyone thinks it is, what would be the consequences? And I said, yeah, let’s assume that for the sake of argument. And I went with it. That doesn’t make it my opinion.
I guess what I mainly wanted to say is: We’re writing science fiction stories here. Nobody knows what would have happened if history had been very different. You’re simply asserting it would have turned out bad. But it could also have turned out great. All we know is this timeline. So we’re bound to think every change from the status quo must be worse. But we don’t necessarily live in the best of possible worlds. Maybe the absence of nuclear power would be bad. Maybe it’d be great, as I laid down. Why shouldn’t it?
Please let’s stop with the escalation here. Nobody talked about IBM or space travel. And we’re definitely on the same page with refusing to make everything some radical extreme.
Your original reply to me:
Again, i think we’re saying the same thing…
The ONLY point i was trying to make in my top level comment is that maths/technology/physics are not inherently good or bad or facist… we’ve discussed many examples of tech being used for both good and bad.
But it seems lemmy has decided (by downvotes) that AI is indeed 100% facist, with no future possibility of doing anything good
Consider that you’re comparing hundreds of years of the printing press without much lived-context, vs about 3 years of LLMs in the context of the country you live in. It’s not the case that when the printing press was invented, that suddenly everyone had access to a bunch of free, unbiased information. It was a complex piece of machinery, it took decades to be adopted widely, and when it did, it wasn’t in the hands of the proletariat at first. The people wielding it most effectively were kings. And in the present day, if you live in China today, odds are you are not nearly as pessimistic about the advent of AI as people in the west, primarily because your government has actively taken steps to make you feel safe. Most recently, China made it outright illegal to replace workers with AI. Say what you will about China, but I think americans would like to see something even 1/10th this effective right now.
I otherwise can’t disagree with your summary of the current sad state of AI. The only part I would contend with is that, while it can be misused to “make people more stupid”, when wielded correctly it is also a great tool for education. It is able to point you in the right direction of the information you’re looking for faster than any other algorithm. Like with any new information, you have to be trained in the ways of skepticism. You have to know how to vet the output for yourself. But it’s so much faster at finding that relevant information for vetting than combing through reams of irrelevant text, or renting time from a domain expert, if you’re privileged enough to have access to one. Used correctly, LLMs are an incredible accelerator for learning.
And while not all open models are full open-training, there are many viable open-weight models that you can both fine-tune on your own content, and run locally so that no one is MITMing your prompts; and they do rival the best that openai/anthropic/etc. have to offer. There is currently a whole ecosystem of normal people iterating on various open models outside of the purview of the oligarchs. Yes, we’re in a hardware shortage right now, which super sucks, but we’re still talking on the order of thousands to 10s of thousands to have your own model running, not hundreds of thousands to millions.
Outside of LLMs, we are seeing breakthroughs in healthcare. A year ago, doctors were leveraging AI to significantly speed up chemo treatment schedules, leading to a measurable number of lives saved. And just last week we saw Moderna announce a personalized cancer vaccine pass phase 3 testing! The ability to create a personalized vaccine that teaches your immune system how to fight your cancer cells in spite of them constantly mutating was thought to be impossible even 5y ago. Meanwhile, the work is still ongoing, but AI seems promising in its ability to approximate solutions to previously intractable problems in fusion power generation.
Yep, that’s all I’m claiming. To me, the active ingredient for fascism is fear. The internet could be full of all the slop propaganda that grok can cook up, but if people aren’t afraid of their neighbors or afraid of losing their livelihood, it’s all rendered powerless. We can take 100 specific steps to combat fascism, but to quote one of my favorite metal albums, “the fear is what keeps us here”.
Hmmh. I’m really unsure about how to compare timeframes. Those were medieval times. Everything was slow to impossible. Nowadays I can communicate information from here to America within a fraction of a second. Back then they weren’t even aware of the Americas. And there wasn’t any hardware store to buy the material needed. They had to invent the oil-based paint, have a bunch of workers dig up the metal, cut down trees, carpenters and goldsmiths… Nonetheless within 40 years they went from invention to 110 printing presses all across Europe. I think that’s crazy fast given the situation. And it really took off after that. Not long after we got it to carry the Reformation. And some century later the Scientific Revolution. (And none of those we’re good things for the kings.)
And 3 years ago is an arbitrary point in time. Neural networks were invented 70 years ago. It’s been 50 years since the first AI hype with expert systems. 40 years since the second AI winter. And now 4 years after the breakthrough of LLMs. It’s really difficult to compare the two. And I personally don’t think LLMs are anywhere close to proper AI. They’re great and all. But also fairly limited in what they can do. For example they can’t update their weights while running. So there’s no learning nor adapting to the environment. Even remembering something isn’t really possible and has to be added on top. And I wonder if we can make them reliable enough for some tasks. Seems impossible to me with current tech. We still need some time to develop the first customer service chatbot which isn’t vulnerable to prompt injection or which doesn’t on occasion “hallucinate” terms and services and procedures. And just lie to the customers.
I don’t really get what you mean by fear. It’s certainly a thing. But I don’t think it is mainstream complaint #1 anymore. I come from a culture where we often meet new things with a healthy(?) dose of skepticism. I don’t see anything wrong with that. And a lot of the criticism regarding AI isn’t concerned with fear. It’s about Elon Musk putting up 6 dirty (and slightly illegal) gas power plants next to your backyard. Sam Altman polluting the environment and making electricity, computer chips and everything more expensive for you. And some idiots starting an investment bubble that requires AI to displace 30% of the human workforce by 203x or it will pop and have catastrophic effects on the stock exchange, including your retirement fund. I mean I’m positive we’ll manage to get by in some form… But I think it’s natural to feel a lot of rejection towards all of that.
Totally fair. I think the relevant difference is that we’re still in the middle of the advent of this technology, we still have a hardware shortage that limits access to it, and it began as we were already entering a crisis era and economic downturn. From our vantage point, we only see the damage caused by the tech, not the potential long term impact, and we are (rationally) assuming the worst.
But if a new scientific revolution could happen as a result of AI for the betterment of humanity, do we want to accidentally prevent that by throwing it out with fascism?
(And if that is in our future, the next question historians 500y from now will ask is, could it have even been avoided? Much like we could ask now, was there a timeline where the original printing presses were destroyed out of fear of corrupting the masses? And realistically, how long would that have lasted before a new one was built?)
But we both know that when people say “fuck AI” they’re not talking about anything other than generative AI made in the last few years.
Fear has defined the Trump era for the last 10+ years. It is why countries all over the world are tilting to the right. It is the necessary ingredient for fascism to gain traction. It happened during the great depression all over the world, even in the US, and it’s happening now.
I’m not saying it’s an unnatural or unreasonable reaction, I’m saying it’s causing democracies to be prone to rash decisions. If you recall, this thread is about the use of AI in FOSS projects. The most prominent sentiment by 99% of people in this thread is “fuck AI, burn it down and anyone who uses it”. And if that fear-based reaction is what prevents well-meaning, intelligent open source maintainers from being allowed to leverage an objectively powerful phenomenon to responsibly and ethically usher in a new scientific/FOSS revolution, we would be remiss to stifle that opportunity out of fear.
Edit: and to be completely honest, I don’t know who is upvoting me, because it’s very uncharacteristic of randos to follow a thread this dense between two people. I get the sense that there are bots in this thread voting for/against their favorite ideologies.
Hmmh. I sometimes struggle to emphasize. I don’t live in the US. Culture and politics are a bit different here. We certainly have those dynamics as well. But I don’t think we’re (yet) at a majority of the population living in constant fear. We Germans tend to be less open towards new technology, though. For other reasons. We always sell our souls to American big tech eventually. But it’s always met with some initial reluctance/backlash.
I’m not sure about your point about fascism. I mean there’s some inflation with how people use the word… But proper fascism is really, really bad. All my grandparents had to suffer through it. Somehow they survived. But it cost like 70 million lives. And most cities here were turned into burning piles of trash. You kinda want to avoid it. Even at a substantial cost. And my place isn’t the only example. We have plenty wars and fascists on earth. Constantly. Fear isn’t the right tool to avoid it, though. Being clever and education are good strategies.
Ultimately it’s certainly hard to judge some hypothetical future. I still don’t see any reason to completely sell out to some specific big companies. I mean they sometimes do come up with good products. Sometimes their path to profit is scattered with dead bodies. Could be anything unless there’s accountability and regulation. And it’s not either/or… We could as well have some less nasty company do the research. Or do it a bit more slowly… Maybe that’ll take 10 years longer but we get less people killed and less permanent harm done to the environment. There’s not just one path forwards.
I fully agree on the atmosphere and sentiment,. It’s really hard to talk about AI. Especially online. Everyone is yelling and doing identity politics. Most people don’t have a clue how it works. And/or they believe in some falsehoods. I think the best way is to just tell it how it is. Quite a lot of people won’t listen. But they’re not listening anyways.
Be a bit careful with the evil companies, though. I don’t think Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, Elon Musk or the Chinese government act in your, or my best interest. I’d advise not to be naïve about that. They always tell nice stories. Promise all kinds of stuff. Politicians do the same thing. It’s their job. It doesn’t have to come true, though, by any means. In fact the more they promise, the more likely it is they’re trying to manipulate you.
This isn’t really connected to the technology and science though. Whether AI is going to succeed and improve from a scientific perspective is yet another can of worms. I still strongly doubt LLMs are going to be the direct predecessor to strong AI or something properly “clever”, but we’ll see about that.
To be clear, I’m saying the opposite. Fear is the necessary ingredient that causes fascism. Everyone is seeing wealth inequality, and jobs going away, and cost of living rising, and (depending on the country) healthcare costs rising and quality getting worse. There is a lot of fear going around all over the world, and that’s the classic environment for a demagogue to step in, point at a scapegoat, and stoke populism. As we’ve learned in the US in the last decade, it’s a short jump from there to fascism, and Germany and Italy weren’t the only countries to learn the same lesson back during the great depression. Canada was about to elect their own version of Trump, but instead elected Carney in direct response to Trump’s aggression. So I’m confident if it wasn’t Germany back in the 30s, it would have been someone else, possibly even the US. We did our own internment camp stuff towards the japanese, and there was famously a pro-nazi rally that was held at Madison Square Garden in NYC in 1939. The fear was everywhere, it just came to a head with Germany first.
Hah, understatement. And yet democracies still reliably fall for it. And the reason is they have fears that make them prone to exploitation.
Absolutely not what I’m suggesting. The opposite. As I mentioned before, I tend to believe that any models trained on stolen public data should be made public domain, and to whatever extent possible, the companies using them should need to license the resulting models from us.
Edit: but I’m specifically against any govts taking a stake in these companies, because that’s effectively a bailout for them. They would love to unload their risk on the people.
You can train a model. Today.
You got a spare $80 million laying around to train one?
I don’t care for sea lions, since I can train a model on my machine today.
Calling out the top-end number of the broligarchs makes you sound like you are either attempting to be sensationalist - or worse are arguing about something you don’t fully understand
Care to share your achievement? So we can learn something?
I’m flattered you think I have the money for that, but I really don’t. People do all kinds of silly stuff as a hobby. But even engineering an airplane in my garage is more achievable than this. And then they bought up all the computer chips and GPUs to make it even more unaffordable. And the way law works, I’ll go to jail after pirating 20 books. It’s just the tech oligarchy who’s allowed to steal. That’s another level of associated fascism. We don’t get equity. There’s different rules for different people.
For Zuck et al it’s alright to torrent porn, pirate all the Hollywood movies out there, music… Musk can keep his revenge porn service… But @hendrik: Straight to jail if they try.
Sure, because what we need is more environmental destruction.
This comment makes no sense. How is training a local model on my machine destroying the environment?
tools shape our perception of the world, and in turn us. neutrality is tacit approval. when a fascist company develops a technology, and some people say “we don’t want technology developed by fascists”, the “compromise” position is “you could have some technology developed by fascists”
if you look into operation paperclip and all the politics following that, you’ll see that there was a ton of pushback. the german scientists were literal nazis, but in the worst way; they were the compromising kind. only that the compromise was between “kill people” and “don’t kill people”, so the result was “kill some people”. and living in that environment changes your perception of the world. as the song goes, “once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? that’s not my department” says wehrner von braun
“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”
Over the past 5 years or so, I have really come to despise the phrase “just a tool”.
Honestly “just a tool” is the same as “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. The phrase frames the context as if EVERY tool can have plenty of reasonable non-destructive purposes.
Honestly it feels like I’m taking crazy pills some days. I run local models on my system, and the technology is legitimately fascinating. I am not talking about the broligarchy, merely the underlying technology is weird and fun to play with.
One thing is for certain - the box Pandora had this thing lying around in has been kicked open, and it cannot be shut. We’ll just have to figure out what that means for all of us.
One argument is that those who make LLMs have a high amount of control their output. It’s giving a lot of control of open source to the whims of those companies to become reliant on LLMs
Think about the potential for providers to add plausibly deniable backdoors, general lower quality code, etc. when they think you are working on a project they care about. The precedent is there with Anthropic publicly stating that Fable was built to intentional sabotage quality when they think you are working on AI research related tasks or distillation. That kind of stuff can be subtly baked into open models as well
Tell us more. Your ideas sound unique.
edit: do you all actually need a /s to see sarcasm?
Go fuck yourself with your tired, “bUt WhAt aBoUt VaCciNeS,” argument.
Search up on TESCREAL!
Why would I of you’re not even impressed or shocked or whatever by it to tell us what it is or why we would want to
AI companies and governments are spreading anti-ai propaganda to push for regulations that will benefit them and limit the usage people can do of the technology.