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:
There are plenty of them that are not trained through non-consential scraping. Just because some of the people making AI models are assholes don’t mean everyone making AI models is an asshole.
Name one that is actually useful 🤷
You want me to do a basic internet search for you?
Fine: https://www.fairlytrained.org/certified-models
A cursory look shows that those are either toy models with no real usability and/or closed, so not at all what we are talking about here. Try a bit harder, because so far you are just proving my point.
So you admittedly didn’t even look at the models, nor their uses, but have determined that they don’t match your criteria?
If you aren’t going to accept a response just because you don’t like that it contradicts what you want to believe, I’m not going to waste my time engaging with you.
It is unfortunately the most common response from anti-AI people. They ignore everything that contradicts their opinion and beliefs because what they want isn’t to seek a better understanding, they want other people to see their opinions as facts.
Many such cases. I see this all the time when it comes to genocide, or the DNC, or healthcare, or economics, etc.
People can be frustrating
Oh yeah, funny story. They also have some shitty opinions about genocide:
I had a nagging feeling I’d seen them doing dumb shit like that and I looked back and found that gem. They also mod !europe@feddit.org too.
There really isn’t any point in wasting any more time arguing with them, they weren’t arguing in good faith and aren’t going to.
Yeah, I figured that out, and had already blocked them. But thx!
Uff, that is the clearest case of projection I have seen in a long time 🙄.
I am not “anti-AI”, I have run local models on my own hardware and are pretty aware of what is available and possible with them. But every time I point out the clear technical and moral issues with them, some AI-booster comes along, points to something that they clearly didn’t bother to even look into themselves and then ignores everything that contradicts their opinion and beliefs…
Yet, when presented with data that contradicts your point, you sure don’t seem to understand the basics of how they work.
Then why don’t you try doing that here? All you did was ignore data that was counter to your claim.
Oh, you mean like you just did? curiouser and couriouser
Are you trying to troll me? Because the link you shared supports my argument not yours, and if you even looked at it for 5 minutes you would have realized that.
I seem to have looked at the models more than you did. Which one of those has open weights and is more than a toy model?
What about DeepSeek, they have released open weights, and their models are definitely not toys.
DeepSeek is trained via web-scraping (and probably also scraping competing frontier models), so it isn’t ethically trained.
Ok, so to bring the debate back to whether such models are compatible with anarchism, are you saying that even if there were no other issues, your main sticking point is that scraping of every [published] website in existence to train these models was/is non-consentual? Because it didn’t respect some TOS somewhere? I think you’ll find most anarchists don’t give a damn about such things. Surely all human knowledge should be freely available to all, not paywalled behind some business model, or locked in a digital fortress. I mean what do you mean by “ethical” here? Because that’s often a matter of perspective.
Did you? Because based on the post timestamps, you spent literally 5 minutes looking at that list, which doesn’t seem like enough time to look through or test any of those models.
Well, did you? Because like I wrote, from a cursory glance none of these are open weight and a good portion are toy models only.
Yes.
They are open-weight, and I don’t see what being a toy model has to do with anything.
archive.org
edit nvm i thought you meant web scrapers not model builders. theres plenty of useful llms not gonna bother listing them