this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 108 points 3 days ago (77 children)

So the problem isn't the technology. The problem is unethical big corporations.

[–] NuraShiny@hexbear.net 17 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Disagree. The technology will never yield AGI as all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.

All it can do now and ever will do is destroy the environment by using oodles of energy, just so some fucker can generate a boring big titty goth pinup with weird hands and weirder feet. Feeding it exponentially more energy will do what? Reduce the amount of fingers and the foot weirdness? Great. That is so worth squandering our dwindling resources to.

[–] PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Disagree. The technology will never yield AGI as all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.

We definitely don't need AGI for AI technologies to be useful. AI, particularly reinforcement learning, is great for teaching robots to do complex tasks for example. LLMs have shocking ability relative to other approaches (if limited compared to humans) to generalize to "nearby but different, enough" tasks. And once they're trained (and possibly quantized), they (LLMs and reinforcement learning policies) don't require that much more power to implement compared to traditional algorithms. So IMO, the question should be "is it worthwhile to spend the energy to train X thing?" Unfortunately, the capitalists have been the ones answering that question because they can do so at our expense.

For a person without access to big computing resources (me lol), there's also the fact that transfer learning is possible for both LLMs and reinforcement learning. Easiest way to explain transfer learning is this: imagine that I want to learn Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, and Computer Science. What should I learn first so that each subject is easy for me to pick up? My answer would be Math. So in AI speak, if we spend a ton of energy to train an AI to do math and then fine-tune agents to do Physics, Engineering, etc., we can avoid training all the agents from scratch. Fine-tuning can typically be done on "normal" computers with FOSS tools.

all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.

IMO that can be an incredibly useful approach for solving problems whose dynamics are too complex to reasonably model, with the understanding that the obtained solution is a crude approximation to the underlying dynamics.

IMO I'm waiting for the bubble to burst so that AI can be just another tool in my engineering toolkit instead of the capitalists' newest plaything.

Sorry about the essay, but I really think that AI tools have a huge potential to make life better for us all, but obviously a much greater potential for capitalists to destroy us all so long as we don't understand these tools and use them against the powerful.

[–] NuraShiny@hexbear.net 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Since I don't feel like arguing, I will grant you that you are correct in what you say AI can do. I am not really but whatever, say it can:

How will these reasonable AI tools emerge out of this under capitalism? And how is it not all still just theft with extra steps that is imoral to use?

[–] PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Since I don't feel like arguing

I'll try to keep this short then.

How will these reasonable AI tools emerge out of this under capitalism?

How does any technology ever see use outside of oppressive structures? By understanding it and putting to work on liberatory goals.

I think that crucial to working with AI is that, as it stands, the need for expensive hardware to train it makes it currently a centralizing technology. However, there are things we can do to combat that. For example, the AI Horde offers distributed computing for AI applications.

And how is it not all still just theft with extra steps that is imoral to use?

We gotta find datasets that are ethically collected. As a practitioner, that means not using data for training unless you are certain it wasn't stolen. To be completely honest, I am quite skeptical of the ethics of the datasets that the popular AI products were trained on. Hence why I refuse to use those products.

Personally, I'm a lot more interested in the applications to robotics and industrial automation than generating anime tiddies and building chat bots. Like I'm not looking to convince you that these tools are "intelligent", merely useful. In a similar vein, PID controllers are not "smart" at all, but they are the backbone of industrial automation. (Actually, a proven use for "AI" algorithms is to make an adaptive PID controller so that's it can respond to changes in the plant over time.)

[–] NuraShiny@hexbear.net 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

These datasets do not exist, you got that right.

I highly doubt there is much AI deep learning needed to keep a robot arms PIDs accurate. That seems like something a regular old algorithm can do.

[–] PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

A deep neural adaptive PID controller would be a bit overkill for a simple robot arm, but for say a flexible-link robot arm it could prove useful. They can also work as part of the controller for systems governed by partial differential equations, like in fluid dynamics. They're also great for system identification, the results of which might indicate that the ultimate controller should be some "boring" algorithm.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Idk. I find it a great coding help. IMO AI tech have legitimate good uses.

Image generation have algo great uses without falling into porn. It ables to people who don't know how to paint to do some art.

[–] NuraShiny@hexbear.net -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Wow, great, the AI is here to defend itself. Working about as well as you'd think.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

What?

I really don't know whats going about the Anti-AI people. But is getting pretty similar to any other negationism, anti-science, anti-progress... Completely irrational and radicalized.

[–] NuraShiny@hexbear.net 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Sorry to hurt your fefes, but I don't like theft and that is what AI content ALL is. How does it "know" how to program? Code stolen form humans. How does it speak? Words stolen from humans. How does it draw? Art stolen from humans.

Until this shit stops being built on a mountain of stolen data and stolen livelihoods, the argument is over. I don't care if you like stealing money from artists so that you can pretend you had any creative input into an AIs art output. You're stealing the work of normal people and think it's okay because it was already stolen once before by the billionaires who are now selling it to you.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Intelectual property is a capitalist invention.

Human culture is to be shared.

[–] NuraShiny@hexbear.net 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Oh right, we live under communism, where everyone's needs are cared for. My bad

Oh wait, we aren't and you are just a shithead who, once again, wants to tell me that stealing from other workers is good.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

How can something being stolen if no one took anything from you.

Same as piracy is not stealing. Training AI models is not stealing. Sharing is caring.

If you don't get paid enough go ask your boss why he makes much more money than you.

[–] NuraShiny@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago

Yes, please apply the logic of stealing form large multi-national corporations to individual artists. Sterling logic.

I know why my boss makes more money then me. Because he is my enemy in a class war.

If any of these AI models draws art that is slightly too close to looking like Mickey Mouse the Disney corporation is sharpening the lawyer axe. I wonder why. But sharing is caring, right? Why would they do that?

Oh right because they want to decide what their intellectual property is used for. A right that wasn't afforded to basically every single artist whose stuff was used to train these models. These artists often rely directly on selling their art for their daily survival. Maybe they would have liked some money to sell their art for this purpose? Maybe they didn't want to sell it at all? Doesn't matter, they weren't asked. If you don't have an army of lawyers, the corporations will do as they like. Which is why Disney is save, while normal artists are fucked and weren't even asked in what hole they would like it before they were.

So shut the fuck up about sharing is caring, it's easy to say that if you are the one taking advantage. I don't know what field you work in, but I hope you lose your job to a robot that they trained on recordings of your work. You can tell me then how good it feels to share your skills.

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