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chati was under the impression that were explicitly against genAI but i found that some people are actually VERY pro genai and quite dismissive of its risks. this happened on lemmy but i saw people getting downvoted for saying that genAI in its current state is harmful to the environment. i saw the old bullshit of how ”i use AI for art because i cant draw”, it was crazy. i called someone a Promptitute and someone unironically told me not to say that, just so much. so can everybody pls affirm you dont support that crap.
another user straight up admitted that they use AI as a friend and to gn to... i dont care how much we have in common ideologically, i cant support you gning to chatgpt and thinking its your friend...
So many sloppers...
Maybe don't use the machine that outputs mediocrity and destroys your cognitive abilities? That is fundamentally unreliable and unable to be audited, and which can easily be tweaked to distort your worldview.
I was promised a struggle session. All I got was just people giving their opinion on things.
Happy Pride!
genuinely what have i done
Gen AI defenders are not my comrades
So you were on lemmy, saw an argument, and are now asking a different instance their opinion on the argument? Do you think that maybe that could start an argument here? And you've been here for 14 days. Rather than asking us to vet ourselves for your sensibilities, it maybe should be the other way around.
how else do u vet your ”sensibilities” with a community other than asking directly?
All the problems people have with AI are caused by capitalism. Next question.
Way, way, wayyyyy too much "i know genai is bad but i use it in this one case" justifications going on around here.
Please stop using it entirely. Rely on your own brain and if you are not capable, learn to be capable.
This seems like a valid counterargument for people who use local models to generate things for themselves, but it doesn't seem like it tackles the usecases where people use GenAI to fight capital's use of GenAI (e.g. using an LLM to modify one's resume before applying for a job for a company that will, in all likelihood, use an LLM to screen the resume).
Agreed, didn't expect so many home users drinking the koolaid. Ulysses would have had a field day.
And I suspect many of those users are among the tech-savvy, too, sadly.
i called someone a Promptitute
wtf is wrong with you, dickhead
I'm sure there are a bunch of other comments expressing this sentiment but I ain't scrolling that far so I'm agreeing up here.
A) Incredibly disrespectful to prostitutes/sex workers at large
B) You're the John in this case anyway
i called someone a Promptitute and someone unironically told me not to say that, just so much.
Yeah that's an extremely shitty thing to say, unironically. You're throwing sex workers under the bus to dunk on AI gooners. Come up with a better insult. Fuck off if you disagree with this part. Sex workers are workers.
i was under the impression that were explicitly against genAI but i found that some people are actually VERY pro genai and quite dismissive of its risks.
I'm anarcho-communist, anti-capitalist, pro-ecology, anti-colonial, and against the notion that we need or want truly intelligent machines...but I am pro-mathematics and pro-liberatory-technology. If we had introduced these tools sustainably, as a strictly voluntary choice, as a tool for the workers and not as a cudgel to destroy people and ensure worker precarity, as a tool and not a simulation of slavery and a simulacrum of the most obnoxious parts of capitalism, at a scale and rate that the ecology could support...these tools would be beloved by the people who benefit from them, and invisible to everyone else. Put simply: the monsters (capitalists and their allies) ruined a good idea, once again.
As other users have pointed out, machine learning and its derivatives have had, and will continue to have, liberatory applications. It is unfortunate that the artificial "intelligence" community gave their work that name, and I think we should reject it.
But I refuse to give the capitalists a monopoly over the use of mathematics!
In my experience, academic LLM use typically uses models made by the researchers themselves and runs on computers at the university rather than data centers. The main issues of plagiarism and environmentalism mostly don't apply. That may be changing in the current environment, though.
i called someone a Promptitute and someone unironically told me not to say that
That term is belittling towards sex workers which is why you got pushback, if I saw that here I'd remove it without question
This thread has just over a 3/1 comment to vote ratio. Spicy.
I proudly wear the moniker of Luddite. They were never against the fundamental technology, but the destructive ways society employed them, and they actively fought against it, as we should now.
The Luddites were right then, and they're right now.
The luddites WERE wrong though, destroying machines instead of seizing them to utilize their productivity gains to benefit the peasantry. They were petty bourgeois jet ski dealership owners in terms of where their ideology took them. They had valuable handicrafts which industrialization threatened, so they tried to destroy industrialization to protect them, benefiting no one but themselves and their direct communities which benefited from their local artisanry and i don't even know for how long because obviously they just kept building machines
Imagine an alt history Britain where the luddites seized the machinery, seized weaponry, expropriated the landowning class at gunpoint, and we got industrial communism a century early from within the heart of the British empire
In that context imo the luddites look like proto Fed shit, like if the British government had the foresight we have looking back i think it was very advantageous for the movement to focus on destroying technology to protect artisan wages, rather than the alternative of an awakening of proletarian and peasant class consciousness and solidarity, using seized machines and their output for the benefit of all
I mean, imagine the propaganda win for communism if rather than having to wistfully dream of a world in which modern industrial output could feed, clothe, and secure the lives of us all, Kropotkin only had to write about how it had already occurred within his lifetime, in the heart of the world hegemon.
Yeah, Luddites suck because they failed to stop their own proletarianization. Their efforts were doomed because non-Luddite workers were still installing the machines. It's a form of commodity fetishism. Instead of seeing those machines as products of labor with workers behind them that could be won over, the machines are merely seen as static objects that the bourgeoisie just willed into existence somehow. Had there been a critical mass of workers who refused to install those machines, the machines would have disappeared.
That being said i don't blame them though, they're what happen when you don't read theory, and they hadn't because it hadn't been written yet
There's no reason for me to use it in my life except that one time i used deepseek to extract text from like 50 screenshots of diablo items i was putting up for trade.
If there was a way to make my job easier with it i bet i would have a different stance but for now it seems like it sucks and has no purpose
GenAI is a tool. Under capitalism, the current dialectic is defined by the enclosure of the cognitive commons: tech monopolies hoard the "means of computation," accelerate ecological destruction via powerhungry data centers in a fossil energy dominated political economy, and use llms to deskill and lay off the working class to protect profit margins.
But these contradictions are also the cracks where alternatives can grow. The leftist response shouldn't be Luddism imo. We must fight to decommodify compute (e.g. via promotion of open-source), demand worker control over AI integration to prevent deskilling and layoffs in various fields, and enforce strict ecological limits on data centers. Ultimately, our goal is to sublate AI from a mechanism of capitalist immiseration into a collective tool for post-scarcity and human liberation. Anyone who says llms aren't useful is kidding themselves imo
The maximalist "anything using any kind of neural network math is exactly the same and is equally bad in all cases" position is nonsensical and feels like people just taking out the frustration they feel towards being unable to stop the actually destructive and bad things (the mass rollout of useless and catastrophically wasteful datacenters, companies trying to replace workers with glorified magic 8-balls that make everything worse, vibe coding speedrunning the complete collapse of the systems and infrastructure modern society depends on) by conflating them with and raging against legitimate use cases (bespoke data processing models trained for specific scientific tasks, or making certain extant techs like text-to-speech or machine translation a little less shit than they were before even if they're still not great) or harmless hobbyist stuff that's at worst kind of cringe and/or annoying (people playing with open source local models, who sometimes spam the worthless output in much the same people who just discovered poser or daz spammed the worst CGI renders you've ever seen everywhere starting in the mid 00s).
It feels kind of like if someone kept hearing about how bad "drones" (remote control military weapons) are and decided to wage a protracted peoples war against the local amateur battlebots scene because they didn't understand that these are complete different things.
Big agree and basically what I think every time I read a hexbear comment that makes me think the last time they interacted with an llm was 3 years ago and that they seem to think the quality of its output has remained static since then. people literally calling it "a markov chain" as if that's even accurate and as if having "a markov chain" bot that is able to pull, contextualize, and then present information in a way that is convincingly human (in that yes, it would pass the turing test) is somehow meaningless.
like there's people here who clearly seem to believe it's literally equal to an AOL chatbot from the 90s and they are just so incredibly incorrect
there's also people who seem to forget china greatly mitigated the environmental costs with deepseek and you don't have to burn up a quarter acre of amazon for every token and that, gosh, perhaps a good number of issues with llms and their use stem from something called capitalism in the same way as numerous other technologies rather than being inherent to those things themselves
Burning much less energy for something useless and bad is still bad. Not doing it would still save lots of energy. I also do not care if it's "improved" since 2023, whatever that means, it's a fundamentally useless technology as it is applied to chatbots and whatnot. Every uncritical interaction with LLMs makes the user dumber and less able to think for themselves.
If this was contained to scientific work like helping doctors identify cancer cells, I would be entirely cool with it. That is the falsest equivalency ever though, the stated goals are entirely not that.
If this was contained to scientific work like helping doctors identify cancer cells
lol yeah let's have the useless lying machine take care of highly sensitive and detailed medical work
Pick a lane, ideologue
Blocking you because we don't have a disable inbox replies and in dont want to argue with nerds all day
neural networks have a use case that they genuinely excel at and that's picking up on subtle patterns in immense datasets, and reinforcing those patterns until they become visible to humans. that's basically what neural networks fundamentally are is self-reinforcing pattern-finding programs. biology and chemistry in particular have the kind of near-infinite variables and chaotic systems that really benefit from having a machine that can draw out these patterns for humans to follow up on
advocates for these uses aren't saying the computer should be allowed to directly diagnose people or anything like that, that kind of stupid hubris is a recent thing from the genai people
There is a difference in application you aren’t acknowledging… training a neural network type computer algorithm to detect cancer on a computed tomography scan is different than a black box that tells you to drink antifreeze - the former isn’t even an LLM… honestly the terminology is so poisoned by the AI bubble marketing, I didn’t even know if you were talking about generative AI or general artificial intelligence at first… not really even sure generative is anything but marketing a specific set of algorithms in a way that implies a level of humanity so that companies can try to sell it as replacing human workers
a black box that tells you to drink antifreeze
Do i need to acknowledge anything at all whatsoever when I'm arguing with people who think it still does this?
It's valid to suggest someone pick a lane when they're saying it's so useless it can't give you a recipe but still somehow potentially useful enough to somehow be used for medical purposes. Guess what, I'm a chef and i literally have not once in the last year at least googled a food item or recipe and it not given something correct (even if it might be a list of steps I wouldn't do) and it also frequently exposes me to new culinary things like haitian pikliz when I was looking up haitian black bean shit. That is legitimately useful
Nobody needs to tell me the cost of data centers isn't worth the suggestion of "what if you made haitian pickles" but the point is that if the argument is "it's mechanically useless in its current state" you're just wrong
Gemini told a guy to kill himself last August, less than a year ago. They may do it less and it may be less explicit than "here's how you can make your microwave explode", but they have absolutely not stopped being bullshit machines when pushed in certain scenarios. I'm not a anti-AI maximalist either, though do have a general disdain, but what you are saying is not true.
They specifically said "as applied to chatbots" so it seems to me like theyre talking about the broader field of machine learning as a whole, which is great as smaller models used in specialized applications and isn't limited to LLMs, i.e. their mention of cancer research, vs literally anything that has ever been posted on the internet and can be spoken of using human language being used to amalgamate bullshit for any user that seeks it.
something useless
A subjective and ideologically driven opinion where you're just straight up incorrect but ok!
We don't think it has remained static, we realize the "AI companies" have been implementing bandaid after bandaid to try and compensate for fundamental lacks in the technology itself, and that as a consequence results are better now (for like 1000x the cost but who's counting - well we all will, soon, but you get the point).
But this is still a credible text generator, ultimately close to a larger, N-dimensional markov chain. It still "hallucinates". It's still shit. It's still almost entirely useless for coding (you know, if you care about long or even medium-term maintainability or security), never mind the other use cases they're trying to sell it for. It does not work.
And if it did (it doesn't !), the aforementioned bandaids would have made the cost impossible to justify anyway.
we realize the "AI companies" have been implementing bandaid after bandaid to try and compensate for fundamental lacks in the technology itself
You could argue in the same way that car safety technologies are "bandaid after bandaid to try and compensate for the fact that cars are fundamentally huge hunks of metal going really fast".
It's still almost entirely useless for coding (you know, if you care about long or even medium-term maintainability or security)
That's just not true at all, you still need to do quite a bit of handholding and double checking it gets stuff right but it definitely can get medium-high complexity stuff right and overall it is a productivity boost.
You could argue in the same way that car safety technologies are "bandaid after bandaid to try and compensate for the fact that cars are fundamentally huge hunks of metal going really fast".
The parallel doesn't really work (there is nothing fundamentally incompatible between the purpose of a car and the basic design idea); but to try and answer, this would be a viable answer if the huge "AI labs" admitted the tech doesn't work and were collectively working on entirely new architectures (likely ones that include actual symbolic representation of the world, not just statistical links between words).
But they're not, they're using the same fundamental approach and doing ridiculous shit around that approach - ultimately a genuine, and interesting, NLP breakthrough - to try and sell it as what it's not and will never be.
you still need to do quite a bit of handholding and double checking it gets stuff right but it definitely can get medium-high complexity stuff right and overall it is a productivity boost.
See, that's one part I disagree about. First as a direct productivity boost; I realize you probably think it's making you more productive; but that's something you have to demonstrate, at scale. And the few genuine studies I've seen suggest the effect, if it exists, is marginal at best; at least two I remember suggest it decreases productivity (and at least one, possibly both, can't remember, said self-reporting from devs was that it increased it despite the effect).
More importantly, though: very little of the code you produce this way will be maintainable. Very little will also be secure, too (both "direct" vulns - they're not actually good at finding them, FYI - and more fundamental logic vulnerabilities - they'll never find these at all outside of trivial cases). If you want a concrete example of that, just look at the leaked Claude harness code: it's genuinely pathetic. They're vibe coding it all and it shows.
Also, I notice you say "you still need to..."; do you think this will eventually get fixed ? it's been nine years. There's a point where "it'll get better" is starting to become more of a meme than an answer. It was getting better, then a lot less, then lately almost not at all, despite greater and greater cost increases.
Shit, lately I've even started to wonder if they're even training new models anymore; I've been wondering if they're just not shipping the same with a different harness / different bullshit surrounding it. It's not like they can improve on the models themselves anyway (not without at least one, likely several, genuine fundamental breakthrough) - they're all out of human-produced data by now.
for like 1000x the cost but who's counting
China isn't counting the same numbers i tell you that
It's still almost entirely useless for coding
It's incredibly useful for letting humans interact with a computer system in natural language and maybe you shouldn't take from that "hey we should have it do highly sensitive stuff where the slightest error could have great consequences"
Here's a use for it. You nerds hate Reddit, right? Well hey, it does a great job of summarizing reddit threads, since that's where half of its fucking training comes from. No more ever having to go back to reddit to browse dozens of inane responses hoping to find the one comment with relevant information. Congratulations, you have a machine that made reddit obsolete
China isn't counting the same numbers i tell you that
That's true; the very quality of results you can obtain with some recent models locally suggests the possible optimizations are huge. But it's also diminishing returns: the moat between state of the art models and one I run on a P40 locally is really small these days; the amounts they need to sink to get even slightly better results at this stage are more and more. They're text generators; yes, if you run ten of them in parallel, vote; have them cross-check their results, introduce harnesses at every steps, etc. (all examples of actual bandaids I evoked above) you can improve results. But all of this is trying to make a tech that fundamentally doesn't answer the problem answer it nevertheless. And all of it costs a lot.
And I dearly hope China is not spending too much effort on backing these domestic initiatives, because again: outside of a few limited use cases (easily identifiable, I've listed a few in another comment in this very thread: those where having no relation to the truth in a portion of the generated text is acceptable), the tech doesn't work.
It's incredibly useful for letting humans interact with a computer system in natural language and maybe you shouldn't take from that "hey we should have it do highly sensitive stuff where the slightest error could have great consequences"
There are use cases where having the computer completely invent actions or do shit randomly isn't that bad, I guess; games come to mind. But ultimately and more generally I disagree, it's shit for that too. Try one as a daily runner, just for laughs. Or just try an entire shell session where instead of typing the commands, you complete a description of what you want to do through one and then do it. It goes bad very fast, let me tell you.
And I get it: what you describe would be awesome - a SF dream. I like tech and I wish all of this would work; and like many initially I genuinely wondered as well if scaling/attention was all you needed, and had some measure of hope; quickly dashed, though.
it does a great job of summarizing reddit threads
Again, no it does not. You have no guarantee it won't pull shit out of its virtual ass; and just as crucially (and even more likely), no guarantee it won't ignore significant parts of the source material. You'll get a result that seem like it summarizes the thread, with no confidence level, and no guarantee of its reliability.
Again, no it does not. You have no guarantee it won't pull shit out of its virtual ass; and just as crucially (and even more likely), no guarantee it won't ignore significant parts of the source material. You'll get a result that seem like it summarizes the thread, with no confidence level, and no guarantee of its reliability.
I've seen what it does and how often and the various ways it tends to fuck up, at least Google's search result llm because I'm not going out of my way to use this shit outside of trying to look up shit i was going to look up anyway (mentioning this because as a result i don't know if the model they're using is better but more expensive), and i really don't consider it a different experience than the last 6-10 years of having to look up a reddit thread to parse comments for information. I still have to figure out who knows what and how much they know and figure out how much I trust the information.
With the llm it's the same shit to me, I have to figure out if it's pulling from a source that knows anything, if the information is actually even present in the source it thinks it's from, if it's miscontextualizing the information, and if it's just trying to glaze me or frame its responses in relation to my prompt
The end result is i google shit and tend to find the information i'm looking for faster and without having to be exposed to 100s of tips m'fedora redditisms directly. In this way you could consider the llms use to be like those boxes you use to view an eclipse without hurting your eyes
Fair enough, if it works for you and you're aware of the downsides (which you seem to be, contrary to most users); two things I haven't even mentioned though are the power/environmental costs (obviously) but also the potential cognitive impact.
You say it doesn't change much compared to when you were parsing the reddit comments yourself; doesn't it ? how sure are you "wasting" time parsing these comments wasn't exercising an important muscle mentally for you (getting the jist of a text rapidly - excluding braindead content quickly, etc.) ?
Here the example is pretty ridiculous - I doubt your mental faculties depend much on parsing reddit comments - but you get the idea. It's very early to tell but several papers now suggest the negative cognitive impact is very real and potentially very fast.
how sure are you "wasting" time parsing these comments wasn't exercising an important muscle mentally for you (getting the jist of a text rapidly - excluding braindead content quickly, etc.) ?
Idk, pretty sure, since i feel the "is the lying machine lying to me or is it accurate" appraisal is about the same exercise and there's also the fact that an absolutely disgustingly large portion of reddit comments are themselves being made by llms now (as every single anti bot measure reddit ever uses only impacts real people, apparently)
Edit: Thank you for the concern though btw but if you ever do notice me exhibiting cognitive decline it is almost definitely gonna be a combination of the alcoholism, drug use, contraindicated drug use, and general medical decline
The maximalist "anything using any kind of neural network math is exactly the same and is equally bad in all cases" position is nonsensical
Does that position exist outside of twitter, though ?
When GenAI-critical people say "AI", they almost universally mean LLMs (and sometimes also diffusion models / multimodal ones). And in fact they usually mean "LLMs as sold by the VCs". LLMs themselves do have a few legitimate use cases (for perhaps 0.1% of the target population they're currently being sold to, but still).
They do not mean machine learning in general - which is awesome, extremely useful, and has been in widespread use for decades now. Including traditional neural-network-based classifiers.
Does that position exist outside of twitter, though ?
It's the standard reddit position and you can even see it in this thread. Like some people genuinely do not understand that there are categorical differences between the shitty chatbots making everything worse at scale just to make things worse and some dork that's just being annoying by posting the weird dream his computer had as if anyone gives a shit.
I use AI to write professional emails, job applications and to edit my resume. I do this because I cannot for the life of me figure out the neurotypical idea of "professional communication" where you have to toe the edge of lying trying to sell yourself, while not actually seeming directly interested, but you have to still seem interested. Nor can I work out the communication where you have to dance around the subject without ever addressing it. When I write these things myself it takes me actual days, I fucking hate that type of writing, might as well ask me to write an epic in latin.
The people that treat it like Google or trust it inherently or use it for creative or personal communication strike me as odd, to be kindest. One of my friends used it to ask for advice on gardening and it ended up killing a plant.
Using it for resume writing is, unfortunately, probably a necessity; with the recent Stanford study showing that companies who use LLM's to screen resumes are biased towards LLM generated resumes, especially the ones using the same LLM as the company uses.
One of my friends used it to ask for advice on gardening and it ended up killing a plant.
What advice did it give them? in my recent experience (again just interacting with the google llm via search, i don't go to chatgpt.com or w/e) it's been fairly accurate (i.e. "what the fuck is this little white butterfly leaving yellow oval eggs on my collard greens" and it's like "that's a cabbage white, dawg, you should probably just cover them with netting" but i didn't wanna do that so it suggested Bt or spinosad. I know enough about how those work to know, yea, that'd work, but also the initial netting idea is probably still the best if i weren't lazy), but gardening being what it is sometimes accurate advice still can't make something live yknow
Also i ignore it on various things like it says not to put rocks and shit at the bottom of your pots. "It'll create a perched water table and rot your roots!" shut up robot, i don't care, my pots all drain 100x better with a layer of rocks and then garden fabric before the dirt. And i like watching it trickle out around the rocks 😤
I absolutely loathe generative AI and everything about it. As a software worker I'm kind of in the belly of the beast. 99% of my colleagues are clapping like seals at the most soulless diarrhea from a butthole fuck-ass slop images they've generated of our company mascot riding a canoe or whatever the fuck. Haha look at this photo I had gemini make to celebrate summer coming up, isn't it fun? Every time I have to exercise herculean restraint to not roll my eyes back into my skull. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it so much. I don't use it at all, ever, not because it wouldn't be occasionally helpful in my work or whatever, but at this point purely out of spite. I just fucking hate it so much.
The one arguably maybe I guess good thing about this bullshit is that, ironically, it's made me able to appreciate actual real human art much more. Like, I have a whole new level of appreciation for people that take the time and effort to make a 45 second mspaint sketch instead of having the nightmare engine hallucinate an image for them. Same with music that's kinda shitty, it might not be GOOD good, but damn someone really made that shit with their own two hands, and that rules. Even just reading an email that has grammatical errors and ZERO em-dashes or emoji will bring a smile to my face, because at least someone fucking made it.
I had to learn what an em-dash was because of llms and I'll never forgive them for it
ZERO em-dashes
Ok but I hate that em-dashes are being wrecked by the nightmare engine, they have legitimate uses
ZERO em-dashes or emoji will bring a smile to my face, because at least someone fucking made it.
But I like em dashes and emoji—I've always used them as long as they've been around 🥺
Yeah – me too 🙁
wait is that an en dash? – idk man, whatever, still love them. Or used to, at least.
I'm curious, how'd you grow to hate em-dashes without knowing what they are?
when all the shit online and on tv is fake we might see a resurgence of community theater and small scale live music... if there are physical places to do those things
if there are physical places to do those things
Depends on the implementation and purpose. I'm not strictly against its use in non-profit works and I'm not strictly against its use in placeholder work either.
To harm or replace workers? Opposed.
Applications where that is not the case? Not really opposed.
I think all AI needs mandatory watermarking though.
Two legit uses I've found.
- cancer and disease research
- writing basic codes to help with meningeal tasks.
Probably more scientific uses to model things, but the bulk of it is only harmful. The slop machine sucks and it's being used to make society un-literate.
I have a nuanced view of it.
On the Environmental Angle: Less a true issue with LLMs as it is an issue with the west. China uses much more efficient models. Local models exist. The west just loves to waste energy.
On IP stuff: I'm not in favor of IP existing generally, but do see the need for it under capitalism so companies can't steal stuff from creators with ease. I'd say it is also an issue caused by capitalism.
On AI use generally: I don't want it used the way that it is currently being used. I do not trust it to not make mistakes and want people to verify everything it does. I am fine with people using it responsibly. For example let's say you are writing code. Telling an AI "Write code that does X" is bad. But writing code yourself, pasting it into an AI, and saying "Point out any errors I might have missed". Is fine. I myself will use a local model sometimes when I forget how to format a bash command. It can save me from having to dig through documentation sometimes.
On mental health effects: It is strange. I do not know if the people talking to it as a friend or using it for sexual gratification are doing so because they actually want and AI to do this with or because they are so isolated in capitalism that they use it as a crutch to replace real human connection. It's concerning though. I definitely don't think it is healthy.
Overall I think LLMs have their problems and also have their uses. I think many of the bigger societal issues with it are more capitalism problems than LLM problems. But I also think there are some genuine issues like hallucination and reliability that need to be worked out on the technology level. More investment in making models smaller too. I fully think these data centers are a waste and that local only models are more than enough if we just work on making them smaller. I would advise you to not let emotion cloud your judgement on this issue. Always examine things from a dialectical materialist perspective. Be discerning, and open minded all at once.
The only Luddite in me I’d bring against the use of tools by capitalists to further exploit worker value and degrade the environment. I don’t hate entire technologies, because technology, even killer drones or genAI, given to a society ruled by the people, can be used towards the further liberation of the working class.
That said, I don’t really use AI in my life, and AI slop is pretty gross. Not to mention the environmental impact of the data centers being built for it in the west.
I'm sure you can find much more effective insults that aren't predicated on the stigmatization of prostitution. I mean, generally I think finding cute little derogatory terms for something without any specific descriptive use is kind of immature and Reddit-y, but I doubt I'll move you on that so at least find a less reactionary insult.
if you are in the usa and need to apply for a job then there is no way around it.
every listing is created with genai. you need to use it to adjust your resume quickly before submitting one. this is the only way to get your resume past the tools they use to filter out resumes with any sort of efficiency because 90% of the jobs you aplly for are going to be fake anyways.
AI isn't a problem if it's locally ran, the environmental impact is negligible. It's like running a microwave for a couple of seconds.
I use local models people host off their pc, I only use chatgpt when google has totally failed me.
i mean, i don't have problems with alphafold, or other scientific use cases. i think sidestepping photoshop is whatever, talking to chatbots as friends is antihuman, and using them to code/bullshitting into jobs/triggering rightwingers is fine whatever.
fuck the machine vision for autonomous drones and faciall recognition as well, but those aren't genai, they are classify "ai" (ml rather).
Fuck generative AI. All of it. No excuses.
Protein folding models to find cures for diseases and cancer?
That's not genAI
Protein diffusion models certainly are
Any computation model that uses machine learning isn't a generative AI or LLM. It would use curve fitting, or PCM, or neural networks or some other standard machine learning model to find the lowest energy form of a protein fold shape or diffusion pathway.
Using AI is the mark of the beast, change my mind
The Antichrist itself is capitalism, it's mark has a symbol on your keyboard - "$"
God's not real.
But the webgl kernel syntax makes my eyes glaze over yet I have so many weird physics experiments I want to try
I am very against generative AI, but you still shouldn't insult people by calling them "promptitute," it's belittling of street workers engaged in survival sex work, and compares people who are economically and socially precarious with losers who use generative AI.
Also we already have "clanker".
Ah yes, lets pretend to use slurs against the chatbot, that will show em
I despise that shit, marker of an unfunny person
I thought it was funny for about two days until I saw how white people were having way too much fun making little skits, like one I saw where it's a 50's style diner and the people inside it refuse to let a clanker take a seat.
This is the kind of shit im talking about but some people here all just telling on themselves in my replies/dms
it's a 50's style diner and the people inside it refuse to let a clanker take a seat.
Wtf?
Calling clanker a slur is the same as calling cracker a slur. The exact same amount of systemic harm is being perpetuated by those two words.
Crackers will make it into a slur.
Someday in the far far future when actually sentient robots exist and are oppressed, yeah probably
I thought Clanker was a Star Wars slur thing that the clones would say to the droids. Unless i'm misremembering stuff.
Could be, I'm not a big star wars fan and don't base any of my worldviews on it. The point still stands though, star wars droids are a fictionally oppressed class in the same way that white people are a fictionally oppressed class.
I think calling chatbots clankers is stupid but calling it a slur is minimizing the actual harm to real people targeted by real slurs
Yeah, it just reeks of reddit.
ridiculous stretch of the meaning of the word "slur". if it isn't applied to people it can't be a slur
it functions well as a derogatory term for LLM chatbots because it sounds like a slur, but that doesn't make it a slur
People have been saying "clanker" on star wars games online for years referring to the droids, it's definitely the same people who often say other slurs, like calling something "gay" as a slur is still a slur even if it's not referring to a person.
Sounds like a slur, used like a slur, carrys the same energy as a slur, but since the target is not human it doesnt cause harm to anyone at all
Youre coping lol
slurs are bad because they because they hurt people. the term clanker isn't targeted at people, so it isn't a slur
if you think critical for two seconds about what makes a slur a slur and what makes them offensive you will see this
Hard disagree. Using language like that even if not targetting real groups still normalizes the use of similar language towards other groups, including real racism, and can still cause harm to people due to the similarities to real slurs
Youre just simply ignoring the impact and optics of your actions to make yourself feel better
Who cares if it is or is not a slur, it causes harm to people and therefore needs to go.
::: spoiler CW misogyny "I'm not targetting women when I call a female dog a ..., that's just what they're called" type shit. :::
like you can break out the dictionary and prove point by point how it is technically not a slur, but if it causes harm then I don't care. Words aren't bad because they inherently contain the property of being a slur, they're bad if they cause hurt to people.
I may be wrong but I've seen it used against people that use LLMs, not against the text generator themselves (which would indeed make no sense). A use for which it seems more useful - if only to shame these people.
I've never really seen it used that way myself, when the trend kicked off it was mostly just making some kind of racist sounding statement but replacing the racial slur with clanker. "No daughter of mine is going to date a..." and so on.
IIRC I've seen it used that way on SneerClub on ; no idea how generalized it is.
isn't clanker usually used to describe the llm bots themselves, as opposed to their users?
I thought that was a star wars slur for the Droid Army that fought against the republic?
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Clanker
I was convinced once I saw an article about people basically just quoting westerners about indigenous and black people but saying 'clanker'. Before that I couldn't imagine why we should care. But the article cited some black creators (also definitely at least partially motivated by clicks, to be fair) describing how hurtful it was to see jokes about apartheid America being made light of by just saying clanker instead of rhe N-word in very specific things to anti-black pre-civil-rights-racism
I think it's likely not near as harmful as slurs against humans, but there's also no benefit to using it that I can see so it's pretty easy to just not if theres even a tiny bit of meanness in it
the article cited some black creators (also definitely at least partially motivated by clicks, to be fair) describing how hurtful it was to see jokes about apartheid America being made light of by just saying clanker instead of rhe N-word in very specific things to anti-black pre-civil-rights-racism
the problem here is racism, not hating LLMs. no doubt there is plenty of cracker scum who use the term clanker because it makes them feel like they're getting away with saying the n word
that said, i don't think it's fair to conflate "using the term clanker bc LLMs are bad" with "using the term clanker bc you're a racist who simply can't avoid conflating bad things with black peolle"
i still think there's some value in using as derogatory a term as possible for LLMs, just to discourage people from using them. they should not be allowed to be perceived as cool or good or useful in any way
Do you really think it's discouraging? I see it more like showing a weakness of the argument against, where it signals the stronger side being the ones who ignore insults (not really, but how its perceived) and the weaker side going to slurs. Registers the bullshit team mentality in some people and they will do the 'I'm joining the war on clankers on the side of the clankers' mentality. Idk, I think we just plainly disagree on the utility at basis. But I'm not plugged into the whole world so idk if the feel is different where you're at. I'm mostly off the webs nowadays except niche Twitter and my favorite liberal site, hexbear
I've seen it used for the users themselves, but given you're the third one to make the same remark I'm pretty sure I'm wrong.
fair enough, maybe the use of it has extended to users since the last time i saw the word "in the wild" so to say
LLMs suck and the people who love them are likely the same people who were convinced that NFTs and meme coins were the future as well.
i literally saw someone comparing gen ai in art to sewing to make clothes and im still so upset about this because it was supposed to be a ”comrade”.
That makes no sense at all? If they’re talking about mechanical sewing machines then that’s most comparable to digital art, not generative AI.
likely the same people who were convinced that NFTs and meme coins were the future as well.
The people are desperate for a future that doesn't exist. We're at the end of history, and until a new world is born the old one will continue as a fever dream.
I call for Butlerian Jihad
There's a couple Hexbear users that are into it, but they tend to focus on the open models and running them locally. Overall consensus here is that gen AI is very bad.
I recognize the uses of it when implemented in some beneficial way, but understand the need to remove the enormous negative externalities. A sort of anti-luddite yet still sympathetic to hating the machine kind of person. I hope the bubble bursting destroys its use as a fact checker and fake-friend though. That shit is way worse than useless and the externalities are the greatest in those realms.
The return of a good search engine is the only thing that will destroy it as a fact checker.
It's still wild to me that Google had something good going then it just stopped working
There wasn't enough engagement with a good search engine, so they made it worse. Gotta get those engagement numbers up.
Capitalism is when you make a thing stop working. And the more the trust decays the more capitalist it is. And if the only reason people work is the threat of violence, that's fascism!
yes but not because of IP laws
I hate AI, it isn't worth the cost because frankly it's just a word guesser. Hardly worth fucking the water up for that
if you put backslashes before the asterisks in "g**n" you can avoid having most of your sentence turn to bold and the asterisks disappearing
sometimes it just feels like there's no way to escape this
Tech is cool, but current bubble is on Metaverse level of delusion
LLMs are so bad, I'd say I have less respect for people who use them than I have respect for people who for into NFTs
Hexbear as a whole unfortunately does not have a principled stance on this. Many users do reject GenAI, it will most likely have at least a simple majority if not more, but it is not the party line so to speak. I would welcome a change, but the resulting struggle session and implementing a ban on slop will be fairly painful.
Its fine for Hexbear to have a lets say "offical" partyline but I dont think it makes sense for Hexbear to enforce every single issue.
Like for example Microsoft is a bad company . We "should" boycott it. Use Linux instead.... I use Linux.
But I assume that 40-60 percent of Hexbear (or more) still uses a Microsoft OS.
I dont think such a degree of purity is necessary . We are not a revolutionary organization nor party
there should not be a hexbear orthodoxy, but if it needs to exist, i will be its high pontiff and excommunicate all of you as heretical libs using my six foot tall ushanka.
It would be painful because the "simple majority" would be reciting talking points that are 3 years outdated, as they are in this thread. Hopefully any ban would have the input of someone who has some understanding of genAI and isn't just a kneejerker before it's implemented.
And what would a ban even be? You can't post genAI here? Is anyone doing that right now? Or are you going to advocate for banning people you suspect have ever used genAI - because good luck lmao
idgaf that it has less fingers than 3 years ago it's still hot garbage
Call me a Luddite but the only AI I’ll ever care about went number one in the 96 nba draft. Oh you want AI to give you “the answer”? AI is The Answer
The only real use for this technology is as a glorified note organizer and brainstorming aid using pre-vetted data and falsifiable prompts, and even then it has to checked and double-checked to make sure it isn't hallucinating; hardly worth it for most applications outside of hobbies
Pretending it's a real General AI is just delusion and a break with reality, but the primary concern for any socialist should be the ownership question, which I believe should be the main political angle when engaging with the tech
it can act sort-of like an abstract programming language, but if my medication was better i'd just write code myself.
The few use cases for which they actually kinda work:
- (not very high quality) Entertainment
- Pre-processing large datasets used for training traditional ML models (I'm thinking specifically of the img2text models here), for applications that aren't too outside of their training set.
- Large-scale automated disinformation
The first two can be fully performed locally for negligible costs; the same is mostly true also for the third one, which is immoral on top of it.
The main ongoing use case/need they currently answer though is that of the capitalists: pretending to have discovered a new Internet in terms of economic growth (the VC morons still don't seem to get that the web was a one-time thing) to make a new bubble and try and make the whole disgusting circus continue a little longer.
Previous attempts - none of them as successful, many of them a lot less: 'web 3.0', 'big data', 'smart cities', 'crypto/NFTs', and 'the metaverse'. Likely next one once the AI bubble pops (assuming the world economy doesn't collapse with it): 'quantum computing' - the quick ones among the shitheads have already started drumming that beat; and once we're in a new AI winter I also fully expect them to connect the two - ie, 'the only reason we didn't get AGI is the lack of quantum computing'.
LLMs are a lot more successful than previous attempts specifically due to the appearance of working; if you don't look at it too closely / are not even slightly well-versed in the tech itself you could believe what the people selling them are saying. It's the perfect grift vector.
Disinformation is a big one. Not only can images be faked easier, but also the replacing of wikipedia and serious sources with an LLM giving the answer to search engine queries.
Grok shoehorning White Genocide in South Africa into everything was a poor attempt, but there's no reason to believe similar things aren't being done more competently to push answers in a certain direction or with a certain spin.
Disinformation is a big one.
I am convinced that this is the real reason for the major push for AI data centres in the US. The corporate media is desperate to retake control of the narrative. They want to be able to convincingly fake photos and video in support of their propaganda goals.
At a minimum, LLMs using sites like reddit and published books written in English as their main data set sources means they will always inherit previous anglosphere disinformation and biases
Bit idea: language-learning models, but they're conventionally attractive people showing off articles of clothing and a penchant for linguistics
as a friend and to g*n to... i dont care how much we have in common ideologically, i cant support you g*ning
You can put a backslash \ in front of any characters you don't want to render markdown
e.g. g\**n for g**n
Otherwise it parses it as a long slab of text ** between double asterixes ** and puts it in bold
To answer your question, no, I don't use genAI
