cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world/p/1758477/using-fascist-technology-to-fight-fascism-still-promotes-fascist-technology
Using fascist technology to fight fascism still promotes fascist technology.
I believe this discussion is important, just the other day I was sad about people colluding inference and training like if both were having the same carbon footprint. I am not defending Sam Altman or anyone else. But we need to look at the facts for what they’re. Running a quantized local model, accepting latency and all, can make your use of LLMs as low as playing video games. I already said that in the past, and I only got downvoted. Maybe because everyone is hurt bout this technology, which is having detrimental consequences. I am not saying there aren’t any problems… but I am accepting the world for what it is, as GPT4 has said ~3 years ago: confetti has left the cannon.
So, we need to deal with this reality. The training done on data like open source code, or even copyrighted materials, will always be a debt.
Just like colonialism. And yet, we are not hating each other for “simple” stuff like eating chocolate or drinking coffee which is most often than not unethically sourced. OR the minerals that make our electronic devices…
Again, it’s not that I am vouching to ignore the issues. But I rather have us take the conversation as a debate or dilemma. Not just start attacking one another.
This all seems like that caricature of a vegan that hates the vegetarians for eating some cheese.
Look at the common ground. Here, on lemmy, more often than anywhere else, we have a big chunk of values and ethics in common.
this is cap. i will continue to use chinese ai and benefit from it. this sounds like blue maga panic lol
Batman the radlib
AI is not evil. AI is being used to find cancer cures, fusion research, climate and environment research, materials science, literally every possible industry. It’s also being used to control and surveil people, and profit more from every corner of life. Both are true of AI.
The part that’s evil is that the people with the most money who are funding the large AI investments want to use AI to support their tech fascist desires. As usual, it’s not the thing itself, it’s the billionaires. It’s ALWAYS the billionaires. They are the evil.
Agree, AI is just a computer.
LLMs don’t cure cancer. That’s the kind of AI everyone refers to these days. Not ML projects.
Nah, redstone valley is right, this meme is very clearly oriented towards generative ai. If you know enough about ai to know that ML and expert algorithms exist and that they are different from gen ai, you know enough to distinguish between an attack towards gen ai and an attack towards the whole of ML.
And yet it’s LLMs doing these things, not only ML. People don’t cure cancer either, but the things that get close (eg. AAV viruses) are currently being done with LLMs.
I’ve been an AI researcher for 12 years. Generative AI also has many applications that tangibly improve the world. For example, I’m using diffusion models for super resolution of surface wind fields to forecast wildfire propagation. It’s not “just” generative AI that’s the problem. The exact same transformers or CNNs used for Capital to try to finally triumph over Labor can also be used to do all kinds of amazing things.
My point is that the incentive structure is fucked. It’s just more apparent with a powerful and widely known technology like “AI” these days.
AI as a term is essentially vaporware. The ways that it’s being used to describe real, useful, and frankly niche technologies, that people rightfully find good and useful, and to describe the consumer facing slop machines that swallow an entire lake just to make a shitty image of an anime girl with 3 tits, is purposeful so as to poison the well, and make discussion about the subject more difficult.
Nah. The math is all the same, the models can be the same, it’s all just the application. We don’t like AI applied to bullshit capitalist profit driven goals, but those exact same models are being used to tangibly improve the world in other applications.
It’s like saying hammers are evil because people can murder people with hammers, which is ignoring the entire industry of construction workers. It’s just in the case of AI, it’s way more powerful than a hammer, so the implications are much larger depending on the application.
My fucking company mailed me a flyer today to remind that I got access to a AI fitness trainer that is totally free just download an app to my phone. I so fucking pissed ripped in tiny fucking pieces. I fucking loath how they just blatantly assume we want use AI for everything. The very thing that if they could would replace us with it.
Fine i’ll steal code the old fashioned way
This is the weapon of the enemy. We do not need it. We will not use it.
-Batman, imaginary cartoon
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
-Mao Zedong, founder of the country eating everyone’s lunch.
Also, what the fuck does AI even mean in this context? LLM’s? Stable Diffusion Models? Yeah, they’re not great, they may get more accurate, but the evidence is currently pointing to them running out of road. Their uses are limited, that’s why most people don’t really use them, not because they’re “the weapon of the enemy”.
I imagine any historic materialist seeing this meme cringing so hard. Thanks for this comment so I can feel less insane about, you know, not swallowing idealistic imaginary nonsense.
Always glad to help. And yes, the cringe was palpable and something needed to be said.
You know what AI means, don’t play dumb.
AI is owned and used by major corporations and has horrible effects on pretty much everything, so people using it for “revolutionary” purposes are just giving more power to the powers that be.
Also, like, a real human writes lines for Batman. So a real person can be quoted for that line.
Then use it, maybe get one of those Chinese models and hack the fash into oblivion! Don’t use it to generate AI slop propaganda, either in text of image form, you’re just eventually signing off your writing and art skills to the machines, and especially big tech.
Stupid af take tbh, especially the commentary. Tools are just tools. Stop stupidly turning them into your boogeymen. Technology, scientific advancement, and evolving knowledge do not care for who contributed to them. Otherwise just get off your programmable computer brother because the first one was made by literal nazis (Konrad Z3) along with a huge laundry list of other technologies fascists have developed. Political ideology and tech do not go hand and hand just because the tech is being used as a tool to facilitate the former.
Nobody who uses AI treats it like a tool, they treat it like an employee they can claim credit for. And most tools aren’t actively detrimental to the user to the point of proven intelligence drops, lawsuits and environmental destruction. Also, the enemy charges you money to use it.
The only person who benefits from AI is the person selling it. So why are you trying to defend it?
Respectfully, you have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve been an AI researcher for 12 years now. I work primarily in climate and environment, and right now I’m using AI for super resolution of wind field predictions, to better forecast wildfire spread. Prior to this project I was using AI and remote sensing to monitor and predict wheat crop health in northern India to feed into various food security monitoring systems (e.g. FEWSNET). There are millions of AI use cases that tangibly improve the world.
At the same time, those same underlying principles of AI are being used to develop tools to better surveil people, control them, and profit off of them so the tech fascists can gain even more control. Both things can be true. It’s the billionaires who are funding these massive investments that are evil. It’s always the billionaires.
Steel can be used to construct buildings and can also be used to construct weapons. You wouldn’t say steel is evil right?
Brother you can run that shit local and all of your claims have so many asterisks attached that they’re essentially pointless. Everything you claimed is entirely true of base computers no ai. Hell even just internet access has been shown to have all the same negative effects. And I’m defending it because I’m not stupid and it’s a useful technology. Run your shit local. The tech bro goons don’t own the technology.
You cannot run it locally and have the same thing that oligarchs and big-tech have at their disposal.
a few tens to hundreds of thousands is all it takes to run models that are better than what big-texh was selling last year
You literally can. Kimi k3 is fist for fist punching at both sol and fable levels. The smaller qwen 3.8 27b is benching well against gpt 5.4 and opus 4.7. There are unreleased internal models you cannot run locally but you also can’t buy them. Additionally, big models are generally bad tools, you’re much better off tuning a local model for your specific task (Wendel from level 1 has a good video on this). If you’re gonna make claims at least do a Google search.
That’s true, but they’re dumbasses. I don’t need Grok, or whatever awful shit facebook made, if I can localhost Qwen
There’s also Colibri which runs large models off of a SSD at a much slower speed than corporations. The large high-quality stuff has been gated by big-tech with gigantic GPUs. Colibri, if nothing else than a proof of concept, shows that high quality stuff can run on anything with a hit to speed.
all of your claims have so many asterisks attached that they’re essentially pointless
No they don’t, but say whatever you need to ignore me. That’s definitely what someone arguing in good faith would do.
internet access has been shown to have all the same negative effects
Citation needed.
it’s a useful technology
Quite the opposite, actually. It causes enormous problems and has no benefits that aren’t better served by existing technologies that lack those problems.
Citation needed*
- provides no citations for his own dumb ass claims.
Well I’ll be the better man I guess… Okkkkkaaay so, first off, I’ve included a few studies published before the rise of modern ai, one from 2011 making extremely similar claims towards Google searches, but hey I can find more if you really want. Additionally, I’d love to see you work to replace several modern llm integrations with “existing technologies” because I’m here to tell you it cannot fucking be done and I’m willing to cite several fields but why don’t you just take a look at mathematics where ai has advanced the field several times over the past few months, or biology where ai has gotten so good at predicting protein fold structures that work for certain requirements that there is literally no alternative technology capable of the same feats.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6866412/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7099936/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20617
https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/dwegner/files/sparrow_et_al._2011.pdf
https://aiinstitute.hbs.edu/navigating-the-jagged-technological-frontier/
Gosh if only there was an ethical way…
As much as I hate “AI” myself, rhetoric like this does more harm to movements resisting “AI” than to help them.
What’s funny about this?
This is so meta because Frank Miller’s Dark Knight is a child abusing fascist.
It’s a tool like any other. It can be used in a destructive and immoral manner or used where it works to improve the lives of people. Think about the alpha fold project and other such use cases.
LLMs existed before the AI craze. Sure, they’re useful in certain specific use cases. They aren’t a good substitute for a search engine or an artist or a therapist or any of the other myriad misuses now prevalent.
True, it’s just a tool and should be used where it best provides a real benefit. That’s essentially the core of my argument.
Lmfao no it isn’t you rube. It’s the most concentrated avatar of Capital in history. It’s constructed on endless desecration of art, music, poetry, literature, science, and more, all to give you shitty summaries of websites and your boss an excuse to fire you for a chatbot. Never before have the forces of Capital worked so hard to destroy the proletariat.
That’s one use of neural networks we do need to react to accordingly as a populace but it’s not the only use of those algorithms. I gave the example of alpha fold which has essentially solved the very hard problem of protein folding unlocking the door to developing cures for many diseases. The issue isn’t the tech, the issue is in some cases how it is being used. Think of nuclear power. We could have functionally limitless and clean power or we can end life on earth. The problem isn’t nuclear power, the problem is the actions of people.
Oof. I think you need to find a better example than nuclear power.
Why? Nuclear power is amazing for actually producing enough energy for global society and being clean. Renewables are amazing where they can be used.
Shut the fuck up you technofascist bootlicker. Claude is never going to love you, no matter what it says.
This doesn’t really have anything to do with what I’m talking about. Nuclear energy is awesome, nuclear bombs not so much. AI in applications where it works and makes the world better is awesome. AI in applications where it’s stealing, dehumizing, monitoring, degrading society not so much. It’s fundamentally just a mathematical structure with no intrinsic behavior on its own. What we use it for is up to us collectively.
Understand that the “AI” framing is pure marketing. It’s meant to get you to accept using LLMs to replace humans for every cognitive task. You have to decouple LLMs as a technology from the AI tech-bro hype train.
In the last few years it has taken on that connotation but the term artificial intelligence is much older than that and has a linguistic use. If for instance we digitize a full fruit flies brain that’s artificial intelligence or similarly if we develop other models with equally complex behavior. We can even go all the way back to mechanical automaton although mechanical systems are quite limited in performing dynamic and complex behavior.
If you don’t use it don’t do it because it’s shit, not because it’s “the weapon of the enemy”.
Any asymmetrical war is won using enemy’s weapons.
Replace with him breaking a brain and you have me
