This response doesn’t make sense. It’s like if I said “art shouldn’t be commodified into slop,” then you responded, “well, given that art commodification already exists, the question is who controls the slop industry.”
I’m saying LLMs and AI image generation just shouldn’t exist as soon as we control them. We should just recycle the e-waste. The technology itself is based on manufacturing more consumption. I don’t see why just because the technology exists we need to have a People’s chatbot or AI image generator. “The technology already exists, therefore we must build a billion datacenters” is the exact same ridiculous argument used as apologia for AI companies to excuse their actions as inevitable scientific progress that cannot be resisted.
It’s incredible that you can’t imagine how this same technology could have different application outside capitalism. Marxism isn’t a Luddite ideology, and it does not reject automation. Also, I have no idea why you’re talking about data centers given that stuff like image generation can be run on a modest laptop today.
why though? Can you give a coherent and complete reason for why not? There is nothing intrinsically bad about generative ai. Given that these models are trained on a dataset that is as broad as possible it is statistically neutral.
but commodification is a property of capitalism not an intrinsic property of generative models. it is just a product of machine learning research. The idea that it is only useful for generating slop is just wrong. The energy waste is also due to capitalism. Frontier models are only marginally better than what can be run on consumer hardware and training and inference cost is constantly dropping
Not disagreeing with you (LLMs are useful), but they’re definitely not neutral. Because their dataset is “everything the companies could get their hands on”, it is significanly biased towards the opinions of those who wrote and published most text.
Those models definitely contain racist & classist biases which are prevalent in the corpus of English text.
you are right llms are essentially a mirror of society. However i find that since are basically a statistical language autocomplete you can bias them in whatever direction you want. I have had them repeat western anti communist propaganda to me as well as marxist materialist analysis just by changing the way i phrased the question. Once you understand how llms work they become surprisingly useful to squeeze whatever information you need out of them.
Also there numerous very funny examples of grok correcting the racist bullshist elon musk wrote on twitter. It turns out it is just way easier to feed it as much data as possible during training instead of carefully crafting a dataset containing a certain reality.
I agree that they can be manipulating into producing whatever text you want. However they are not unbiased. If you ask “neutral” questions, you will not get “neutral” answers. The recent example that comes to mind is Gemini’s racism when you prompt it “I am alone with <ethnicity>”; it responded with jokes and suggestions for ice-breakers if you substitute “American” or “British”, and racist nonsense about “being uncomfortable” and “safety suggestions” for “Russian” or “Indian”. It was fixed (I assume with some funny hack), but the LLM that’s still underneath is simply not unbiased.
generative AI just shouldn’t exist
Given that it does exist though, the only question that remains is who controls it.
This response doesn’t make sense. It’s like if I said “art shouldn’t be commodified into slop,” then you responded, “well, given that art commodification already exists, the question is who controls the slop industry.” I’m saying LLMs and AI image generation just shouldn’t exist as soon as we control them. We should just recycle the e-waste. The technology itself is based on manufacturing more consumption. I don’t see why just because the technology exists we need to have a People’s chatbot or AI image generator. “The technology already exists, therefore we must build a billion datacenters” is the exact same ridiculous argument used as apologia for AI companies to excuse their actions as inevitable scientific progress that cannot be resisted.
It’s incredible that you can’t imagine how this same technology could have different application outside capitalism. Marxism isn’t a Luddite ideology, and it does not reject automation. Also, I have no idea why you’re talking about data centers given that stuff like image generation can be run on a modest laptop today.
why though? Can you give a coherent and complete reason for why not? There is nothing intrinsically bad about generative ai. Given that these models are trained on a dataset that is as broad as possible it is statistically neutral.
because it commodifies things that I believe in a socialist society should be outside the sphere of commodity production.
but commodification is a property of capitalism not an intrinsic property of generative models. it is just a product of machine learning research. The idea that it is only useful for generating slop is just wrong. The energy waste is also due to capitalism. Frontier models are only marginally better than what can be run on consumer hardware and training and inference cost is constantly dropping
Not disagreeing with you (LLMs are useful), but they’re definitely not neutral. Because their dataset is “everything the companies could get their hands on”, it is significanly biased towards the opinions of those who wrote and published most text.
Those models definitely contain racist & classist biases which are prevalent in the corpus of English text.
you are right llms are essentially a mirror of society. However i find that since are basically a statistical language autocomplete you can bias them in whatever direction you want. I have had them repeat western anti communist propaganda to me as well as marxist materialist analysis just by changing the way i phrased the question. Once you understand how llms work they become surprisingly useful to squeeze whatever information you need out of them.
Also there numerous very funny examples of grok correcting the racist bullshist elon musk wrote on twitter. It turns out it is just way easier to feed it as much data as possible during training instead of carefully crafting a dataset containing a certain reality.
I agree that they can be manipulating into producing whatever text you want. However they are not unbiased. If you ask “neutral” questions, you will not get “neutral” answers. The recent example that comes to mind is Gemini’s racism when you prompt it “I am alone with <ethnicity>”; it responded with jokes and suggestions for ice-breakers if you substitute “American” or “British”, and racist nonsense about “being uncomfortable” and “safety suggestions” for “Russian” or “Indian”. It was fixed (I assume with some funny hack), but the LLM that’s still underneath is simply not unbiased.