His argument was literally that
- artists, writers, and programmers are “labor aristocracy” and deserve no respect because they’re sitting around making art and writing code while other people are toiling and laboring,
- genAI is a “free resource” (“it’s free for me to use at work”) that “helps everyone make things” instead of having to rely on skill and expertise and therefore makes everything equal,
- it’s hypocritical of people to be worried about the environmental and societal impact of genAI because “only white people are worried about it now that their hobbies are being threatened and everyone else is catching up”.
Pointing out there there are artists and programmers from every race and economic class, as well as perfectly ordinary people in every walk of life who are all actively being harmed both by the theft of ideas and labor and by the physical effects of gigantic data centers ruining communities, was met with much hand-waving and incredibly impenetrable philosophical jargon.
I’m particularly incensed because I’m as leftist and anticapitalist as they come and this felt like the fuckery some conservative cockwomble would try to come up with to parody socialism, except this guy was completely serious.
One of those situations where you want to reply, but you just drop it because it’s pointless.
People who use terms like “labor aristocracy” are fake leftists, and are almost always like to fetishize workplace injuries, that forever disable people. I can only wish the same happening to them.
It’s important to understand that trash people are usually liars.
Let me guess, they’re a college freshman.
Or a tankie.
So both then
These people walk among us.
LLMs take the intellectual labor of billions and convert it into a form that can be privatized and commodified so capitalists can charge for access. It’s the enclosure of the commons extended to the digital realm.
Universities have been doing this since forever.
Consider that generative AI is a “thing”. That thing can be sold as a product to accrue capital, but that thing can also be given away freely. A socialist government may redistribute land so that every citizen has a plot, but that doesn’t erase history or the fact that the land was originally stolen from native inhabitants when it was colonized.
Capitalism’s backbone is theft. The middle-class is having a hissy-fit now that the forces of capitalism are turning inwards. My critique of Shoshana Zuboff’s book on surveillance-capitalism has been that it’s not a new form of capitalism at all. It’s just capitalism. Only those mechanisms are now being turned towards a previously ‘protected’ class and they really don’t like it when the leopards eat their faces.
Watch out. Describing yourself as “leftist” on Lemmy. Brave choice.
Wow.
Imperialist huh? Just wait until Unga Dunga hears that about his prehistoric cave drawings.
You’re wasting time arguing with a troll. Tell him AI is copypasta for lazy tryhards and offer to buy him a coloring book since it’s essentially the same time. You can even offer to hang the pictures on the refrigerator when he’s done coloring it if he stays inside the lines like a good boy.
(know what’s funny, no one ever colors in a coloring book and says look at this “art” I made. Children are smarter then AI bros.)
People who argue in favor of AI art are, at best, talentless hacks.
genAI is a “free resource” (“it’s free for me to use at work”)
i.e. literally not free, it’s capital the boss allows him to use while on the clock while he works for a wage.
Nothing like arguing socialism and imperialism with people who don’t know what either of those words mean.
AI is built on the unprecedented theft and exploitation of the intellectual labor of the creative working class by greedy capitalists.
Literally the definition of stealing the surplus value
I’ve talked with someone that argued that the concept of intellectual property is inherently capitalist, and therefore it taking the art and other works of people doesn’t matter in the grand scheme.
And I guess I see the point. I don’t agree with it, but I can’t argue that well against it.
That is logical equivalent to saying that because property is a capitalist concept theft is a form of socialism.
So the robber barons are actually socialists too, and wage theft isn’t theft because money shouldn’t exist, and if you can steal candy from a baby that’s ok because ownership doesn’t exist and only the strong survive. Delusional people can justify anything.
It’s pretty twisted, especially when you consider the players involved, as well as who is being exploited, and who is benefitting from AI the most.
Even the top brass within Microsoft are quoted as having said that what they’re doing is the “largest theft of labor in history”, and I tend to agree.
After all, the richest men on Earth are getting richer at the expense of the artist, the thinker, the writer and all forms of intellectual and physical labor. Profit may be theft, but theft is also still theft.
Capitalists always frame socialist programs as theft so… it actually lines up.
This is like saying we don’t need to pay a minimum wage now because under communism each will be provided according to their needs.
IP is a necessary evil under the current system to stop distributors like Instagram, tiktok, or AI companies from taking labor from workers (artists, writers, etc.) without compensation.
That is true… but it’s important to remember, I think, that even under a non-capitalist system, people are still going to care about plagiarism and attribution. Recognizing where an idea came from is a basic sign of respect for the effort that goes into creating them, you know?
It’s also saying that artists’ works shouldn’t be considered personal property. Even as an anarchist, I wouldn’t want people taking my drawings and using them however they wanted without my blessing.
IP is a necessary evil under the current system to stop distributors like Instagram, tiktok, or AI companies from taking labor from workers (artists, writers, etc.) without compensation.
Seemingly this did not work.
Almost like rules dont apply for the ruling class and the whole IP spiel is just, as pointed out, completely and utterly capitalist.
And to think that IP laws would prevent the rich from thieving is hilariously naive.
You’re not really a communist if you don’t think the rich can ever be brought to heel.
Of course they can be brought to heel. But not really with laws of the bourgeois state.
Then you bring them to heel to respect IP.
They dont even pay taxes. IP is FOR THEM and is used against US.
They can only be forced to adhere to laws by constant fear of execution otherwise they “invent” a legal loophole.
Debating with a conservative is like playing chess with a pigeon. They just knock over all the pieces, shit all over the board and strut around like they won.
That’s the thing! This guy actually is a very involved leftist, complete with theory and everything…and then he goes on to say this
They sound like a tankie. Tankies are leftists like Dr. Pepper is a medical doctor
I got the reference! Guessing you’re Canadian?
I wish!
I do wonder if some of this anti ai sentiment is a psyop to keep the proletariat off the tools and away from ai while the bourgeoisie learn to use them to consolidate power.
And with this recent news about Nvidia inflating the price of their chips by paying/guaranteeing neoclouds to take them makes me even more sus
The last computer revolution had to be distributed because the Internet wasn’t good enough yet, but this time they can be ahead of the curve gobbling up all the hardware so they can decide what you can do with these models.
I imagine another world where openai stayed open and Nvidia stayed a consumer company and everyone just has their own little box that can order their shopping or whatever
At the end of the day, these models are compressing all knowledge into something much more accessible, and knowledge is power, so it would be a smart gambit to limit access and spread fear…
At the end of the day, these models are compressing all knowledge into something much more accessible
That’s the thing though: they aren’t. Information has a fundamental maximum level of compression.
In most cases what they’ve captured is the ability to sound plausible, and confident.If you’re being conspiratorial, it’s worth remembering that they’re much better at being persuasive than accurate. You can tell them anything is the truth, and they’ll confidently repeat it, and automatically fill in the most plausible sounding explanation.
I can ask it how relativity works and it will tell me, I can ask it to explain something differently and it will, I can ask it to eli12 and it will dumb it down. Of course there is a maximum compression, that doesn’t make what these learn not useful.
And you can train it to do whatever you want, be confident, be persuasive, be accurate, nothing inherent about the model makes it go one way or another. And if you glue them into another system containing verified facts (database or a wiki or something) then you can very easily get very high accuracy
And we are literally 5 years in since chatgpt dropped and these things have gone from “can finish the line of the function your working on” to “can do basically anything on a computer code wise” …METR stopped doing their horizon benchmark because it got too expensive to develop longer horizon tasks and frontier models have saturated what they already have
I think this is something anti ai crowd miss a lot too, these models are currently as bad as they’ll ever be, all the issues people have are just bugs that can and will be fixed … Or left in depending on the wants of the wannabe overlords running the thing
You’re pointedly wondering if anti AI is a psyop to keep people from using it while we actively have people using it to push agendas. Simpler of two conspiracy theories.
So how do you know it’s explanation of relativity is correct? With a library, you have a notion that there was review. With the traditional Internet research, you have multiple sources. With an LLM you have its unwavering confidence, and when you catch it being wrong a conciliation “you’re totally right to push back on that”.
The models are inherently biased to emulate the patterns in their training set. That leads to communicating like people do in the training set, which if they’re including factual information means “stating facts” as a demeanor, regardless of accuracy.
the issues people have are just bugs that can and will be fixed
My program to climb a ladder to the moon is going great. Every day I’m buying new ladders, climbing higher, putting the new ladder on top of taller and taller buildings and my massive stack of ladders. My progress has been consistent, steady, and relentlessly forward, so there’s no reason to think I’ll ever hit a roadblock.
Training these models is incredibly expensive and it’s far from clear that it’s a financially viable venture.
The overt data processing requirements sets limits on what the minimum infrastructure requirements are.
The big names in the field are aggressively unprofitable.There’s this thing called an AI winter. After a big cycle of hype around AI, people get sick of it and others feel let down or disillusioned by the reality vs the implied benefits. Then the field collapses back to researchers and it repeats in 20-30 years.
Anti ai being psyop and people using it to push agendas are not mutually exclusive
Emulate the training set
People are being paid large amounts of money to build these datasets, and the builders are incentivised for the training set to emulate real data, our OP is a clean example of this
For your point on my relativity comment, Llms are just as capable at producing referenced text as a human. And if the knowledge representation is air tight then hallucination is detectable. Eg llms solved fermats last theorem solved in lean.
Ladder bugs / AI Winter
Idk how ai winter fits here, did you check out the METR long horizon benchmark I mentioned. The bottleneck now is finding tasks it can’t solve.
If you build a ladder to the stars, you don’t have to achieve that goal to land on the moon.
Imagine yourself in 2020…what tasks would you have said was unachievable by a computer in that time? How many of those tasks are trivial in 2026? Fermats last theorem? proof against np hardness of 3 sat?
Anyway guess my point is, don’t kid yourself, these things are powerful, ignoring them and pretending their capabilities haven’t grown since 2022 is naive. And if we let oligarchs run this shit then the next century is gonna be fucking grim. Knowledge is power…arm up
That’s a part of it, but the proletariat are useful idiots, too. They can take the Anti-AI sentiment to get them to back “anti-AI” representatives and senators.
Those legislators will support AI “regulation” written by-and-for the top-companies in the industry.
This will make it incredibly cost-prohibitive for anybody to enter the AI industry new, and cements the top companies at the top, while the smaller companies run around spending every last cent they’ve got to meet the regulations…and when they fail, they will be scooped up by the big cats.
Don’t be surprised if you start seeing the big guys supporting (or, at least, not disagreeing with) policies that initially seem counter to their interests. It’s a long game thing.
That’s my prediction, at least…based upon, well, nearly every other industry that everybody hates.
Luckily China is slightly on the backfoot here and so it’s in their best interest to make all this stuff as public as possible
My hope is that (and I think somehat grounded based on engram and MOE) research will congeal towards fully modular networks that can run in a couple gigs of vram and connect to some neural memory store where all the knowledge is encoded…then the weights only have to learn algorithms to manipulate data, rather than learning the entirety of human knowledge in a single weight set…kinda like how computers went from running in warehouses to lounge rooms from the 70s to now
If AI really was a free resource, then maybe that part almost makes sense. It’s losing billions per quarter, it’s not free.
“helps everyone make things” instead of having to rely on skill and expertise and therefore makes everything equal,
everyone else is catching up”.
In both of these statements it sounds like they’re saying, “the AI is smarter than me, and I’m stupid without it.”
The open models in good inference engines can be dirt cheap, but that’s not a good argument because (among other reasons) it’s not the bulk of what is used.
Honestly any company that uses AI as part of their business model should be running open-weight models locally. They can be fine-tuned to their specific use case, it’s not as compute-intensive as the initial pre-training.
And overall it’ll save the business money because they don’t have to shell out for these flagship APIs that are only going to crank up their rates as they become more desperate to prove to investors that they can turn a profit.
Individuals who use it should be running something between 7 to 24 billion parameters depending on how many resources they can allot to it. And even if you don’t use it, it can’t hurt to keep local copies of a few.
Well, yes, they should use open weight models.
…But on prem?
Honestly, finetuning modern MoEs to actually improve at tasks (much less without overfitting) is very difficult. It’s why finetunes are so rare in HF now, even though we still some for Qwen 27B.
Even deploying such large models is hard.
That, and inference costs decrease at scale (to a certain point). It’s way cheaper for some inference company to keep dozens of servers saturated, with parallel requests split across many clients, than for a company to leave a bunch of mostly-idle servers barely spun up.
In privacy insensitive scenarios, open weight APIs make sense for most companies (IMO), and the great thing about that is you can pick from hundreds of providers. Rates are highly competitive. You aren’t locked to a single source like the “frontier” models.
Hey I can hack my smart TV with a Claude code subscription and get rid of all the ads and listening device shit so I’m not gonna hate. Ai for the people, baby.
