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.
These are sloppy & ugly, they’re tools of cowards
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.
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”.
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.
AI is analogous to guns… how? Just because this meme is about Batman snapping a gun in half?
As for your other point, AI means those machine learning models that keep eating up all the electricity and water and computer parts we can feed them and making places near where datacenters are built worse places to live and allowing bosses to fire creative workers because while their output may be worse, it’s a lot cheaper, and encouraging their users to confide in them and being sycophantic and deliberately giving them an outsized opinion of their own abilities and whose makers are endeavouring to promote as a substitute for human connection with a worrying degree of success.
most people don’t really use them
Lol. Lmao. Roflmfao. ChatGPT’s monthly active user count is triple the population of the United States. People are asking LLMs for meal plans, exercise routines, recipes, write greeting cards for them, do their school essays for them because they think it’s a better writer than they are, bouncing ideas off it to see if they’re good (yikes!), you name it they’re doing it.
Also more than half the flyers going up around my university are obviously AI generated.
The meme presupposes the usefulness of AI, which is why everyone’s taking it as a given. If it isn’t useful, you don’t need to use normative arguments to stop people from using it, people will just naturally never find an opportunity to do so.
Also if you really can’t think of any ways to use a chatbot to advance your political goals you need to think harder. It just shows a lack of adabtability.
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.
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.
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.
LLMs don’t cure cancer. That’s the kind of AI everyone refers to these days. Not ML projects.
No it isn’t. That’s the distinction that is made when arguments arise, but the claims really are spawned indiscriminately.
You need to understand what you’re complaining about before you can name it, and most people don’t understand much of anything about modern AI and LLMs.
What then, O wise one, must we understand before we can criticize LLMs for the slop machines they would still be even if we eliminated the myriad ethical problems with how they’re currently deployed?
Being a sarcastic ass does nothing to refute my point. I don’t have to be an oracle to look back at history and see 100% of technologies finding an eventual use. I don’t know how the problems will be solved, and I don’t need to know what their uses will be in order for the trend that has continued for 1,500 years of recorded history to most likely be true.
You, on the other hand, have to somehow show that THIS technology is so wildly unique that none of the examples from the last 1,500 years are informative.
Edit: sorry, got some things mixed up in my brain. Just because you can’t identify a use for a technology doesn’t mean a technology is bad. Unless you are personally familiar with every single technology, profession, and process on the entire planet, and those that will be invented in the future, and can act as the ultimate arbiter of what is and isn’t useful. Alcohol is very harmful. But also good at sterilisation. X-rays are very harmful, but also good at medical imaging. Gunpowder is very harmful, but also makes pretty fireworks.
Fascists don’t create, they corrupt. Technology is neither fascist nor antifascist, those labels only make sense in the context of humans.
Be thoughtful about the services you use, the money you spend, and the data you entrust to others. Do your best to understand your tools as fully as you can. Strive to help others and do no harm, in your immediate impact and in your downstream effects. Don’t trust to heuristics like labeling certain technologies “fascist”; they are not and the more non-fascists there are who understand technology, the better equipped we will be to fight fascism.
There are definitely fascist technologies out there, that’s why we can say don’t build the fucking torment nexus.
Mass surveillance, torture devices, hostile architecture, the slanted toilet, the panopticon, those can only be used for evil.
The torment nexus isn’t a discrete thing. You can’t make thumbscrews without screws. Are the screws evil? If not, when does the composition of components become evil? I don’t think LLMs are evil for the same reason I don’t think thumbscrews are evil in and of themselves. Thumbscrews, like LLMs, lack the capacity for evil. It’s the people who turn technology against their fellow humans that I hold as my enemy, not the trappings of their mischief. Remove them from the equation, and the torment nexus becomes so much harmless scrap, ready to be beaten into plowshares.
I can see the argument for local or at least open source models, but most people who use LLMs are using ChatGPT and other Big Tech LLM services, which are clearly run by fascists.
Yes, but it is very important to distinguish between LLMs, which are amoral math, and OpenAI et al, which are corporations run by fascists that offer LLM-based public surveillance / disinformation platforms. There is no technology on earth that cannot be bent to malign purpose if malicious people are inclined to do so. LLMs are just the popular useful technology du jour.
Thank you. I just wrote this in another comment:
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?
I don’t believe your analogy holds water. I believe computers are a lot closer to steel than “AI” is, in that they’re both foundational technologies with a very very wide array of proven uses such that the benefits of the development and use of steel/computers far outweigh the associated costs. Weapons/“AI” on the otherhand are both specific, narrower applications of steel/computer technology with a few particular beneficial uses, but those uses pale in comparison to costs of the existence and development these technologies, so much so that both weapons and “AI” should be put on a metaphorical shelf out of reach until we as a global society can grow up to develop and use these technologies in a more responsible and conscientious manner.
I see what you’re saying, but they’re all on a continuum and it just depends where your perspective window lies. I could see AI as foundational to many new technologies in the future.
I agree we should shelf any AGI or ASI (which supposedly doesn’t exist yet), however I think AI has many tangibly beneficial applications. The problem comes from the incentive structure of the Epstein class and their investments into surveillance and profit extraction.
“amoral math” 🤣
I got called unethical today for using a small-scale locally hosted open model trained on Wikipedia and Stack Exchange. A LOT of the anti-AI people are universalists that have decided carte blanche that it is an evil technology and everyone who uses it is bad.
Sure ya did buddy
https://lemmy.zip/comment/28450273
Why act like an ass?
Well they did, it took like 30s to check their last few comments
Even most of of the local and “open” models are exploiting the work of others by training off unethically sourced data without even so much as consent.
There is such a thing as ethical AI, but damn near zero people are doing it that way.
Critical thinking is a rare commodity on social media. The the AI hate is basically lemmy’s version of facebooks anti-vaxxers.
I wonder if it isn’t at least partially a psy op. This whole business of giving anyone who even looks at an LLM a scarlet letter, and refusing to participate in any critical evaluation of LLMs or other AI tools, plays right into the hands of those who would use LLMs to pollute, isolate, and destroy the free internet. The willfully ignorant will be the easiest to trap.
If you can read this: beware the day that internet discussions of mass manipulation go quiet. That silence is the death knell of freedom.
Ayup. I’ve noticed and wondered the same thing. Very logical and great ROI, it spreads itself
And the cost is what?
A little Thiel anti-christ buffoonery here, a little Zuck has to make a blog post about the wonders of the happy AI there?
Their biggest issue is just self correcting the sentiment gauge for their vanity, the machinery to ensure they are the only ones who use and control the tooling with proficiency is already in place from their perspective.
As much as I hate “AI” myself, rhetoric like this does more harm to movements resisting “AI” than to help them.
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.
Gosh if only there was an ethical way…
The anti-AI zealotry on Lemmy has been surprising. They have no idea what to actually be upset about and instead they parrot the most retarded shit.
Be mad at the corrupt exploitative companies, not the technology that has the potential to unlock miracles.
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?
You know that when people who complains about AI say “AI” they mean diffusion models and LLMs, not the field of machine learning as a whole.
Are you defending those too? If not, why did you enter this conversation?
I literally use diffusion models for the super resolution part of the wind field predictions lol. Also I use LLMs to aid in the research every day.
It’s ok if you don’t know how things actually work, just don’t be so confidently incorrect.
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.
The tech bro goons don’t own the technology.
They do own ChatGPT and other commercial LLM services, though, which is what most AI users use, and they made the hardware to run local AI models prohibitively expensive for a lot of people.
Cool so don’t use chatgpt and tools have costs? Idk what you want? Free compute and a lolly? Like I don’t disagree that those tech bros fucking suck and I personally don’t use their service but I’m not going to turn an entire technology into a boogeyman just because some fuckwhits with too much money and not enough empathy are fucking about. The underlying technology is solid and useful as a tool, regardless of the hardware you have. You can run local models that produce useful results on even a raspberry pi. It does not matter who contributed to it to assess it as such.
Ok, you have a local model… but did you train it yourself? On what data?
Sadly, modern generative AI is a tool that’s built on top of the exploitation of other people’s work.
Actual human beings put blood, sweat and tears into their words, art and music, only for it to be used without consent or compensation by unskilled lazy misanthropes to generate an infinite sea of unwanted slop.
There is theoretically an ethical way to do AI (using public domain, creative commons, licensed or original data), but it seems to me that almost nobody is doing that.
Personally I don’t care how “useful” people want to claim AI is. For one, I’m not seeing things getting better faster, if anything they’re all getting worse. And regardless, the ends don’t justify the means, so if we’re exploitint people to generate slop I don’t really care how nice the slop is.
Slop is a consequence of tool use, not a design feature of the tool. There are vast amounts of ethical data to train against. Etc, etc, etc. I could go on but you don’t really care, you care selectively. Or you wouldn’t be using the computer (the tool in front of your hands) undeniably built upon exploitation and compromise. It is a tool. It exists. You can’t stuff the genie back in the box. Work to make shit better instead of needlessly complaining about shit you can’t control like it’s some sort of generalized target you can paint on every iteration.
Slop is a consequence of tool use, not a design feature of the tool.
To me “slop” is a description that reflects the supply and demand imbalance of all generative AI output: there’s a practically infinite supply of AI generated stuff (to put it kindly), but very little demand.
For example, someone could generate a book with an LLM faster than any person could actually read it (assuming anyone actually wanted to read it in the first place…), and that represents a fundamental logical problem with regard to the value of things that AI produces.
There are vast amounts of ethical data to train against.
Of course there are. Like I said in the comment above: works in the public domain, works licensed cc-0, original works, works licensed for training, and so on. Ethical AI is possible.
But is that what your local AI is trained on?
If so, cool and good for you, you’re using the tool ethically.
But that’s not what I’m seeing from >99.99% of AI users out there generating Ghibli-core slop for an audience of 0. Stealing all of Kazuo Oga’s background art is not curing cancer or doing anything good for society, it’s just blatant exploitation of one man’s life’s work and legacy so frauds and billionaires can make a quick buck off of people who can’t tell the difference between AI slop and human art.
I could go on but you don’t really care, you care selectively. Or you wouldn’t be using the computer (the tool in front of your hands) undeniably built upon exploitation and compromise.
This comparison isn’t exactly working in your favor…
Even assuming some of my PC parts were made in a sweatshop in Asia, how many people were exploited to make it? How badly were they exploited? Were they payed something for their time and effort?
Odds are that the model you’re using was trained off a mountain of work from of untold numbers of people, all over the world, who didn’t see a red cent for their skills, time or effort. Not only is their work being exploited for other people’s profit, nobody even bothered to seek consent to do it in the first place.
This is exploitation of labor on an industrial scale. AI turns the whole world into a sweatshop for every person in the creative working class. Forget talking about the “means of production”, creative types today aren’t even able to control the fruits of their labor anymore.
It is a tool. It exists. You can’t stuff the genie back in the box.
Like every technology, it can and should be regulated to prevent abuse, exploitation and other forms of negative impact. Every new technology introduces new problems, challenges and implications. But unlike what happened with oil and nuclear technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, we shouldn’t wait 50-100 years to consider them.
The big problem I have with most AI stans is that you are all so infatuated with the subjective utility of the “tool” that you’re unwilling to even have a good faith conversation about the objective impact of this technology on the world and society.
You just conceded my entire point. Ethical AI exists, it can be regulated, and the problem is how a tool is built and used, not the mere existence of the tool. The rest is meaningless boogeymaning. Your “99.99%” figure came directly out of your ass, and abundant supply does not make something worthless. Additionally, nobody said Ghibli knockoffs cure cancer. You picked the dumbest use case you could find and are pretending it defines the whole technology. You also turned “your computer is built on exploitation too” into “well, my exploitation is probably smaller and somebody may have been paid,” which is not remotely moral. I think it’s extremely smart to do some of what you mentioned though: regulate training, require transparency, license protected work. Great. None of that supports “do not use AI" or invalidates it as a tool. Oh and ending a comment full of invented statistics, cherry-picked examples, and arguments nobody made by accusing everyone else of bad faith is honestly… 🤌
You cannot run it locally and have the same thing that oligarchs and big-tech have at their disposal.
Of course it’s not the same. It’s better because I control its inputs and outputs, and who has access to them.
Oligarch controlled tools are dangerous because of who controls them, not because the tools are intrinsically dangerous.
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.
If you want something useable you need a decent amount of RAM/VRAM and a modern GPU, things that aren’t exactly accessible these days. That Kimi model is apparently half a terabyte in size and requires 100s of GB of VRAM, so I don’t know why you’re saying it’s a ‘local’ model.
That is patently untrue. You can have useful ai on a esp32, a $10 chip. https://github.com/slvDev/esp32-ai It will not be as capable as kimi k3 in general generic tasks but you can fine tune models for certain workflows (literally how “distillation” works) and you can run them on affordable and available hardware. Just because you don’t understand a tool or how to properly use it does not mean someone else doesn’t.
Just because you don’t understand a tool or how to properly use it does not mean someone else doesn’t.
You brought up the Kimi model up in a conversation about local models being viable, something that requires 8 Nvidia GB300s as a prerequisite. And I’m sorry I don’t follow you’re little hobby close enough for you, I did try it and it sucked.
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.
That’s true, but they’re dumbasses. I don’t need Grok, or whatever awful shit facebook made, if I can localhost Qwen
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/
The protein fold prediction stuff alone is huge. If we discover a cure for Alzheimer’s in my lifetime, or hell, even an effective treatment of the dementia symptoms, it will probably be due in part to these tools.
Well Google disbanded the AlphaFold team last month and moved the people there to work on Gemini to generate more slop, because they never really cared about that. It was just a stepping stone like making AI play Go.
Even if they reassign the researchers to other projects, I find it hard to believe that they just casually won a chemistry Nobel on their way to making more believable fake internet pictures. And putting aside the curing cancer of it all, why wouldn’t the most conniving capitalist in the world be interested in discovering patentable drugs? It’s huge business.
That’s a gross overreach and obviously wrong. Selection bias at its finest. The people who act as you have described are loud and easy to spot. The people that treat it like a tool don’t go around telling everyone about it. You’re conflating improper use and corporate abuse with ANY use. By that logic we should outlaw X-rays entirely, since when they were first discovered they were used fuckin’ EVERYWHERE, and quite a lot of people got sick because of it.
Humans are bad at moderation. When a shiny new toy is presented, we obsess to our own detriment. Over time, a balance is found. This has happened over, and over, and over, and over.
The people that treat it like a tool don’t go around telling everyone about it.
What rock have you been under? None of the people in my social circles who use AI as a tool will shut up about it.
Cool, your personal experience doesn’t dictate the global population. And you just reiterated my point. What about the people in your circles that don’t talk about it at all?
And the person using it.
This is so meta because Frank Miller’s Dark Knight is a child abusing fascist.
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.
