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Do not use ai (thelemmy.club)
submitted 6 days ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world/p/1758477/using-fascist-technology-to-fight-fascism-still-promotes-fascist-technology

Using fascist technology to fight fascism still promotes fascist technology.

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[–] 6 points 6 days ago (1 child)

What then, O wise one, must we understand before we can criticize LLMs for the slop machines they would still be even if we eliminated the myriad ethical problems with how they're currently deployed?

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  • [–] 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 child)

    Being a sarcastic ass does nothing to refute my point. I don't have to be an oracle to look back at history and see 100% of technologies finding an eventual use. I don't know how the problems will be solved, and I don't need to know what their uses will be in order for the trend that has continued for 1,500 years of recorded history to most likely be true.

    You, on the other hand, have to somehow show that THIS technology is so wildly unique that none of the examples from the last 1,500 years are informative.

    Edit: sorry, got some things mixed up in my brain. Just because you can't identify a use for a technology doesn't mean a technology is bad. Unless you are personally familiar with every single technology, profession, and process on the entire planet, and those that will be invented in the future, and can act as the ultimate arbiter of what is and isn't useful. Alcohol is very harmful. But also good at sterilisation. X-rays are very harmful, but also good at medical imaging. Gunpowder is very harmful, but also makes pretty fireworks.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 child)

    I don't think LLMs are bad because they're not useful. If people didn't think they were useful, ChatGPT alone wouldn't have 900 million weekly users.

    I think LLMs are bad because they buy up all the computer parts and leave none for the rest of us to build datacenters that make their communities worse places to live, and consume so much electricity that houses have to be bulldozed to build bigger power lines and/or have clean air act violating natural gas turbines on the property belching toxins into predominantly black neighborhoods, and suck up so much water that there isn't enough for residents, and scrape independent websites until their servers crash and evade every roadblock webmasters put in their way in the hopes of one additional scrap of training material, and buying and destroying rare books because they need training data that isn't polluted by LLM slop like the internet is and cutting the spines off of books lets you scan them faster and more cheaply than if you don't do that, all so that they can produce a machine that generates answers that are wrong 10% of the time, meaning that you have to check them anyway, and code that its authors do not understand and which is extraordinarily difficult to maintain, and make it the expectation to write three bullet points into a chatbot to turn it into a five paragraph email which the person who receives it will then immediately feed back into the same chatbot to turn it into three (slightly different) bullet points. and measurably hinder children's learning. and that's without going into chatbot psychosis and suicides, which we prommy are rare and caused by preexisting conditions.

    But they're also useful for generating meal plans or whatever, so all in it's even.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    Yeah, except that's a complete shift from "This technology is bad," to "I don't like the way this technology is being used."

    You could write a 5,000,000 word thesis on all the ways ANY technology could be abused, and it STILL would not be a refutation from its beneficial uses.

    Explain to me why open source LLMs, trained on public data, so both the training data and the resulting model are both 100% free and open source, are bad. For something to be universally bad, it CANNOT have any positive uses. Otherwise the real assessment is that it shouldn't be abused, not that it shouldn't exist at all, which I 100% agree with.

    Because that's the claim that needs to be defended. I am not defending OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. at all, so suggesting I am would be dishonest. I am not saying it should replace teachers, or scientists, or programmers, or anything like that, so suggesting I am would be dishonest.

    I am not defending the corporate practice of explosive expansion, which causes these major issues. As that is a product of psychopathic capitalism abusing a technology, not an inherent property of the technology itself.

    If you want to justify how an emotionless, mindless, will-less technology is inherently bad, you need to address its BEST, most ethical uses. Not its worst. You're making a universal claim. I reject the universal claim. I don't need to explain the abuses, because I am not justifying or defending them. The responsibility is yours to explain how the ethical uses are somehow bad.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 child)

    I apologize for presenting an insufficiently nuanced view of your favorite toy. It's not an excuse, but being subjected (and seeing my friends subjected) to the massive material harms done by LLM companies has a tendency to make me very angry, and I lash out at the obvious target. In retrospect, I realize only about 90% of current LLM deployments and use cases fit the both-unethical-and-harmful-to-the-user model I describe, and the remaining 10% is crucial. We mustn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

    Please do elucidate what exactly these ethical uses of LLMs are.

    You mentioned in another thread you use them for research. Have you figured out how to get them to stop confidently presenting incorrect information because they don't know the difference between a sequence of tokens that represents a true fact and one that doesn't hallucinating yet?

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  • [–] 3 points 5 days ago

    My wife is a materials science researcher, and works for a university here in Germany. She uses AI to drastically increase the speed that she programs calculations and simulations. Yes, it regularly spits out nonsense, and she's constantly having to refine and tweak it, which she can effectively do because she has a PhD in the field. She has repeatedly told me that the actual programming was always the least favourite part of her job. But now that she can get an LLM to write the actual code, all she has to do is go back to refine it, and spend more time thinking, and less time reading stack exchange.

    Another group used Evo 1 and Evo 2 to create novel genomes for bacteriophages in the fight against antibiotic resistance. There is a nuanced debate on whether those models are technically LLMs, since their language is actual sequencing rather than written descriptions. But they are structurally nearly identical.

    My personal project is iterally just for funsies, to see if I can mimick human learning and dreaming by combining an LLM with a more abstract NN. So the weights are never frozen, and it actively hallucinates and dreams scenarios between weight adjustments and re-initialization.

    I don't know how to make it not lie, and I'm not sure if that's possible. But I see that akin to asking "But how can we make X-rays safe to be used in shoe stores again?" Maybe we can't, but that doesn't mean we should ban them entirely.

    You and I seem to agree whole heartedly with the harms. Over use, abuse, misunderstanding, etc. are terrible and causing real harms.

    But I see people pointing their ire at every instance of the word indiscriminately, actively antagonizing those who are actively trying to make the changes they supposedly support.

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