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Fuck AI, there is nothing there to miss.
I wouldn’t say I’m missing it
Article claims leftists aren’t engaging with AI in a meaningful way.
It lists people and groups it disagrees with, and then… Doesn’t engage with those disagreements in a meaningful way.
Right? Why aren’t leftists embracing the environmentally-destructive mechanism the techbro billionaires are using to simultaneously enrich themselves and enslave humanity?
Why aren’t leftists embracing the environmentally-destructive
It’s only as environmentally destructive as the environment in which it operates, if you train your AI in France using Nuclear power it is effectively carbon free training is it not? The biggest limitation on the carbon use of AI appears to be entirely limited to how fast or slow the USA transitions to renewable energy.
If you run your LLM locally on a solar powered device is that not carbon free inference?
the techbro billionaires are using to simultaneously enrich themselves and enslave humanity?
enrich themselves? I thought AI was a massive money losing adventure bubble that was about to pop?
enslave humanity? I thought AI was slop not worth of even being used because apparently all it does is hallucinate answers?
It’s only as environmentally destructive as the environment in which it operates, if you train your AI in France using Nuclear power it is effectively carbon free training is it not? The biggest limitation on the carbon use of AI appears to be entirely limited to how fast or slow the USA transitions to renewable energy.
Distracting hypothetical - ie a red herring. The question is not is it conceivable to build AI in a way that isn’t inherently environmentally destructive. It isn’t being done. Not at scale, nor is there any plans to do so. There’s no intention to reduce reliance on fossil fuels powering datacenters. There isn’t even a suggestion of intention to give lip-service to the problem so fantasizing about it serves no purpose.
enrich themselves? I thought AI was a massive money losing adventure bubble that was about to pop?
These are not mutually exclusive. The golden parachute problem still exists.
enslave humanity? I thought AI was slop not worth of even being used because apparently all it does is hallucinate answers?
That it is worthless doesn’t make it not psychologically destructive. People want things that destroy their lives all the time. Drugs, gambling, AI sex bots, etc. We’ve known for a very long time there’s ways to hijack people’s behaviour and make them behave in ways that violate their values and good sense. The fact that AI slop directly engages in hacking our brains, and filling our heads with junk data and hallucinations is not internally inconsistent.
You do realize, don’t you, that there is more to hurting the environment than just energy use, right?
Water use is through the roof, and water is kind of useful for making food and keeping humans alive: https://theconversation.com/data-centers-consume-massive-amounts-of-water-companies-rarely-tell-the-public-exactly-how-much-262901
Construction uses concrete and steel and other natural resources, as well as using gas to run the heavy equipment to build.
Large centers take away natural land that could be used as carbon sinks but instead are concrete heat traps.
There are more hits to the environment, but I’m not going to lay them out. Just looking at one source of possible energy use, which they aren’t actually using since many are in the US and not in France, is stupid.
Also, to your pseudo-intellectual “gotcha” points about thinking AI was a waste so how can billionaires profit: just because it doesn’t make money in the long run doesn’t mean billionaires aren’t making a TON of money in the short run. Long term losses will be born by the public and not private money-holders. And even if AI is mostly useless, billionaires will still lay off employees only to learn that AI was in fact worthless, but the people who lost their jobs will fall further into debt and will be slaves to that debt.
No thank you.
Good. We don’t want it.
I think you mean the “biden crime family”
Aragorn was missing out on the power of the ring.
lol no… many leftists are very outspoken on AI, like my friends at Tech Workers Coalition
the article uses “Democratic Party” as a synonym of “leftist” 🙄
No… No we’re good.
Is this some sort of rage/engagement bait? Lol
This whole article reads like copium
I’ve yet to meet a single anti-AI person in real life. I’m starting to think it’s just a loud online minority that again makes the rest of the people on the left not daring to even admit to using it.
Funny, I know just as many anti-AI people in real life as very pro-AI people. It’s almost like there are all kinds of people in the world, and not everyone knows all of them.
That’s called the black swan fallacy. “I’ve never personally seen it, therefore it’s not real.” That just sounds like cope and projection. You feel like this “loud minority” is preventing you from being so open about your love of AI, and so you pretend like everyone is secretly on your side.
If you were to get specific, people are generally receptive to very specific use cases, like tailor-made models for assisting medical diagnosis or security analysis of code. What people almost universally hate is the slop produced by generative AI, particularly in creative niches where what these machines produce isn’t art but a pale shade of it. Yet, these billionaires keep trying to shove GenAI down everyone’s throats at every turn, all the while ruining hobbies (see the RAM/SSD supply chain), livelihoods, health, rights (see Palantir; see who owns these tools), and the planet.
So yeah, if you don’t have a visceral reaction to someone shilling AI, I don’t believe you’re really that far left. The tools that broadly exist are not the tools of nor for the befit of the people.
Perhaps so, but is that an AI issue or a billionaire tech bro issue? It feels more the latter than the former - and I’d argue the two aren’t as easily separable as that distinction implies.
The people building this stuff largely are the problem, which makes it an AI issue by default.
My read of the poster above is that they’re pointing towards the knee jerk reaction AI discussions cause.
Mention AI and you invariably spark off “online experts” who argue in bad faith - and that bad faith cuts both ways, dismissing legitimate concerns and overstating them in equal measure.
There’s a lot more nuance to this issue than commonly presented.
For anyone actually wanting to engage with the substance rather than the noise:
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about
That link is worth your time before wading in.
Be honest. Did you have an LLM write that? Because boy howdy, does it read the way LLMs output text, right down to missing the point.
Regardless, in only one place did I mention climate change effects, and that was in passing as the last item in a list of issues with AI and LLMs in particular. That was on purpose.
You can throw out the environment as an argument entirely, and accept Andy Masley’s entire premise (I don’t), and AI still has much for which it needs to reckon.
For someone who claims to be versed in logical fallacies, you do like to bandy about the old strawman. I didn’t dismiss the concerns you raised, I reframed them. There’s a difference. Pointing out that the harms you listed are primarily harms of concentrated corporate power isn’t missing your point, it’s pointing at the root cause.
If Palantir didn’t exist, the surveillance state doesn’t disappear. If Altman vanished tomorrow, the RAM supply chain doesn’t magically recover. The tool is downstream of the incentive structure.
As for the LLM accusation, no I wrote that myself. Though I’ll note the irony of deploying an ad hominem to dodge the substance, especially after opening with a lecture about fallacies. Cute. If my prose is too structured for your taste, that’s a you problem.
The Masley link stands. Engage with it or don’t, but the knee-jerk “that reads like AI” isn’t the ‘aha’ you think it is.
I haven’t claimed it isn’t real. I haven’t claimed it’s stopping me from talking about it. I haven’t said I love AI. I’m not pretending people are on my side and I haven’t claimed to be on the left politically.
Did anyone here actually read the article? I think it was pretty reasonable and am worried that the future of LLMs/AI will be determined largely by people who hold very, very different fundamental values than me regarding compassion and equity. I think part of my worry comes from people (often on the left and from the US, but I am biased in what parts of the internet I frequent) dismissing AI as a fad which will soon go away and which will certainly not have a large impact on the world for a long while.
Sadly you cant expect large comms on Lemmy to do anything that reflexivly up/down vote anything negative/positive about AI, no matter how insightful or nuanced. It’s pretty ironic for this article in particular given that the same refusal to engage is its topic.
