cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31072292
Summary:
I downvoted pro-AI comments in a post in leftymemes community. It was LLM generated polandball comic (Which is objectively pathetic as fuck) that showed up on my feed, blocked couple of users who I thought were unhinged, and have blocked the whole instance on my client after realizing how rabid these morons are.
I didn’t go looking for AI posts like a vigilante.
One user in question got miffed for being downvoted and banned me from places they moderate.
To be fair, the typical defenses of that technology are the most maddeningly empty headed shit I’ve ever read, including conversations with real life fascists and work with people deep into senility.
Listening to enough of them has genuinely given me a substantial vein of anti human ‘most of this is just unrefrigerated meat, there is no spark of intellect, no consviousness, no beauty to be found here’ type thought.
I wouldn’t go into ‘/stable diffusion fruit’ to throw a fit about it, but my first instinct when someone says that tech is good is just straight up assuming, whether its on silicon or meat; the thing im talking to is not a person in any way that matters to me.
Im occasionally wrong, and have to adjust course, but it has become an unsettling oft confirmed default which i very much resent.
I just really want to emphasize here:
this technology is often defended with a stupidity so profound and so stubborn that it has broken the last shreds of my love for humanity, a love for humanity that survived being thrown away onto the street like trash as a child, no small amount of rape abuse life unhoused and tending to those who had suffered so much worse than I. In its place that stupidity has awakened a creeping suspicion that there never was such a thing as ‘humanity’, and I’m utterly alone in a howling void.
I might be able to give you another perspective.
This technology is the first time that humankind has ever been able to create an interactive snapshot of human culture. Everything thats been written, scanned, drawn has made their mark on those models, and it gives you glimpses in what else there might be in the human cultural space. It’s not intelligence, but it’s distilled human culture.
I am very critical about the fact that this technology is mainly in the hands of corporations that want to use it as a cost cutting tool. I am also not a fan that GenAI is pushed into everything just to get sweet investor money. I am far less alarmed about the productivity increases themselves, or about copyrights which are normally only wielded as a weapon by the rich.
The power consumption argument doesn’t even apply here - the generation of those images does not cost more energy than playing a computer game for 2 minutes, is often done on consumer grade hardware (like the one running here now while i type this), and the training of the models is not necessarily very power hungry if done smart (deepseek used a fraction of the power that GPT4o needed). Also, with the massive expansion of solar power generation (we’re at the point where the price starts becoming negative at peak solar output) the power itself starts becoming a non-factor.
Copyrights themselves are a clusterfuck, which is an statement that many artists would agree with. I personally wish for the following (copied from the vote-thread regarding the rule we’re discussing):
I hope i could give you a bit hope in humanity back - there are still idealistic people out there.
Again, its not even the technology, its the typical advocate of it. Its the fuckers who defend it as everything it’s not, against all evidence.
I’m aware it can be a neat little toy. It even has niche uses in a lab. Not worth the perfect sociological attack vector it seems to be. Trying to convince that it’s not your friend, doesn’t love you, and isn’t making art, and the kind of pushback i get from that, is the real black pill here.
Maybe don’t assume all people who support or are interested in a certain thing are the exact same people would be a nice start.
I often wonder about antiAI opinions such as “it isn’t making art” what differentiates art to you? When it genuinely does create things that are not already in existence, how do you square that circle?
When people say LLMs are just fancy autocomplete, and I ask it to check an entire nodered flow for logic issues and it points out valid and interesting things I overlooked when designing it, how exactly do you determine that’s autocomplete? Because I’ve used autocomplete or intellisense or whatever and this is leaps and bounds beyond those capabilities.