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AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.
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Damn, I can run the models on my laptop? How were they trained? What benefits will they give me?
I'm sorry for being snarky here but frankly speaking LLM output in general is neutral at best, as for what I'm an expert in I have little need of it, and for what I'm not I have little trust of it. And yes, while I can do the matrix math locally now, and get output even less vanishingly useful, it still embodies the fuel and treasure burned to generate it, and it embodies the theft of labor it is backed by. That matrix being handed to me to chew on the spare compute of my laptop - and let's sidestep the issue of that occurring at scale, as if a thousand people generating a gram of poison is somehow different than one generating a kilogram - was still generated via those expensive processes. It embodies it in the same way my coat embodies the labor and fuel used to make it and ship it to me but at least it keeps me warm.
We can say all we want that the issue is the economic system - we would have no need of copyright, of being concerned about the theft of art and creativity, concerned about the breaking of labor, if only we simply didn't live under capitalism. And I agree! The issue is we do. And so I'm uninterested in hand waving those concerns in the name of some notion of "technological progress"
Yeah, you can run models that outperform those that required a whole data centre just a year back on your laptop today. The benefit of privacy should be obvious here. They were trained the same way every model is trained.
If you don't need it that's good for you, but try to develop minimal empathy to realize that what you need and other people need may not be the same. Also, are you seriously advocating for copyrights here? The whole argument about models embodying labour is null and void when we're talking about open source models that are publicly owned.
Meanwhile, Marxists have never been against technological progress under capitalism. The reality is that this technology will continue to be developed whether you throw your tantrums or not. The only question is who will control it. People who think they can just boycott is out of existence are doing the same thing that libs do when they try to fix problems by voting.
Literally the thing I'm saying is bad.
I'm advocating for my artist friends to not die on the streets.
I'm not boycotting it out of existence, I'm arguing against its use because of the harms it causes. If your calculus is that different than mine, there's simply no point in continuing this discussion
So literally boycotting then. There are two paths forward, proprietary models that are owned by corps and open source models that are publicly owned. It should be obvious which is the preferable option here.