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.
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.
I don’t know man, surveillance tech seems pretty fascist to me.
surveillance networks are made of computers and sensors, which are made of chips and wires. I don’t think chips and wires are fascist, I don’t think sensors and computers are fascist. I think the purpose to which they are put is the fascist part, and the purpose is pure human.
The individual components are no more fascist than the individual organs that put fascists together. What matters is the function of the end product. Flock cameras for example is surveillance tech and that’s their only purpose.
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.
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.
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.
Could you directly address the use-cases that the person you replied to brought up, because they seem pretty important to this discussion to get swept aside?
Forecasting wildfire spread, feeding people better… finding novel drugs, curing illnesses, cheap accurate translation, these all “pale in comparison” to the costs? Even though those uses have all existed for years before ChatGPT?
“amoral math” 🤣
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.
I’m going to get downvoted, and that’s okay, I understand why, but I just want to explain why some people do this. I tried for years to learn to code in various languages, hell I even bought expensive courses to try and help, but I’m either too dumb or not chemically balanced enough to focus and retain the knowledge and I can’t afford college classes nor the time away from a steady job to take them without losing my mortgage, I also don’t have the money to pay someone to code programs for me. So from the time I was about 14 and got my first computer to now at 35, every idea I’ve ever had for a program or a mod or some other coding work needed to be so simple a baby could figure out the code from context clues or I was just out of luck. Since LLMs have come about I have created several small applications that do what I always dreamed of and no one else online was willing or interested in bringing to the table, and a few of them fill niche roles that people really wanted an option for but never existed like mod organizers for certain games.
So hate me all you want for the choice I’m making, but if the alternative is going back to just dreaming about the programs I want to see instead of actually seeing them come to fruition, I’m going to choose this every time.
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.
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?
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.
So because everyone you know who uses “AI” treats it that way, that necessarily means literally everyone who uses “AI” must treat it that way? Wow, such flawless logic.
Some of us see LLMs for what they actually are - tools. Tools that can be useful, but are also dumb as fuck. Claude is fantastic for writing boring, boilerplate shit like unit tests and reasonably good at finding bugs in my code. But I am never going to take credit for its work. If for no other reason than “I wrote this” means “any mistakes in this are mine” and I am not going to take the blame for the dumb shit Claude does.
All I said was that people who “treat it as a tool” never shut up about it. Thanks for proving me right. Also:
If for no other reason than “I wrote this” means “any mistakes in this are mine” and I am not going to take the blame for the dumb shit Claude does.
For fuck’s sake, mate. Even the most permissive AI policies in FOSS require you to claim responsibility for anything your LLM generates. “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore I’d better let it write my software for me”? Bruh.
You: “Nobody who uses AI treats it like a tool, they treat it like an employee they can claim credit for.” Me: “I treat it as a tool.” You: “Wow, you won’t shut up about AI.”
Wow, you are just the best at reasoned arguments!
Kindly, fuck right off. (I’m blocking you, so any response you make won’t be for me.)
That wasn’t me, that was someone else.
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.
The very thing that if they could would replace us with it.
I find it depressingly hilarious that this is the line that makes people furious. Not the previous decades of exploitation and corruption.
It’s a tool like any other. It can be used in a destructive and immoral manner or used where it works to improve the lives of people. Think about the alpha fold project and other such use cases.
Lmfao no it isn’t you rube. It’s the most concentrated avatar of Capital in history. It’s constructed on endless desecration of art, music, poetry, literature, science, and more, all to give you shitty summaries of websites and your boss an excuse to fire you for a chatbot. Never before have the forces of Capital worked so hard to destroy the proletariat.
That’s one use of neural networks we do need to react to accordingly as a populace but it’s not the only use of those algorithms. I gave the example of alpha fold which has essentially solved the very hard problem of protein folding unlocking the door to developing cures for many diseases. The issue isn’t the tech, the issue is in some cases how it is being used. Think of nuclear power. We could have functionally limitless and clean power or we can end life on earth. The problem isn’t nuclear power, the problem is the actions of people.
Shut the fuck up you technofascist bootlicker. Claude is never going to love you, no matter what it says.
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.
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”.
I imagine any historic materialist seeing this meme cringing so hard. Thanks for this comment so I can feel less insane about, you know, not swallowing idealistic imaginary nonsense.
Always glad to help. And yes, the cringe was palpable and something needed to be said.
Nah, change with the times or get left behind.
I’m not afraid, give me those yummy downvotes.
