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.
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. 🫠
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 think the same was said on ozone destroying gases and leaded gasoline. Look where they’re currently. Or should we also encurage the “anti-corporate” use of those? Maybe even stop our fight against big plastic, because open-source plastic making could be an advantage over the corporate stuff?
These are laughably incomparable. You literally can’t use freon or leaded gasoline without causing damage. You can run computers entirely on clean, renewable energy. The issue is the energy generation and mass-scale inefficient use of resources.
Small AI models can be hosted on a laptop. Unless you are advocating for abandoning computers as a technology?
If we didn’t waste energy and resource on the AI, it wouldn’t be as accessible and advanced as currently is, which is fine by me, but not by those who think the AI is like a “little person in the computer”, or that a super AI will solve all of humanity’s problems, including those caused by said AI.
Those are issues with generalist corporate AI designed to replace human labor and search engines. Not small, open-source image generators.
The issue, as always, is that we have dragged our feet on renewables for over half a century, and allowed massive corporations to steer our usage of resources to massive, inefficient “convenience” systems designed to extract as much wealth as possible at the cost of the environment and humanity’s future.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/19314224
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.