cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/33936586
Completely untrue.
The environmental impact would still be as bad, it would still spout out misinformation, it would still scrape for art against people’s will, the images would still be shit and not art anyway, and would still make an intellectual sinkhole.
If society isn’t built around competition and exploitation, the usage of AI can be limited to renewable energy. Whereas now, every gram of hydrocarbon and uranium will be burned to win the race for global domination.
Great you ignored my other issues with that, but also you don’t think people would collectively be using those resources? Also the water used for those ai servers isn’t great.
I agree with your other points.
It depends on the type of society if people use all those resources. With AI they will use them much, much faster.
Water doesn’t have to be a problem in places where there is enough water.
I mean building out renewable energy still has a negative impact on the environment, whether it be silicon for solar panels or concrete for hydro electric dams. Not to mention all the water that gets used to cool the massive data centers or the materials needed to create the computer components used in the data center. So sure you could lessen the environmental impact by shifting to renewables but it would definitely still be there. Reducing usage will always be the best way to help the environment, there’s a reason it comes first in Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
Hate this dumbass meme. All of the worlds datacenters only use like 3% of our energy. You can do more by skipping one shopping weekend than entire lifetime of AI use.
prove it
Ok cool make a true communist society and then I can.
I really disagree with this meme. For just one example, capitalism isnt why people are using ai to generate nudes of unwilling people and children. Without capitalism I do very much doubt AI would be where it is right now, but the cats out of the bag and it isnt going away if we didnt have capitalism.
That is unfortunately just human nature. The tool here is not to blame, but the person using it. People were making drawings of people unconsentually well before ai, then with the addition of photoshop the issue became even worse. Now AI is just the next step in allowing humans to follow their darker interests.
But the tool is so much more valuable than that.
If people think the big risk of AI is fake nudes… man, I wish that was the worst that could happen.
Yes, why people are mad because of me having AI generated nudes of Stalin?
Ai is pretty much like as any other tool. Knife is an extremely useful tool. It can either help you cook a delicious dinner or kill a man. It all comes down to what you are going to use it for.
Yes, but AI porn, which is really bad, is actually a small problem compared to the other uses of AI under capitalism.
People generating porn, no matter how abhorrent, is one of the LEAST problems with AI, but the fact that you are stuck on it is very telling
edit: you have no idea how bad AI is already fucking up your life and it has nothing to do with prompt art
“stuck on it” is an egregious hyperbole, they just gave it as an example.
Yeah lol, I just gave one quick example of something I felt was indisputably not tied to capitalism. But apparently I’m stuck on it and the only problem I have is with it generating porn? Wild way to read my post, and entirely untrue.
Get back to me after your psych degree, thanks
It is not just Capitalism…is is centralization in all its forms. Too much power in the hands of the few always leads to poor outcomes for the many. This is bigger than Capitalism.
What market structure is a good model for decentralization? Socialism generally involves a central authority deciding on resource allocation, and most other approaches also have an emphasis on centralization.
I think you have to pick the low hanging fruit and go from there. For instance, we are here and already have made a small, but measurable dent to Reddit traffic. Imagine if everyone came over here, Reddit would no longer be viable as a profit company. Google would collapse if we all supported Peer Tube. Of course these are not going to change the world, but I am convinced if/when decentralization gets traction, we will find ways to implement it everywhere it makes sense. It is about balance as there are benefits to centralization and I am not suggesting everyone is decentralized, but right now the scales are out of balance and we have some tools to start to rebalance. We just have to want it. Well maybe need it which seems to be coming.
There is nothing in socialism that requires central planning. There are specific branches that do, but market socialism would, if anything, use it less than the current system.
It doesn’t solve the energy and emissions crisis we are facing but sure.
Nor does it resolve the inherent biases introduced by humans working on it
To be honest I’m tempted to say that desire to remove humans from the production of society is a fundamentally capitalist one.
While that might be true in some contexts it makes no sense in the context of my comment.
Im saying that leftist coders inherent personal problems and racism will make their way into the AI much like how it has worked with capitalist AI.
Humans have many of the same biases and issues regardless of political lean.
It’s less of a bias of the programmer and moreso a bias of data, particularly when a factor like gender or ethnicity correlates with something without direct causation, such as crime rates correlating with ethnicity largely because of immigrants being poorer on average, and economic standing being a major correlating factor. If your dataset doesn’t include that, any AI will just see “oh, people in group x are way more likely to commit crimes”. This can be prevented but it’s generally more of a risk of overlooking something than intentional data manipulation (not that that isn’t possible).
Yes that’s fair. I guess my comment wasn’t a direct response to yours other than it made me think this desire that all the difficult issues (like bias) just disappear if you remove all the humans from the process* is flawed and any anticapitalist society should really start from that understanding. One that understands that conflict will emerge and pro-social “convivial” systems and structures need to emerge to handle them.
*You are right to point out that the “AI” we are talking about is statistical models built from humans that includes bias where as the hype is that we have Data from Star Trek and therefore these systems hide the human inputs but don’t remove them.
(the energy and emissions crisis are also byproducts of capitalism)
The Aral Sea is essentially gone and it was killed by poor Soviet planning. Capitalism was not the driving factor rather ignorance was and ignorance is held equally by all sides.
Capitalism isn’t the only thing driving environmental collapse. It’s industrialization
Central planners in the Soviet Union didn’t even have computers and they lacked the level of scientific understanding we have today of the environment, of our resources, and of the limits to growth. We’ve all heard about Mao killing the sparrows in China.
This isn’t a reason to never try central planning again.
They absolutely had computers, I have no idea why you would think the second largest economy that produced tremendous technological advances in its time did not have computers.You know Tetris was created by a Soviet programmer, right?
Planned economies are doomed at this point gecause we aren’t able to predict distasters and the planned economy cannot respond in an efficient manner when things go wrong. Humans aren’t smart enough and we do not have artificial intelligence capable of doing so.
They had computers towards the end, of course, but they were extremely primitive. The kinds of disaster predictions you can do on a machine built to run Tetris are nothing compared to what can be done with today’s technology.
Also, it’s not like markets can actually deal with disasters. Without at least some central planning disaster response and relief is impossible.
Planning for relief disaster and a planned economy are incredibly different things. Planned economies do not handle disasters well at all as they didn’t prepare for that disaster in advance (typically because how can you plan for the one in a hundred million chance that x would happen).
We largely have stuck with market based economies because they currently are much more responsive to changes.
While computers have gotten more powerful there is zero evidence to support that we have gotten to the point where they could run a planned economy in any fashion.
We largely have stuck with market based economies because they currently are much more responsive to changes.
No, we still have market based economies because they make a few people very very rich.
We needed markets before computers and instant mass communication. Things are different now
While computers have gotten more powerful there is zero evidence to support that we have gotten to the point where they could run a planned economy in any fashion.
What about the fact that market-based responses to COVID were universally worse than centrally planned responses?
Non market economies are never going to work, because you’ll be essentially creating one giant monopoly and leaving people without the possibility of doing things differently
What happens when you don’t like the product the state offers?
What if you discover a way of doing things more efficiently?
What about independent artists and creators?
And that’s not getting into how unpredictable people are, products that have been predicted to fail end up becoming very successful, and the opposite also happens
How old are you? Did you go through COVID? Capitalism doesn’t do disasters well at all. Every cost is minimized. So emergency supplies go unmaintained. If it doesn’t help the stock price annually it doesn’t get done.
50, yes and most nations did poorly the reason for America’s failures have to do with American healthcare as most market economies handled it much better than the planned ones did. China did much worse but that rarely made China’s news.
American healthcare is capitalist. It’s insurance companies and for profit hospitals. That’s why it’s bad. Healthcare is an inelastic demand.
China isn’t a Democratic State. I’m not arguing that just having one guy handling all the economic planning is a good idea.
Industrialization to make money is encouraged by capitalism. Why do you think big oil was lying about global warming? It’s not a few bad apples it is a systemic drive to make more money even if it hurts people or the planet.
Industrialization has been done by every nation that is capable of doing it regardless of their economic system or philosophy.
Thinking this is a capitalist issue ignores the Marxist states that have horrible records on the environment eg China and the USSR. It’s industrialization that is the issue.
There’s a difference between industrialization for people and trade versus industrialization for money and power. One helps everyone, The other only helps capitalists.
I wouldn’t necessarily look at China and USSR and say they are a good alternative. I prefer a more democratic socialism. My problem with capitalism is specifically the lack of choice of the people. We spend 8 out of 12 hours on average working for a company that we don’t get a vote in.
There’s a difference between industrialization for people and trade versus industrialization for money and power.
Not as far as the environment is concerned and frankly many will tell you running water and electricity are huge advantages regardless of how you get them.
What? Yes, the environment can tell because there would be less pollution. The motivations are different. Do you think worker controlled industries would use the same tactics to over produce and polute the areas the workers live in? No one would benefit from that.
I’m not saying we would reach zero pollution but there would be a lot less pollution.
I have no problem with running water and electricity, most reasonable socialist would agree.
They don’t disappear if capitalism disappears. I agree with you capitalism needs to end in order to deal with them but there are hard issues that we have to deal with even with capitalism gone.
Even if the causes ceased we would still be left with residual emissions and degraded natural systems to try and deal with and a lower EROI society to do it.
They’re “hard issues” because we don’t have a centrally planned economy, we have to rely on the market to provide solutions.
Through a combination of marshaling the forces of production to build a renewable infrastructure and strict fossil fuel rationing during the build-up phase I think we could get the crisis under control within 5 years.
… I’ll admit that’s just vibes, though.
I get the sentiment and I wish it were true.
Some of the issues stem from material and energy limitations regardless of human organisation structures. Fossil Fuels are stored sunlight over a long period of time that means that burning them has a high yield and that’s given us a very high EROI society (one where there’s an abundance of energy for purposes that aren’t basic functioning).
I recommend reading The Collapse of Complex Societies by Tainter who discussing the energy limitations of society. Its before our understanding of energy limitations of technology and he’s by no means a leftist but it is still a good introductory text to it.
I’ve read Limits to Growth. I understand there are physical limits and that we can’t just grow our way through this crisis. Industrial civilization can not continue as it is.
But central planning would allow for us to transition to a lower energy society.
I agree but there’s a lot of detail about what activities a lower energy society precludes and my point is that energy intensive “AI” (mostly thinking about LLMs rather than targets applications of ML) probably aren’t part of it.
Deepseek showed that these chatbots can be run much more cheaply than they have been and it isn’t really necessary to build giga warehouses of servers. It might be possible to run them on even tighter hardware specifications too.
Of course, chatbots aren’t AI and the fact that they’re trying to use them as AI isn’t going to work out anyway lol
They’re “hard issues” because we don’t have a centrally planned economy, we have to rely on the market to provide solutions
As humans are very bad a predicting the future, centrally planned economies come with so many added problems that market based solutions are frequently more realistic.
Every corporation is centrally planned.
I recommend reading The People’s Republic of Walmart. Businesses have figured out central planning, there’s no reason it can’t be done for nations.
No, they are not and how a business functions amd how a national economy function are incredibly different.
Walmart isn’t a federation, it’s very centrally planned. It’s also larger than a lot of nations.
The only thing missing is a military.
Corporations are run very differently from countries.
What happens when you don’t like the product that the state is offering?
What about independent artists and creators?
Figuring out what things people will like is next to impossible.
What happens when you don’t like the product that the state is offering?
Petition the government to offer something else. Central planning can still be democratic.
What about independent artists and creators?
Well without the need to sell their art they could create whatever they want without fear of it being unmarketable. An artist could just create without needing to sell it to anyone.
Figuring out what things people will like is next to impossible.
Businesses do this all the time! They do market research to find out what people want, they monitor current events and customer demands and social media. There’s no reason a central planner can’t do the same.
Yes, because it’s so great that they’re trying to run the nation like a business right now.
They’re trying to strip the wiring from the walls. They’re not even running like a business, they’re running it like VC.
Let’s not pretend they’re trying to centrally plan anything. The doggy department hates central planning. They just tell ChatGPT to come up with things to cut
This is a strawman. Centrally planned does not mean immutable, and markets are no more able to predict the future than anyone else. What it does allow is the disregard of the only quantity markets are capable of maximizing, profit.
This is not a strawman. Im not constructing a false point to argue against while ignoring their claims. Im in fact discussing them directly.
Markets don’t need to predict the future as the market responds naturally more quickly than central planning can adjust for errors or unexpected aspects of the plan. one of the major points of failure for central planned economies is the lack of responsiveness. A centally planned economy would not avoid environmental catastrophe as the Soviets were responsible for several with profit motives.
Markets respond only to profit changes, and even then they are far from perfect. It’s simply an economist fiction that they are uniquely good at adaptation, one proof being the utter failure of markets to handle the global catastrophe climate change is going to cause.
There’d be no crisis if we ditched oil and coal companies and just put solar and nuclear everywhere.
So we can have solar and nuclear oligarchs instead of oil oligarchs. Yeah, that would be slightly better
Let’s say its true that doing that would stop the problem getting worse (e.g. no more emissions after 5 years)*.
We still have the legacy issues to deal with and I need anticaps who are thinking seriously about what can replace capitalism to take seriously how dependent we are on natural systems that are very close to collapse. We are already passed the point where just stopping the harm is job done. The climate is not the one we have evolved and developed civilisation under its far less stable.
- There are material and energy constraints that aren’t instantly solvable and electricity production is far from the only cause of climate harm (land use and manufacturing) and some of those have major question marks remaining as to how they can be removed or electrified.
And none of the issues are helped by a further moving target by pursuing something that pushes our energy usage even higher like some forms of “AI” that produce very little meaningful outside of capitalism anyway.
I remember sitting in an art class where the teacher proclaimed using premixed black paint was improper: a true artist must mix their own black paint. I thought a lot about that when I first started using Photoshop and viewing digital art. I think about it now with AI.
Right now AI is a tool of MBAs who see it as a way to extract money from budgets by cutting costs on artists and writers. AI’s only proper use is as a tool by artists and writers.
I disagreed with that teacher then, and still kinda do, but I understand them completely: they were focused on fostering the artistic drive of the creator and eschewing shortcuts. I just think the artistic drive includes so called shortcuts as there is no predefined or ‘true’ path to being an artist.
There are some really good quotes from famous painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries saying that photography is devoid of all artistic merit, and that it should never and will never be taken seriously as an art form. Every time a new tool comes along, the art community freaks out. It happened with the invention of the camera, it happened with the invention of digital art software, and we are currently watching it happen with AI. Eventually, it’ll just be another tool in an artists toolbox.
To avoid panting with black is a common truism for traditional painters that will save your saturation in the lower values of your painting. When painting a naturalistic scene in a traditional medium, you are in a loosing war against the cost of saturation. (saturated pigments tend to be more expensive.) Ivory black and lamp black are very cheap pigments, hence the mixture of black paints tends to have more pigment vs medium. Also, Pigments lose saturation over time. so vibrant paintings you made 10 years ago can start to become grey.
The area of your painting where the saturation loss will become more daunting is the shadows. They tend to be a cool temperature and have a lower value and saturation. This is one of the reasons why it’s dangerous , especially for a student to use black; And this is the reason why a lot of traditional painters plot their shadows with washes of earth pigments: Burnt sienna, burn umber etc.
The other reason is convenience: Leaving you some space at the bottom and top of the value structure for final touches. Once you reach the floor value of pure black it’s hard to go back up, especially if the rest of the values are down with that black. Same for white. If the key of your painting is too high, it’s hard to add any detail without just burning the rest of your picture. So keeping some floor and headspace for the final details can save you a lot of headaches! And this is especially true for black paints since they tend to have so much pigment in their mixtures
In digital media it can also be beneficial to avoid blacks, or at least clip-mask them into a black with a little temperature in them at a early stage of coloring. I can’t really explain the reason for this exactly, but neutrals and especially black and white have a lot of visual pull in a monitor that displays thousands or millions of colors. Just adding a hint of temperature to your blacks and whites can make them gentler on the eye and keep the colors from becoming muddy*.
(*Muddy colors are a result from disorganized value and temperature structure between your lights and shadows.)
So your teacher was right, he was just either too lazy of busy to explain all that shit!
Edit: I remember my very cruel first semester painting teacher gave us an assignment of making value swatches for 15 hue-degrees of the color wheel. We had to make 10 swatches of low saturation greys (grey mixed with a hint of color pigment) From the lightest we could manage to the blackest. He would make us repeat the whole set if one swatch was “too saturated” or if a value scale was off. IT WAS HELL. I am not sure if that exercise was intended to make us despise black and white tubes or give us an idea of how different the proportion of pigment and value is between painting tubes. I developed an irrational fear of adding black to lower values.
My art teacher in middle school would rant for hours about how awful Photoshop was for the industry, as “Photoshop effects” in movies are so noticeable. She was part of the group who wanted to ban CGI and Pixar because it wasn’t real art.
Companies are the original AI. They turn humans into a machine that does whatever the owner wants. Kind of like the dreaming humans in the Matrix movie.
Unironically any good argument against AI boils down to an argument against capitalism. Every other one is horribly misinformed.
Crazy how my socialist world view gets proven right time after time. Reality really does have a left wing bias, huh?
Problem is that AI is going to be used to make it harder to overthrow capitalism. It’d be interesting to see the uses of AI in a world where it wasn’t being used to chip away at some of the last occupations where talent and skill mean anything.
Machine Learning is especially useful for many different kinds of research as an advanced mode of statistical analysis.
Text and image generation is not especially useful in any field other than to cut corners on paying human artists and writers and programmers to do the job properly.
Text and image generation are the ones that upset me. C-suite types (and their pettier, aspirational counterparts) don’t care about “art” - why publish a few good novels that you have to pay royalties on, when you can generate thousands? Even if they’re shit, there was zero effort on your part.
If you lack aesthetic appreciation - why would you bother hiring an artist for anything?
The wealthy of this era don’t seem to value art. Midjourney can make Kinkade knock offs faster than even Kinkade himself could. There’s not room in their world for Twombly’s and Motherwell’s - except perhaps as investment schemes.
Unpopular opinion: The only complaints I’ve read about AI taking someone’s job so far were from freelance writers who wrote for clickbait sites, or other artists doing very generic work.
I am terrified of the impact on education. With the DOE likely to be dismantled, public education is probably going to be AI garbage. Teachers don’t need to be qualified for the subjects they teach. It’s being heavily pushed by administrators as a way to deal with ever increasing class sizes and SPED case loads. (God, if Kamala had been elected, I was going to be on the war path for a fed investigation into SPED compliance in my state…)
They made the working conditions for teachers hell, to drive us out of the profession. Online schools don’t require building overhead, they allow so many options for scamming the system (AI generated essays in response to AI generated homework assignments.)
I am worried that the future for all children who cannot afford a private education will be AI generated content delivered via a screen either at home or in a mass classroom overseen by a babysitter.
It’s an attack on knowledge and expertise. It’s “knowledge has no value, reality has no value, it’s who has control over the model.”
It’s also going to be used to eliminate positions where “talent” and “skill” aren’t required, which is where a gigantic portion of a lot of countries populations work.
When ownership decides “I own the AI that run the factory and the AI inside the Robots that perform all the physical tasks in the factory, so why the fuck should any of my profit go to pay parasites on society?” that’s when we get into the “let them all starve” portion of capitalism…
Uh… that’s just plain wrong. Everyone who seeks power (read: all governments) will abuse this technology the exact same way they’ve abused every other technology which came before it.
Yeah, so we take AI out of companies who only want to make money even if it hurts people and give it to a democratic elected government which will use it to help people or they will be voted out
We can choose a less shitty power structure if we want.
Yeah, cause the state is the heart of capitalism.
So, we don’t do government
People are going to have to work one hell of a lot harder than they currently are if that’s to be achieved. Real jobs too, not just streaming and onlyfans.
You got it backwards. The state is the violent force behind capitalist coercion. WIthout the state and its capitalism there’s no need to waste your life serving capital.
Who said anything about capital? You’re going to need to do real work, directly involved with the real world, to create much of the things you will need to survive daily life.
What does this mean?
Without capital you can’t get land to do any of the things you need to survive. If everything is run by AI + robotics and someone owns the AI and robots then there’s no way to acquire capital to buy land to utilize for your survival.
My guy. If there’s no government then you can just settle anywhere you please. You don’t have to pay anyone an ounce of copper.
Might have to kill off some other people with different ideas though.
I missed the no government part.
Security is going to be job #1 thats for sure. The world is filled to the brim with assholes.
TIL socialists can’t use AI, reason unknown.
Oh, we can use it. We can use it to replace your job and make our boss more money. We just think that is bad.
Socialists can even use calculators! Wheels! Smart phones! Any kind of technology.
Even wheeled smartphones! They’re smart AND they roll.
Finally, a mobile phone! The future is now.
Well, do LLMs know a word Karl Marx wrote? Curious.
You can train a LLM on whatever content you want, so probably yes.
sure lets just get rid of capitalism as a whole, lets see where that lands us
Yes, let’s
keep me updated
I agree. Most of the problems with AI are the people controlling it, and the need to profit. Give it to the public to control, and eliminate the profit incentive by eliminating capitalism.
Or we could just give total control and benefit of this new tool to a small group of psychopaths. What could go wrong?
Most of the problems we’re facing aren’t solely due to capitalism… imagine if Trump and co. took power in a communist state. It would be the same, if not worse due to the structure of govt. Less guardrails there and it would be way easier to shut down any opposition from the population.
Birthrate-too poor for babies-capitalism Abortion-too poor for babies-capitalism Climate change-addressing interferes with short term profit selling dumb shit-capitalism Public education- starved into ruin to cut capitalist’s taxes and maintain an ignorant workforce - capitalism Higher education-winners and losers mentality causes resentment by citizens paying for other citizens education despite society benefiting from an educated citizenry-capitalism Teacher/doctor/mental healthcare shortages-see above-capitalism Microplastics-self-explanatory-capitalism The fall of democracy-governmental capture to destroy regulation and maximize private profit-capitalism The fall of news/misinformation-More profit in pushing oligarch control serving, fear/anger appealing lies than boring truths-capitalism Needless consumerism-duh-capitalism Grind culture hell devoid of meaning or end-duh-capitalism
Whatever problems capitalism doesn’t cause, it exacerbates. Unless that problem is “I don’t have enough useless crap I don’t need to buy yet!”
You’re not wrong about any of that… but any communist nation has its own problems. History has pretty much shown there is no perfect form of governance, especially when you have hundreds of millions of people living there. And why would so many people from those communist states immigrate en masse to the US over the years? Surely there’s a reason for that - lots of freedoms are afforded here that aren’t given under communist rule.
Misinformation can be just as bad in a communist nation when news is controlled by the state. Russia and China have both notably had issues with that over the years. Journalists “fall out of windows” all the time in Russia. I’m gonna reference them mostly because they’re some of the only nations with similar population size to the US.
Birth rates are dropping in places like China too due to economic struggles. Yes, they’ve gone green with electric power and all that - but they’re still one of the worst polluters in the world. And child labor runs rampant in communist countries.
If the US govt. had rewritten the constitution here at some point instead of interpreting language that no longer applies to modern nations - we would be a lot better off.
And when we do that, I’ll stop fighting AI.
Capitalism is not perfect but it’s better than any of the bullshit that’s out there. How many Full communist countries have ever worked? Even the countries that are socialist countries such as Vietnam have an open market. So any doofus that believes That 100% communist or socialist country would be better than what we live in today have no idea how things work and our fucking buffoons
