this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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When people complain about AI (including the above screenshot), it’s almost always just complaints about Capitalism. Yeah, big corporations are pushing AI hard. Yes, they are trying to replace workers with AI. These are not AI problems, they are Capitalism problems. People do know it’s okay to criticize Capitalism instead of just the things that Capitalism abuses, right?
And it’s like they don’t see the ways that AI can help in the fight against Capitalism by empowering individuals.
Plus, AI is not solely the providence of corporations… and even if they are in the lead on advancements, they won’t be able to keep it locked down, either. There are community AI projects and open source/weight/etc models… and they are also advancing quickly. The libraries that interact with the models are almost all open source, too.
And while people complain about corporations scraping peoples data for training they neglect to consider that we, the community, can scrape corporate data as well… that’s ALL fair use. Attacking, diminishing, or destroying fair use benefits rich corporations infinitely more than it benefits us plebs and community efforts. “License your training data” is something only deep pockets can achieve. If I want to train something and have to pay for training data (which, btw won’t ever be reproduced/redistributed)… I can’t do that, you can’t do that… 99.999% can’t do that.
The fear of Capitalists replacing us all with software has somehow managed to make people miss the forest for the trees. AI isn’t the enemy - not any more than the cotton gin, the telephone, or the internet - Capitalism is.
And the resource consumption? Is that made up?
No, that’s valid… but it’s also a problem with all cloud technology in general. As models shrink and run locally more often instead of giant, dedicated data centers, that will improve. Right now brute force is how the bigger, cutting-edge models (e.g. ChatGPT) operate.
Does our habitat have that time?
Oh, we are fucked. But I also won’t pretend that mostly solar-powered data centers, which don’t emit greenhouse gases, are in any way a remotely meaningful contributor to our climate crisis.
If a bull is bucking around in my house, I’m not going to worry about the faucet slowly dripping in the bathroom. I want to deal with the bull, first.
User name checks out. I appreciate your veracity.
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At least where I live, data centres are taking up green power that was supposed to go to households
You put that much better than I could have, but I agree with you 100%.