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In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
First of all it concentrates power and wealth on the owners of the models (Microsoft, OpenAI) or the ones that provide the tools (Nvidia).
Yes, there is truth in it, that people who couldn't afford to pay someone to create art, or get consulting, can get this now to a certain extend (if they can afford internet access and pay the AI services they need). But this comes also at the price of lowering the income of the people who provided these services. They now need to compete in the business creation market and not in the market that they trained for. Not everyone can create and maintain a business with or without starting money, just from a skill point of view. Nor does everybody want to.
Umm what?
When I run a checkpoint at home, how do you think the creator of checkpoint is profiting or gaining any power/wealth?
This stuff is ridiculously easily self hosted and run independently of any company.
It might be "ridiculously easy" but there is a reason why linux adoption is around 3ish%.
Its because it isnt the easiest option.
Can’t really run the models in reasonable amounts of time without a reasonable GPU, there’s still a bit of a cost barrier
The concentration of power part is not true unless people keep trying to use copyrights and the legal system to protect themselves from genai, at which point it will be true. Currently there's plenty of self hosted solutions like stable diffusion and services like the ai horde to help even people without gpu for free
You are still reliant on the models trained by these companies. This training is very expensive. And yes there are ioen source models exist (thank god) but there are also closed source models that are very successfully advertised.
And self hosting requires money and skill. This means there is a lot of people who lack both and may then use closed source models.
This is what we've mostly to solved with the AI Horde, where we allow people to rely on self-hosted open models.
This is good news indeed.
But I see the same problems as with email, chat etc. You can selfhost almost everything. But too few people are doing it. You can use Linux as your Desktop and at least 4% are doing it. Still too few if you ask me.
And if most of the people keep using the commercial and closed source options over the self hosted one, then I see this concentration of power. Additionally, there is the risk of regulatory capture, where big companies may try to at least hinder self hosting due to (what I consider) made up risks.
However, its good that there are currently such good open source option. I hope they will grow and become the defacto standard.
@paw @db0
Exactly, this is just a diversionist argument pretending that just because a theoretical possibility exists the problem can be considered solved in practice - it's like the decrepti old capitalist argument that "everyone can start their own company" if they don't like how they're treated as an employee. No they can't, not in the real world out there. That only works on paper, i.e. if you ignore the current distribution of resources and privileges in the existing society and economy.
This is not theoretical. It already is in place and is already serving people. The only reason it's not growing more is because we don't have any marketing and we don't participate in the capitalist rot economy.
@db0
Yep, like I said: doesn't work as advertised "just because actual reality".
Me: "The system works exactly as advertised for thousands of people"
You, a wise person: "The system doesn't work as advertised because not everyone in the world is using it."
You're a very unserious person, so I won't engage further with this nonsense.
The system is explicitly setup so that normal people don't need to set up anything. Experts and enthusiasts are the one doing the complex work, while normies just use a simply client like this and power users can also use more advanced clients.
That's up to all of us to counter by promoting the good solutions instead, not of just despairing and begging politicians to fix this (they won't, they'll promote monopolies instead)
That was always the case. Having said that, I'll appreciate your enthusiasm and that you share this work.
So your gonna solder your own video cards?
In theory sure, but in practice it’s just gonna give more control to MS and NVidia since they are the ones most people would use.
People buy GPUs already for video games and other purposes. We're using the same consumer cards, not enterprise ones.
That still involves you giving lots of money to card manufacturers. Which is rather centralized atm (not many competitors).
You give money to centralized monopolistic capitalists regardless what you do
Not when I’m creating art by hand.
Sure I’m paying for a pencil and paper, but you don’t need massive investment into means of production to create that.
That’s why the Industrial Revolution changed things, you now need big factories for your critical tools.
... now that's a silly take. A nearly $300 billion industry.
Paper creation is one of the worst sources of pollution and water drains on the planet. Far, far, far more than anything dealing with AI lol. Orders of magnitude higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_and_paper_industry
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1073451/global-market-value-pulp-and-paper/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_paper
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468584419300479
Writing instruments are a $17 billion industry... Get off the internet for a bit. Doomerism is getting to you.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/writing-instruments-market
The people who get screwed are the ones who cling to the idea that AI is the enemy and refuse to learn to use it. The jobs will be taken by the flexible and adaptive people who use this new incredible tool. This isn't a new idea, this is how it's been as long as people have had any jobs and found any more efficient way to do them. The issue is that some people are more willing to continue to grow and adapt than others. The ones who are not willing to, maybe because they are old, or just have oversized egos, will be left behind while they shout angrily into the wind that progress is evil.