Post by hugo rojo in Fuck capitalism but hey...respect copyright! - itch.io

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hugo rojo7 days ago(+2)(-1)

As an anarchist, I believe that copyright laws are far from ideal, but artists/creators, as workers, have the right to reap the rewards of their labor. In this case, genAI would be the equivalent of the means of production that capitalists monopolize through private property, allowing them to steal the surplus value from workers. But genAI is even worse, because once it has been fed the artists/creators’ work, the owner of the means of production no longer needs them and therefore doesn’t have to pay them, even though, from the very beginning, it fed on stolen works taken from the internet without permission and without any kind of compensation for their work but making profits using it.

In short, generative AIs are the ultimate expression of capitalism: the ultimate extraction of surplus value without the need for workers (or at least some of them), while maintaining private ownership of the means of production.

If you want to make something and you don't know how to do it, learn it or search for someone who know about the topic. Make a team, create community, learn something new, try and experiment, enjoy the process, don’t leave it to a plagiarism machine. genAI also serves as a tool for fascism. There are already studies linking the use of AI to a decline in cognitive ability and critical thinking. There are two values that the use of genAI erodes: learning and collaboration. It’s easier to ask genAI to do something we don’t know how to do (even if we don’t know whether it’s making mistakes). That makes us more ignorant, more dependent, and more isolated; a demographic that is far more vulnerable to fascist ideology.

pabink7 days ago(-1)

As an anarchist, I think that AI is not in itself an expression of capitalism, but rather the use that is made of it, as is the case with any technology. However, I think that, unlike other technologies, it has the intrinsic power to become an anti-capitalist tool, capable of bringing skills and knowledge to social classes that cannot afford to acquire them. In all honesty, I think it is a bit too early to consider reliable the studies that correlate the use of AI with cognitive decline.

hugo rojo6 days ago

You can't be serious. Maybe there are some uses of LLM that can be beneficial in very specific scientific areas, like medical applications, etc... but the use of genAI to do the creative process instead of you ins't bringing any skill or knowlegde to yourself, it's doing the opposite. You learn nothing and you adquire no skill at all. We need the free time and our needs covered to afford to learn and be capable to do these things if we want instead to outsource the process to a probabilistic calculator greedly feeded with the labour of other people.

We can convey no technology itself is inherently capitalist or anticapitalist but when we talk about genAI we all know the kind of models are we talking about and the uses we are referring. Can you train a genAI to do something really more useful and constructive that collaboration with soemone who knows how to do the same thing better, that is not a waste of energy and is trained by data obtained etically? Can you do it in the context of this Jam? Of course not.

Anarchists usually are more akin to praxis than theory and the examples in the real world of the use of genAi are a massive support of capitalists and big corporations, right-wingers and fascists, market speculation in harware components, a lot of people losing their jobs, etc... you can teorize what you want about an ideal ude of AI but the praxis says another thing.

English isn't my first languaje, sorry if the structure of my text have errors and is not very clear.

pabink6 days ago(+1)(-1)

My critique was trying to go beyond the specifics of this jam. Rejecting a tool out of ideological purity risks leaving it entirely in the hands of those you want to oppose.
It's a mistake that alternative movements have already made in the past. For a long time, parts of the leftist and anarchist movements looked with suspicion at the internet, social media, and going further back in time, at private radio and TV stations. This meant ceding those spaces to those who had fewer ideological qualms about using them.
It may seem paradoxical, but the more powerful a technology is, the more it costs to reject it. And AI is probably the most transformative technology of recent decades. In any case, if we really want to limit ourselves to this jam: if a young person interested only in learning to code wanted to make their game by generating sprites with AI, I don't think that would be a great harm to the world of creativity — or conversely, an aspiring artist who had AI write the code to animate their creations wouldn't be such a great harm to programmers either.

I'm not a native English speaker either, so don't worry about errors — I don't even notice them :-)

Angry Mouse Games3 days ago (1 edit) (-1)

Going beyond the specifics of the Jam? Ok! Hi, I disagree.

Offshore radio was very cool and largely embraced for many many years and in some forms continues to this day. All sorts of groups across all political stances embraced it as a way to avoid government monopolies. I have never heard anything about an anarchist (other than anarcho primitivists?) who was rejecting or decrying any sort of pirate broadcast.

As far as the early internet is concerned, there was worry due to the fact the early infrastructure of the internet was using military technologies/companies. But, there was a large social movement and anarchist presence from the very beginning. Look up the Cypherpunks, read their activism and manifestos, etc. They are also very cool.

Feel free to share what evidence you have for that claim, because honestly I have no idea why you made that claim to support your argument for AI.

Also, it is a harm to programmers. Every interaction you have with LLMs teaches more to the LLM. It is watching you too, harvesting every request and scrap of data you exchange. Please remember, the problem that AI is trying to solve, is WAGES. So yes, it will cause great harm to many many entry level programmers.

The harm to creativity is this. Someone would have made something. Because someone asked their AI model to create, they did not. How many cute janky doodles never got shared with the world? How many artists never built up their skills and confidence to create more things? How many artists never found their style? Or worse, saw their style get scraped and remixed by the machine? Are you sharing studio ghibli selfies?

When you say decades, that is a large amount of time. That puts AI on the same level as Wifi, stem cell treatments, and additive manufacturing in your home with 3D printers. AI requires data centers, it requires mass data collection. AI will always be an alloyed good. A product built and bound to massive corporations that have no respect for you, for copyright, for art, for workers.

(Data Centers are causing all sorts of other problems too!, raising power & fuel prices, water management, pollution, violation of US EPA regulations, consolidation of the internet into corpo control, etc.)

I do not reject AI out of "ideological purity". I refuse it as a moral necessity. I find its use immoral. GenAI is rent extraction on the act of creating.

:)

pabink3 days ago (2 edits) (-1)

I wrote that radio, TV, internet, they were initially "looked with suspicion", fearing they would brainwash people. It's not that they were never used. Fortunately, common sense prevailed over ideological purity, and they weren't left solely in the hands of capitalism. The same thing is happening with AI. Looking it with suspicion is legitimate, leaving it in the hands of capitalism—a strategic mistake. Just as we used radio, TV, and the Internet against the system, it will be inevitable to do the same with AI.

elTestRobot2 days ago (1 edit) (+1)(-1)

Radio, TV and Internet are means to distribute information. AI is not, and it's goal is not the same. Remember that the definition of AGI according to OpenAI and Microsoft is when AI systems can generate at least $100 billion in profits.

Also, the sheer scaling and government insight required to produce anything meaningfully helpful for society puts it firmly out of most people's reach and firmly into big capital's.