I’m curious to get a general pulse on how people here view the rapid evolution of AI, specifically on lemmy. On one side, there’s growing interest in local open-weights models, self-hosted setups, and practical developer/productivity tools. On the other, there seems to be a growing list, I can’t keep track of, that are seen as major concerns. I’m not here to pick sides or be biased in one corner. Im genuinely curious what people have to say about AI in general. And maybe it will help me and other get a better handle on how we perceived it in our ever changing world.
Personally I think the vast majority AI is ethically indefensible purely based on how it was trained. Generative AI represents, at best, the privatization of culture by for-profit corporations, and at worst, one of the most unprecedented instances of exploitation of human labor and creativity in history.
And you don’t have to take my word for it because it was recently uncovered in court that Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht called it the “largest theft of labor in human history”.
Even if we were to totally ignore how wasteful most AI is, how damaging to the climate it is, and how much it threatens to further broaden the gap between the rich and the poor, I already hate AI for what is so obviously the capitalistic strip-mining of all human culture in the name of creating shareholder value.
Pro-AI people love to brush off pretty much all of the ethical concerns with the simple argument that the ends justify the means. I reject that outright, but for the sake of argument I want you all to consider whether that is even a valid point… Do the ends justify the means? We are doing all of this AI shit to what ends?
Who benefits from this supposedly increased “productivity”? Definitely not the working class who have at most a relatively minor stake in the success of big tech businesses. Can anyone seriously claim we are seeing things improve at all, let alone an accelerating rate? Do we really see AI bringing about a utopian society where everything is great? Or are we seeing things enshittify and become more corporate and less affordable week by week? Is any of this shit making your life easier or better?
Now don’t get me wrong… it seems to be making some things much easier: scams, disinformation, surveillance, propaganda, fraud, and of course generic commercialized slop. We honestly couldn’t ask for a better set of tools to trick people into giving us money. Generative AI has truly disrupted the market for scams, and it seems that it has brought about a new golden age of fraudulence.
Not to be a wet blanket, but I feel this stuff really needs a reality check too.
“Open weights” is nothing more than a freeware binary blob.
I can see how that’s at least preferable to using some company’s subscription service, but at the same time your local LLM still has a hard dependency on someone else’s corporate training dataset (pretty much all the result of stolen labor, by the way), and so it’s very much not as “open” or “local” as people like to make it out to be. And from an ethical standpoint, it’s not a whole lot different either way.
I think an ethical alternative to today’s generative AI could exist–if it was trained on public domain, creative commons and licensed data, and thus not exploiting human labor and culture–but I’m not seeing people invest any time in making that.
Ethical training data could exit, but I don’t think public domain/creative commons/licensed are quite good enough (almost no one who contributed knew what AI would become until recently, and some of those people are still alive). Although that’s better.
A truly ethical training dataset for AI would be one that everyone who created the training data opted into. And I don’t mean their employer or photography sharing platform signed a license deal, I mean they personally opted in. If AI is so great, I’m sure plenty of people will be happy to contribute their art, photos, writing, code, social media posts, etc. All the pro-AI people can just band together and make their own dataset to use.
That doesn’t solve all the other issues with generative AI, but it would make a huge difference.
I get what you’re saying, but that is sort of a failure of imagination on the part of the licensor, in my opinion…
While I can understand some people being surprised by how their explicitly public domain or cc0 works are currently being used, this is inherently part of the risk you take when you opt into giving your work an extremely permissive license in the first place.
If you put something out there and tell the world “you can use this freely, forever, for whatever you want”, you are committing to all kinds of potential uses, known and unknown, within the scope of that license.
Contributing someone into the public domain is a nice thought for sure, but it’s also not something to take lightly because you really don’t know what it might one day be used for, and you are relinquishing a lot of your (legal) rights.
I think it’s ethically indefensible, but because of the environmental impact of data centers.
I don’t disagree with that.
But a magical, new, clean, and infinite fusion power source could be invented tomorrow, and AI would still be deeply exploitative of human labor.
So, to me at least, in addition to the environmental impact, the cultural and social impact can’t be overstated. It’s all bad.
As far as the ethical concerns go for “local” models how do you feel about individuals using it for non-commercial use? A toy/hobby/assistant for their own home use? I personally have been enjoying “playing” with it, but I do agree in that I hate how they’ve come to obtain the training data. I hate the companies that create it and profit off of it, but personally I don’t feel too guilty using it as a toy/hobby if it’s a model that was released for free to be used on your own hardware.
This is my biggest concern for sure.