Lord Caramac the Clueless, KSC on Nostr: The enemy is not #AI -- the enemy is #Capital ; it's not the machines that are to ...

The enemy is not #AI -- the enemy is #Capital ; it's not the machines that are to blame, it's not the code and the models that are to blame, it's who owns them. Using "intellectual property" laws like copyright to fight against the big AI companies won't help the creators, it will only lead to all the AI models being "owned" by the huge IP hoarders like Disney and Elsevier.
We need to fight a very different machine, the insane economic system known as #Capitalism . The reason why they're building insanely huge computing centres everywhere, the reason why they're training bigger and bigger machine learning models, is simply that the world economy has run out of growth. Investors are desperately trying to find any markets that have any growth potential left, but there aren't any. If we're being honest, growth is over, we have even exceeded the global ecological growth limits, which means that even the current size of the world economy is too big to become sustainable, and anything unsustainable won't be sustained for very long, meaning that the world economy will #collapse at some point not too far in our future.
If the machines didn't belong to a small number of very rich people but to everyone, if private property simply didn't exist and all the people just shared everything, nobody would have to worry about AI.
We aren't even close to AGI, let alone superintelligence; LLMs aren't even _really_ intelligent, they're just billion-dimensional word clouds, huge vector spaces made from entire libraries where words that often occur together are closer to each other than those that don't. Machines that can generate text that looks "intelligent", machines that can generate images and sounds and video, may seem like magic or like something alien or out of science fiction, but they aren't going to come alive. I'm not saying that artificial general intelligence, artificial minds, even artificial superintelligence, will never exist, but they aren't going to spontaneously emerge from LLMs or any of the other currently popular applications of machine learning. I think the probability of AGI/ASI ever coming into existence is rather low due to the fact that the Industrial Age is running on fumes and will probably collapse before ever getting there. Just like asteroid mining, orbital habitats, or factories on the Moon or Mars.

What is happening right now to knowledge workers, office workers, creative workers, artists, musicians, etc., is very similar to what happened to all kinds of other professions when automation became available for their jobs, beginning with artisanal weavers in the late 18th and early 19th century. And while attacking the machines has always been a very human thing to do, it has also always been rather stupid. We should be attacking the system instead. We need to seize the machines, end private property, reinvent and remake the technology. Machine learning is a very powerful tool, but the hardware needed to train and run them should be owned by everybody. We only need huge computing centres if we want to crunch insane volumes of numbers very quickly; if we don't need to train an entirely new AI model within a few weeks or months, if it is OK for a model's training to take a couple of years, we can do it with hige distributed networks of small consumer PCs, with volunteers contributing spare CPU and GPU cycles over the Internet. The resulting models should be small enough to run at reasonable speed on a single PC. And when there is something that needs to be trained within a shorter period of time and therefore needs a computing centre, the resulting model needs to be in the public domain, an open weights model which can be downloaded, modified, fine-tuned, by anybody.

And of course the people must decide what is included in the training data. I don't think anybody should be able to say something _shouldn't_ be in the training data because it's their IP, I think IP is an abomination, a legal fiction which only serves capital (just like physical property, which is used to keep the means of production under corporate control). However, the people need to be able to decide that some things should be excluded, like fascist or corporate propaganda.

All of this needs to be embedded in a larger revolutionary movement against capitalism itself. We need to replace this insane economy with one that not only works without any net growth but also doesn't collapse entirely when it needs to shrink. None of the existing flavours of #Marxism will do us much good because they were designed for a world where growth is still possible, and that world is over. However, #Anarchism is always a good starting point.