So without capitalism, AI would not be obfuscating the sources of ideas, mischaracterizing the content of works, polluting communication channels with vapid slop, enticing emotionally-vulnerable people to self-destructive behavior, accelerating disinformation, enabling scams, profiling thought-crime, producing nonconsensual pornography…?
There’s no denying that capitalism is steering AI (and everything) in a dark direction, but AI is also just hazardous by its very nature. Moving beyond capitalism won’t automatically make humans more careful than we’ve ever been.
AI would not be obfuscating the sources of ideas
Who would care? Why would it be important?
mischaracterizing the content of works
Huh?
polluting communication channels with vapid slop
That can already be dealt with moderation tools. If you don't like GenAI slop, just ban the people doing it.
enticing emotionally-vulnerable people to self-destructive behavior,
If people do this (big "if" here), then the cause is again in Capitalism (alienation) giving an incentive to do so.
accelerating disinformation
Root cause: capitalism
enabling scams,
Capitalism
profiling thought-crime
Huh?
producing nonconsensual pornography…?
We were doing that since photoshop.
Just because you can spam a bunch of scary concepts, doesn't mean they stand up well
You can't dismiss the legitimate harm enabled by these things by pointing to another thing that enables harm...
I think you could make reasonable points here, but you're not engaging in discussion if you just dismiss them. These are legitimately serious issues and it's worth taking them seriously especially if you actually believe the things you say and want other people to understand your point of view. I'm not going to lie, it's gross to basically just say "well people get sexually abused anyway so it's not a concern."
Capitalism enables a lot of terrible stuff, but the world doesn't immediately become sunshine and rainbows if it's gone. There's still a lot of work to be done after the fact
AI is also just hazardous by its very nature
I think the point is that there's nothing hazardous inherent in its nature, and pointing to the problematic uses under capitalism isn't any more a description of 'its nature' than is pointing to an ass a description of a chair's nature.
AI is a tool, just like any other, and the harm caused by that tool is largely defined by how it's used and by who.
There's no doubt that LLM's and other generative models are disruptive, but suggesting that they are inherently harmful assumes that the things and systems they are disrupting aren't themselves harmful.
Most of what you're pointing to as harm caused by AI is far more attributable to the systems it exists in (including and especially capitalism) and not the models themselves. The only issue that I can see with AI inherently is its energy demand - but if we're looking at energy consumption broadly then we'd be forced to look at the energy consumption of capitalism and consumerism under capitalism, too.
I imagine the sentiment here would be wildly different if we were scrutinizing the energy demand of gaming on a modern GPU.
db0 woke up today and chose violence again.
I keep screaming it and all the fucking liberals come out of the woodwork to shit on AI- they can virtue signal all they want but I survived on selling my art for years and me and all the other artists I know can't say it loud enough:
If you aren't paying for art now then why the fuck are you mad about AI "stealing jobs"? And if you don't make art for a living I promise you, no one is mad at not having to draw somebody's Sonic OC or latex fetish to live! Uncouple the need to sell art to live and people don't stop making art, they make more of what they want to make!!
AI gives the power to make things to people who can't. It doesn't take away my ability at all. Stop the capitalist system that enslaves artists, and we will make more, and better!
If you aren’t paying for art now then why the fuck are you mad about AI “stealing jobs”? And if you don’t make art for a living I promise you, no one is mad at not having to draw somebody’s Sonic OC or latex fetish to live! Uncouple the need to sell art to live and people don’t stop making art, they make more of what they want to make!!
I kinda wanna make a few spaces I help manage have a rule for April Fools day:
If you did not personally create the image, or pay for someone to create it from scratch, you are forbidden from sharing and viewing it. It is in violation of the copyright of the owner, and they did not give consent to the use of their Intellectual Property to be used and displayed in this manner. Copyright is automatically assumed to the creator, and unless consent was given to the exact person with demands, it is null and void unless stated.
99.99% of all media online weren't given consent to be shared or modified by the owners of the media. Everyone will say it's stupid for a company to try to expand its reach to the millions of faceless users. Yet will simp for them the moment they are briefly against AI. They will vouch for extensions to copyright, and say companies should purposefully creep their money and influence on the internet, because a bad AI model did something weird 5 years ago.
Eh, I don't really buy it. You've still got an issue of plagiarism (notably not the same thing as copyright), soulless slop flooding creative spaces, the fact that LLMs just kinda lie all the time and then there's the abuse enabled by image models, icky stuff and it's absolutely not driven by capitalism.
Neural networks have a place in many fields, but when it comes to replacing human creativity, I'm not sold. I've certainly got no respect for anyone claiming to be an artist because they ran a program and stole the hardwork of potentially thousands of people. You can take away the profit motive, but you can't take out the social motives. People are dicks and capitalism isn't why they are, it's a symptom and a tool.
Maybe there's some use cases for that kind of thing, but I personally don't see it and think we'd be just fine leaving that sort of thing out of daily life. I don't see what we get beyond like making shitty graphics quickly or something, is that worth the harm?
The AI haters here are just flat out hypocrites, I mean why are you on this instance? Be honest, it was probably for !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, the largest community here (and one of the largest on Lemmy), maybe you didn't and in that case maybe you just don't understand the main mission of dbzer0 and the fact that copyright isn't something we care about, but for those who do it is hypocritical if not downright asinine to support and participate in piracy but also say that "It's important to respect intellectual property" when people discuss AI projects and training of AIs. I mean if you pirate movies or games you certainly aren't respecting copyrights yourself. Maybe you think it's different but those companies feel just as offended, and it's evident from their sleazy efforts to fight against piracy.
There are so many arguments that can be made against AI and might even apply in certain situations (Corporate monster AIs like OpenAI) but this one is just fucking stupid, and you all make yourselves sound like trolls when you come here whining about the importance of copyright and intellectual property.
thats certainly not my argument agsinst it. there are a lot of arguments against Grnerative AI that have nothimg to do with copyrigth especcially on the left.
Like the envoiremental inpact, the amoint of energy and water wasted for large datacenters. how rich ceos see it as a way to cut down cost and replace workers (which doesnt even work but they dont care), The amount of exploitation that goes on in the global south where people are being exploited by comoanies that work for ai companies where they have to sit through ours of generatet content of gore and child porn to work on filtering said content out, whithout any psychological care aswell as abismal money they get for it.
the deals AI companies have woth fossilfuel companies. etc. there also some arguments on AI art nlt being actual art and how just content scraping indie and also big artist do a computer can turn out an pretty mediocre average artstyle because you (strawman you not actual you) are to lazy actually learning and apreciating an art style of an artist whos style you may like.
And also lastly the closed source nature of AI we currently have
Also there are different degrees of piracy when it comes to big corps and indi creators but thats another subject
So basically all things that, pretty much exclusively do not apply to the open source, self-hosted, and decentralized AI promoted and used by this community of anarchists and tech enthusiasts? And you wonder why people here think you are trolls? Like, everything you described here is a problem with capitalism and the capitalistic system, you realize that your arguments are just proving what @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com is saying?
No actually. I have multiple concerns with "AI" that would continue to be concerns in a completely non-capitalism based system.
It would take several hours to type out some of them, but some that are very simple are: the resources required to have these "AI" systems are extensive and would be better used elsewhere, there are things that should not be copied (especially without consent of the creator) and used in a LLM or any image generator, and these systems only exist because of capitalism, without being able to extract and steal value from others, there is really no use for them
You can run inference on desktop gpus. Copyrights are a state enforced monopoly, not a law of nature. I don't recognise any control of culture by anyone, including the author. The technology can just as well exist outside of Capitalism
I write software collectively. Sometimes code needs to be fixed. Let's say Fred wrote some code that needs to be fixed. I fix it and create a merge request. My reviewer, Mark, looks over my merge request and allows it into the collective repository. Fred, being too attached to her code, comes over yelling. Fred has not learned that software is a collective experience.
We collectively own the technology and creative works. Under capitalism, we must individually own that work to make money.
The government guarantees copyright and patents, not capitalism.
Mainly the US government, who forces other countries to adopt it via the reserve currency which is required to purchase energy, in mob boss style fashion. They are entirely artificial constructs that are designed to create monopolies in order to fund RND.
Even the BS laws like software patents are foisted upon other countries, for things like rounded corners on windows.
You all keep saying that but i don't see capitalism being overturned any time soon.
Also art made by a computer just sounds like shit.
art made by a computer just sounds like shit.
This is a common but reductive statement and I'm tired of hearing it. People have been drawing crude boobs on rocks since the first man picked up a stick but I don't hear you complaining about childrens drawing. 'AI', especially the current iteration of it, is being used for all kinds of shit that would've taken conventional computing a million real-hours to do. There is no reason that real artists can't or shouldn't incorporate AI into their workflow in any capacaity if it helps them realize the idea they have. Denoising is a simple use case that you've used if you ever took a photo on your phone but, again, I don't hear you bitching about that one.
The only thing you could possibly be upset about is that the barrier of entry to making passable art with no thought put into it has been lowered so much that a child can do it. That's a problem of you looking in places that allow that to be posted, though. You could just not. I, for example, don't care for stable diffusion spam; I don't see a lot of it because I don't go where that kind of art is.
I'm sorry if this comes off as rude but I'm really tired of hearing uh buh AI art bad with no expansion or introspection.
There are a few reasons not to use AI, without even getting into the philosophical considerations like whether a generative model can have the intentionality necessary to turn its images into art.
- Current models are utterly dependent on using others' work without permission or compensation, and in fact the people behind AI companies are now advocating for the abolishing of IP law so they can exploit artists even more. I'm sure that will definitely apply to their products too.
- For all our concern about the energy and environmental cost of crypto mining no one seems to have noticed that AI is using the same hardware at the same rates as mining bitcoin, and for the same reason: to make rich people even richer.
- As with every other product of the large tech companies it will be free and easily accessible now but will not fail to succumb to the same enshittification that has driven us from facebook, reddit, etc.
Arts have some of the lowest barriers of entry imaginable. Anyone can pick up a pencil and do "art"
Your comment tells me you are not interested in art. you are interested in finished products. Your idea of Generative tools giving children a voice is grotesque. Any child can grab a pencil and make a drawing. It is easier than ever for a child to learn visual art as a language or writing as a voice or music as a passion.
But you prefer your child to write a prompt in a vending machine thus negating any humanity that your child could bring to the world of art. The children of the next generations could be holding the next Shakespeare or the next Miyazaki or the next Steven Spielberg. The children that hobble themselves with machine induced Dunning-krueger have been stolen of that opportunity.
A world without capitalism, would not be obsessed with monetizing everything and the lowering deadlines to mass produce garbage. I imagine there would be time for slowness, and introspection. To make less more meaningful art. To propose alternative aesthetics. To judge art as a human act. You are telling me that a free society will choose creativity as automated corporate sponsored vending machines? Well talk about a lack introspection.
There are so many living Artists out there and I love to see hear and read their aesthetic obsessions. I love the musician that mastered the violin as much as I love the urban noise artist that rubs his balls to a contact microphone. I love the novelist that took care to research for his novel by moving and living to the little town they are writing about as much as I love The crude horror short story writer that wanted to exorcise a visceral feeling by adding automatic writing to their new story. I love Tarkovsky and Neil Breen. I love The Russian Arc and saving Captain Alex, especially when watched together in a 2 movie marathon. There was a wide array of outside art that incorporated people with diverse abilities. People who paint without limbs, people whose styles are wildly different from the mainstream. The disabled and incarcerated. You won't see this art being sold in capitalism because neoliberal capitalism is inherently ableist. so instead capitalist logic suggests that they should wear someone else's mask. Thus erasing their voices.
A love for art means that you can love and respect what someone else makes. It acknowledges that we are different, that our voices are different and that there are a myriad of forms of communication. Capitalist logic wants to make things uniform and standardized, centralized and dependent of large platforms. Current AI products follow this logic and being critical of it is as valid as criticizing the logic of every good and service that has been coopted and perverted by capitalism
It is hilarious watching people yearn for a communist utopia while trying to silence critics of current production methods. I feel it is only a rhetoric strategy adopted by AI apologists.
My issue with AI in creative fields is that the people that use it seem to hold a contempt towards art as a language. To them creative media that doesn't follow a certain specification doesn't exist and holds no value. So they want to jump immediately to the production line notion of a finished product. They don't believe in the human action of creating a personal language or aesthetic by exploring the limits of language. Language is bypassed by the vending machine. you mix and match a few reductive options and you get your product. AI vending machines are very depending on this mechanistic labeling of art as well. millions of works ranked and scaled through a centralized reductive criteria.
Yes I think it is the AI defenders who are usually reductive in comments.
They reduce the logic of artistic production to capitalist logic: Hence AI art is better because it is "faster" to make and because it looks to a standard or specification to be sold.
They reduce living artists to materials for these vending machines. Always denigrating their work while at the meantime always hungry for the new lora or the virgin territory in training data. Artists are both valuable in bulk but dehumanized, imitated and anonymized.
They don't believe in human voice or their own voices even. They have infinite hopes for the AI. A big chunk of AI defenders are doomers in a way. Their idea of progress is turning themselves into machines instead of making the system more humane. They always talk about efficiency and judge everything in value scales. Mathematical thinking has no place in art. Especially art made beyond capitalism. The beauty of art is that it transcends value. That it connects us to people with different viewpoints. It expands cultural horizons and subjectivity. Art is useless in the best sense of the word. It is potential beauty looking for a beholder. But that is also a trait that Ai defenders seem eager to bypass. Because art made by centralized models has the tendency to IMPOSE values and solidify subjectivity.
In this respect the generative products we have are a self defeating practice for it's enthusiasts because it also has the potential to anonymize those who use it. I feel that is the end goal of the consolidation of generative AI models. This is the reason why CEO's are so obsessed with alignment, censorship and control. It's not "Skynet as a threat" but rather "Who gets to be Skynet?" Who floods the media with dribble? What AI model creates and sings and speaks for everyone? It's part of the pitch for large investors.
You could have picked up a pencil a music instrument or a quill, but you choose someone else's hype cycle. And I feel sorry for the voice we lost.
Fuckin AI bros trying to co-opt socialism to try to justify how much they love the new corporate tool.
I'm not gonna lie, in a post-capitalist world, I would have absolutely no issue with AI that isn't "AI art". Art is the product of human creative decisions and human creative expressions. Removing the human source of said art (in my view) strips it of being art.
This is an interesting topic to me. If I paint a landscape, I think most people would say that's art. What if I close my eyes and splash random paints at a canvas? What if I encourage my cat to track paint over the canvas with its paws? What if it's a robotic toy instead of a cat? If I create a program like Minecraft to produce aesthetically-pleasing vistas, is that art? Is a swallow's nest art? What if I physically do the painting, but I allow a random number generator to dictate my actions?
e: Elephants that paint recognizable objects were trained to do so by their handlers. When given access to paint and a canvas, elephants will happily smear the paint around with no apparent logic behind it. No non-human animal has been recorded reproducing an object visually of their own compulsion. Are the random paint smears of the elephant art? If I teach an elephant to paint a house, is that painting art? Who is the artist?
The viewpoint you're responding to also disregards all the art made by elephants.
People are so desperate to hate on AI art that they will justify it a billion ways, but as an artist, let me tell you that art exists in nature. Art exists in a vacuum. Art can be found anywhere, made of anything, and it's not just the creator who imbues it with meaning. Ultimately, the lens through which the consumer is engaging the art is the final measure of it's meaning.
I wholly subscribe to the idea that it doesn't matter if an artist or an author or a musician meant to evoke a feeling- whatever feeling invoked is valid.
It's one thing for a bunch of people to say that AI art is meaningless because it's same-y or because it elicits no feeling in them or whatever. To dismiss the entirety of it because it had no connection to something as ephemeral as a human soul during it's creation is, at best, ignorant, and at worst, the kind of close-minded nonsense I'd expect from reactionaries who have no actual artistic experience.
To take it a step further- if a person has a reaction, any kind of reaction, to AI art, their feelings are not invalidated because of who or what generated that art.
It can be used to create art (though that involves manual editing, most of the time), like any other medium, most of it is not. Just typing a prompt into a machine does not make someone an artist
I think the vast majority of the anti-AI bullshit being spouted by the people in this comment section and the people in !fuck_ai@lemmy.world is just straight up trolling or copyright and capitalist friendly bootlicking.
The fact is that without capitalism the AI venture capitalist projects by tech bros wouldn't exist, but AI still would, open source, self-hostable, maybe even decentralized AI, but AI nonetheless. Also without capitalism copyright loses all it's meaning and desire and inevitably becomes problematic as a barrier hampering human creativity and knowledge. Asking for permission to make art is a courtesy, it shouldn't be required (especially for dead artists who can't give permission).
Take it from the Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist, cognitive scientist, cognitive psychologist, and Nobel laureate in physics.
I don't like that you linked to a direct download, but I love the cause
We're definitely not getting out of Capitalism, especially when:
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The loudest anti-capitalists don't even know what capitalism is exactly (why read and study it when you can go for vibe based approach) or are outright pro-capitalist but instead pushing for a more "humane" version of it and sometimes fighting actual anti-capitalists.
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Most people are content with accepting the worldview they were born into (the liberal/Capitalist one) instead of actually attempting to examine reality for what it truly is, seek answers and do a double take on who they should be supporting, especially nowadays.
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how do you ensure the next best thing which is socialism, does not turn into a different form of fascism?
Probably by doing anarchism instead
This is useful shorthand but is too oversimplified to believe in full
