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.
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.
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.
AI as a term is essentially vaporware. The ways that it’s being used to describe real, useful, and frankly niche technologies, that people rightfully find good and useful, and to describe the consumer facing slop machines that swallow an entire lake just to make a shitty image of an anime girl with 3 tits, is purposeful so as to poison the well, and make discussion about the subject more difficult.
AI means, and has always meant, artificial means of doing what before computers seemed only possible with real, human intelligence. Another good way of looking at it is algorithms for problems for which it’s not practical to explicitly write an algorithm to solve.
It’s meant this since Turing. That’s a remarkable foresight if it’s “purposefully poisoning the well.”
“AI” used to mean “artificial intelligence” as in “a thing that is intelligent”. Which disqualifies LLMs because they’re dumb as fuck; their ability to generalize is garbage.
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?
No, but I believe machine translation is now powered mainly by LLMs, which is a damn useful application of the technology.
I was surprised to learn recently that a few of my friends pay for Claude to help with personal projects and things like that. This particular AI tech is quite new so it’s surely too early to declare axiomatically that it has no uses. That sounds like an emotional reaction to me.