Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All (potentially accidentally while scrolling).
Important notes:
- I don't use scripts.
- I don't mass-downvote Communities. If I see a post I generally don't like when browsing All, I may downvote one post, block the Community and move on.
- Some of the communities I was banned from don't have any posts in them so I wouldn't have been able to downvote anything.
- Of all of these Communities, in my history I downvoted one post in one of them. Voting in this manner is not vote manipulation. It's quite literally a feature of the platform and as a mod of another Community, I would consider it pretty good etiquette.
- One of my bans reads "Appeal Granted, not a brigading member" but I'm still banned.
- I don't troll.
WTF is going on here?
EDIT - Updated Info from the conversation below: In the initial image, you can see two "ban waves."
The 10 bans three months ago stem from a single downvote in one Community. It was @[email protected] See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477
I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.
The other bans from two months ago are from four total downvotes over a 10-month timeframe in one Community.
I have also stated in this thread that I don't have issues with AI-gen images, but there are shoddy ones and well-done ones.
"Fixing capitalism" is just ending capitalism, the problems are inherent in its design.
In any case, you seem to be under the impression that all AI is just chatgpt, copilot, Gemini, grok, meta, etc. This is not the case. There are models trained entirely on peoples own work/material, models trained only on public domain materials, etc. Its just software and data, and the issue you are taking is - from your example - a capitalism problem, and has nothing to do with the software.
So what you're saying now reads no differently than "We have to fix capitalism before we can advocate for Linux!"
Would that make sense as a statement to you?
That's a fair statement, but I think it's a more fair statement to say almost anyone hating on AI is usually referring to corporate AI in the first place. Also, the person whose behalf you're defending AI clearly thinks that the AIs being trained on other peoples' work is completely fine. So I think you jumped in on the wrong side tbh
No, I'm pretty comfortable where I'm at.
I think intellectual property is a functional element of capitalism, and capitalism is a problem. I support people directly, and could not care less about anyone downloading content. I also support the local art scene, through events and direct purchase of works.
That doesn't mean that I think intellectual property (as a product) is sensible in any way.
That said, all my models are personally trained on my own data, and maybe a public domain based model for basic language to put context to a detected issue. That doesnt mean I'm going to put down folks who use a local model trained on some degree of copyright works, because no matter what, those users aren't the problem. Corporations are.
Because capitalism is a problem.
I'd say its more accurate that the people who constantly hate on AI are ignorant of the tools and their use, and most often their position is nothing more than "capitalism is the problem" (see above) whether they realize it or not.
And some will even go on to defend capitalism, which makes it even weirder to me.
And considering some of the comments across this post, I'd say my perception is pretty accurate.
Don't know what to tell you. If you don't see the issue with taking another person's labor and exploiting it for your own capital gain, then I don't know why you're even leftist. You sound more like an opportunist at that point.
Corporations are the problem because they are exploiting and stealing other people's generated labor for capital gain. If someone else is doing that, it's still bad, because that's how corporations are started.
You're right, capitalism is a problem. Abolishing capitalism is more important than fighting progress in AI development. But we aren't doing that. We aren't there. So AI's current existence and commercial implementation is a net negative to society at large.
It's like a farmer who has painstakingly grown a full crop, only for a random person to walk up with a magical tractor that duplicates the crop instantly, but in a way shittier and inferior way, and then is able to undercut the farmer by as much as they want because they basically have to perform no labor. And then the farmer is given the opportunity to "heal" the harvested crops, but you know. For a lot less. Since the other guy already did the "work".
And yeah, I'm not generally that worried about people with their own LLMs or whatever. But they're not exactly free tools. Not everyone has equal access to them. If we existed in a communist society where everyone has equal access to the AI, that would be different. But we aren't. Like why are we even discussing this. "No ethical consumption under capitalism" isn't really valid here, because this isn't consumption. It's capital production generated from labor theft. Lmao. Can they be used responsibly? Yes. Are they? Largely, no! So what's the problem? Capitalism, sure! Can we deal with that problem? Nope! Does that mean we can't create regulative rules to protect laborers from having their labor stolen? No, we could definitely do something about that. It's called IP laws. Are IP laws perfect? No. Do IP laws do more for individuals than for large corporations? I would guess not. Does it offer them more protection than if they didn't exist at all? Yes. Could they be reworked? Probably.
So... what's your point? Fuck trying to fix things, everyone just do whatever you want, it's the end of days, hopefully revolution comes on its own? Lol, whatever yo.
Original point: some people (didn't say me) think it's immoral.
Secondary point: IP laws aren't inherently immoral, they conceptually exist to protect laborers from having their labor exploited by people with more existing capital. They aren't even good in their current implementation, but believing in some form of IP law under capitalism is essentially a socialist policy.
Third point: When most people think of AI, they think of corporate use. Literally no one gives a flying fuck about your personal models trained on your personal data, except for environmental activists. Who even then, generally begrudge corporations way more than the individual, but they are still technically right when speaking about the individual's personal impact as well. You can say they are ignorant and their position is nothing more than "capitalism is the problem", but boiling it down to that is reductive and makes you seem like an idiot trying to argue a black and white perspective. "We absolutely have no reason to be critical of AI because capitalism exists. Capitalism is the problem, and therefore, AI's impact on exacerbating the problem is completely irrelevant." Lmao. That's your position. That's the position you're trying to argue.
Fourth point: It's more important to worry about where we are at than where we want to be. And look around. AI is a problem, and it needs regulation, and regulation of it includes protecting ACTUAL artists.
I always thought the immoraility was not just about theft of labor. The environmental impact is where the real ethical problem comes in. Yes, a single person using their own LLM is a drop in the ocean of power usage, but if everyone used their own LLM, surely that would be even less efficient and more harmful than centralized data centres handling billions of queries (unless of course everyone is using sustainable energy sources).