His argument was literally that
- artists, writers, and programmers are “labor aristocracy” and deserve no respect because they’re sitting around making art and writing code while other people are toiling and laboring,
- genAI is a “free resource” (“it’s free for me to use at work”) that “helps everyone make things” instead of having to rely on skill and expertise and therefore makes everything equal,
- it’s hypocritical of people to be worried about the environmental and societal impact of genAI because “only white people are worried about it now that their hobbies are being threatened and everyone else is catching up”.
Pointing out there there are artists and programmers from every race and economic class, as well as perfectly ordinary people in every walk of life who are all actively being harmed both by the theft of ideas and labor and by the physical effects of gigantic data centers ruining communities, was met with much hand-waving and incredibly impenetrable philosophical jargon.
I’m particularly incensed because I’m as leftist and anticapitalist as they come and this felt like the fuckery some conservative cockwomble would try to come up with to parody socialism, except this guy was completely serious.
People who use terms like “labor aristocracy” are fake leftists, and are almost always like to fetishize workplace injuries, that forever disable people. I can only wish the same happening to them.
I do wonder if some of this anti ai sentiment is a psyop to keep the proletariat off the tools and away from ai while the bourgeoisie learn to use them to consolidate power.
And with this recent news about Nvidia inflating the price of their chips by paying/guaranteeing neoclouds to take them makes me even more sus
The last computer revolution had to be distributed because the Internet wasn’t good enough yet, but this time they can be ahead of the curve gobbling up all the hardware so they can decide what you can do with these models.
I imagine another world where openai stayed open and Nvidia stayed a consumer company and everyone just has their own little box that can order their shopping or whatever
At the end of the day, these models are compressing all knowledge into something much more accessible, and knowledge is power, so it would be a smart gambit to limit access and spread fear…
That’s a part of it, but the proletariat are useful idiots, too. They can take the Anti-AI sentiment to get them to back “anti-AI” representatives and senators.
Those legislators will support AI “regulation” written by-and-for the top-companies in the industry.
This will make it incredibly cost-prohibitive for anybody to enter the AI industry new, and cements the top companies at the top, while the smaller companies run around spending every last cent they’ve got to meet the regulations…and when they fail, they will be scooped up by the big cats.
Don’t be surprised if you start seeing the big guys supporting (or, at least, not disagreeing with) policies that initially seem counter to their interests. It’s a long game thing.
That’s my prediction, at least…based upon, well, nearly every other industry that everybody hates.
One of those situations where you want to reply, but you just drop it because it’s pointless.
He has a point, there’s tons of people doing hard physical labor who can’t afford to hire an artist and these llm give them a way to have some art that works for them, what’s so evil about that?
The fact that AI is making the world significantly worse for everybody especially more vulnerable people that are underpaid, especially physical laborers…
Physical laborers are the same people that the same AI tracks, profiles, manipulates and abuses, among the rest of us, just because some cunt bastard decided to pay to generate code, pictures, or whatever the fuck else.
By all means use AI but DON’T FUCKING PAY for any of it.
Let me guess, they’re a college freshman.
Or a tankie.
These people walk among us.
Wow.
Imperialist huh? Just wait until Unga Dunga hears that about his prehistoric cave drawings.
LLMs take the intellectual labor of billions and convert it into a form that can be privatized and commodified so capitalists can charge for access. It’s the enclosure of the commons extended to the digital realm.
Universities have been doing this since forever.
Consider that generative AI is a “thing”. That thing can be sold as a product to accrue capital, but that thing can also be given away freely. A socialist government may redistribute land so that every citizen has a plot, but that doesn’t erase history or the fact that the land was originally stolen from native inhabitants when it was colonized.
Capitalism’s backbone is theft. The middle-class is having a hissy-fit now that the forces of capitalism are turning inwards. My critique of Shoshana Zuboff’s book on surveillance-capitalism has been that it’s not a new form of capitalism at all. It’s just capitalism. Only those mechanisms are now being turned towards a previously ‘protected’ class and they really don’t like it when the leopards eat their faces.
You’re wasting time arguing with a troll. Tell him AI is copypasta for lazy tryhards and offer to buy him a coloring book since it’s essentially the same time. You can even offer to hang the pictures on the refrigerator when he’s done coloring it if he stays inside the lines like a good boy.
(know what’s funny, no one ever colors in a coloring book and says look at this “art” I made. Children are smarter then AI bros.)
People who argue in favor of AI art are, at best, talentless hacks.
We democratized misinformation. God bless.
Well, I suppose if we collectively owned together the means and access to said AI, and nobody would own or be able to claim ownership over it beyond the public domain, I could see this argument perhaps work.
As it is, it’s just another theft by the capitalists aimed to oppress us all, cheat us out of our collective knowledge and published works. The technology is useful and could be made sustainably, but the drive of profit over sense and reason fucks us all equally in this one shared planet.
I hate that it has come to this, when just a little bit of more sense and taste, responsibility, we could have made this a public domain good equally available to all, via public libraries or such offering compute or whatever. And ran responsibly and sustainably with realistic limits and scale.
It didn’t need to be this big of a pig dick in our asses. It was a deliberate choice by those that have the power and the means to make those choices over everyone else.
So in the real world, that’s bullshit.
In an ideal world, it may have been even good.
genAI is a “free resource” (“it’s free for me to use at work”)
i.e. literally not free, it’s capital the boss allows him to use while on the clock while he works for a wage.
Completely detached from reality.
Don’t call it philosophical jargon though, because that isn’t philosophy. It’s just delusion masked under oxymoronic neologisms.
“Labor aristocracy” what the fuck
Debating with a conservative is like playing chess with a pigeon. They just knock over all the pieces, shit all over the board and strut around like they won.
That’s the thing! This guy actually is a very involved leftist, complete with theory and everything…and then he goes on to say this
They sound like a tankie. Tankies are leftists like Dr. Pepper is a medical doctor
I got the reference! Guessing you’re Canadian?
I wish!
