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.
I can't even imagine the mental gymnastics required to be both "pro-labor" and "pro-AI". I mean, yeah I'm all about workers rights...but imagine how much money my boss could make if he just replaced us all with robots?
So in an ideal world we would have ai/robots doing labour jobs, while humans are free to do what they want and enjoy life without the wage slavery to survive...
But we do not live in such a world and instead, ai is doing all the creative fun bits and humans are loosing their jobs and not getting any support to live... ๐
I think "pro-AI" is an overstatement for one comm about generated art. They just want to enjoy the art without the drama.
That;s a great way to put it.
Its like denouncing all of reddit because of one subreddit (not saying you shouldn't denounce reddit).
I'm fairly sure doing mental gymnastics and hypocrisy are fairly popular these days. I can come up with a bazillion of other topics where people like to do it. And it's often both sides, and the people interested in the truth and facts are a bit more rare.
Same thing here. It's easy to have a strong opinion and to vocalize it loudly. But I have zero information whether this is legit or someone went through 20 posts and downvoted someone because of a personal vendetta. This could be a warranted ban, or not.
I have a hunch though, because I know how that mod moderates. And it's often because of zir personal agenda.
Is there really a difference between downvoting posts that show up in your feed and downvoting posts in a shitty community?
I fully admit that if I see a stupid looking community I might click on it and downvote a bunch of posts on the first page that appear to be spreading misinformation or are malicious trolling. Then I skim and if they are mostly downvoted it gets blocked. Sometimes I do the same with users to see if they are shitty overall vs had a bad comment.
As an extreme example, if I downvote a bunch of posts and comments by racists does it really matter if I stumbled across individual posts or comments in the All feed vs looking at a community or user as long as I am doing it because of the content and not their username?
Yes, I think it's bad. I mean some people have it coming and I'm not mad at you for downvoting those. But a bunch of people do what you do. And once you're part of a niche community or one about a controversial topic, you tend to get that a lot. Random people wo aren't members coming by and leaving some negative drive-by comment, or a bunch of downvotes. And most of the time it's not a well-informed take. Or it's been debunked countless times already, or not even the specific topic at hand. But more someone pushing their uninformed opinion or the prevalent sentiment... And I mean how would they know it they don't know a lot about what's going on, since it's just someone browsing the "All" feed and leaving drive-by interactions?
The issue is not you doing it or one person. But that quite some people do it. And at the other end it's just a constant stream of it. And if you want to discuss something you then have to make the rules more strict, start to ban people. And then it might lead to some outcry on yepowertrippingbastards or something like that. I think it's just a lose-lose situation for everyone. It doesn't create anything constructive or with substance to it. Main thing it does is drag down the place and poison the atmosphere. I'd rather you just block the community if you don't like the content, and move on with your day.
Make of this what you will. I also downvote misinformation and bad content. But rarely do I scroll through something just to vote on it or make my opinion known to everybody. (With some minor exceptions.)
I think the main difference is that I don't see downvoting terrible stuff as the same thing as downvoting positive stuff.
There is a lot of nuance to it. I'd say receiving one downvote feels as annoying as it feels good to receive 5 upvotes. At least to me, so I'd say downvotes are worth more. But yeah, this is kind of a different topic. Upvoting bad stuff or downvoting good stuff is both very stupid. But this isn't a competition or an excercise in stupidity. Just downvote bad/terrible content and upvote if you think other people might want to read it, too. And use your brain before using the voting system for different purposes than those.
But don't you get it? Once capitalism and its shackles are overthrown, AI will not be a problem. It will be a tool for communist utoparadise. ๐ซ
AI consumes more resources than Bitcoin, at this point. We are accelerating our own demise, all for the spectacle of watching a computer hallucinate on command. There is nothing more decadently bourgeoisie than that.
AI development and usage isn't about to be stopped under any economic system, any more than computers were. But the instance is exclusively anti-corporate, pro-open-source AI. It's not like they're waiting for a revolution to try to use the tech more responsibly.
I feel like comparing AI to computers is misleading. AI can obviously be really good, computers can do so much more
Also, its not like all AI has to be so big, stealing from and competing with artists
They should, though. The Earth is burning.
Small AI models can be hosted on a laptop. It's the corporate AI's that are burning the world.
They can't be trained on a laptop. It's like arguing that beef can be cooked on an electric stove, and ignoring the emissions from the agriculture.
https://www.databricks.com/blog/stable-diffusion-2
AI model training is getting more efficient over time, not less. And each model only needs to be trained once, so your analogy doesn't quite work.
https://huggingface.co/docs/diffusers/main/en/tutorials/basic_training
You can absolutely train a small, specialized model on minimal hardware.
It's also locally hosted and free to use, so each image generated does not directly incentivize the training of future models, unlike cloud-based subscription services.
Worrying about open-source AI while corporate AI burns orders of magnitude more resources every day is much like everything else with climate change. Even if you somehow stopped it, it would barely be a drop in the bucket against the massive, inefficient behemoths destroying the world.
That's a clear strawman, irrespective of how you feel about the topic. The pro-AI left position is that opposing AI is trying to futilely treat a symptom when one should be fixing the root cause of capitalist exploitation, or in other words: "All your problems with AI can be solved by overthrowing capitalism". If you disagree then disagree with that position, not a strawman you made up.
Overthrow capitalism and then I'll stop complaining about AI, then.
See, now you're disagreeing with the actual position. If I cared to have this argument (which I don't) we could now have an honest-ish conversation about the merits and demerits of opposing AI instead of a meaningless circlejerk.
It's not really, because the "AI" people have gievances with in context is the LLMs that are being shoved down everyone's throats by every silicon valley giant, with literal trillions of dollars invested in them. Very, very not left wing. I'm left wing - that money can be MUCH better spent elsewhere.
When people complain about AI evangelists they're complaining about the people who fawn over the aforementioned tech giants, wholesale theft of training data, and enshittification of all platforms by AI slop - not 'AI as a concept', so in other words, you're very much crafting a straw man of your own there.
Yeah these are bad things (well mostly, I don't recognize intellectual property of any form as valid), but that's irrelevant to my point. I wasn't criticizing the anti-AI position; I was criticizing circlejerking by pretending the other side doesn't have valid reasons to think what they think.
There is no such thing as "AI". And most of the "left" in this context is not actually left.