Technology

I think rejecting AI is a mistake. All that does is allow fascists to have mastery of the tools. Like money, guns, media, food, oil, or any number of other influential things, you don't want a select few people to have sole control over them.

Instead, we should adopt AI and make it work towards many good ends for the everyday person. For example, we can someday have AI that can be effective and cheap lawyers. This would allow small companies to oppose the likes of Disney in court, or for black dudes to successfully argue their innocence in court against cops.

AI, like any tool, reflects the intent of their user.

Honestly it just feels like ai is created to spy on us more efficiently. Less so about assisting us.

I guess that means it could also be the most effective tool for saving democracy. Fuck these what if's over factual news.

It's guns. The most effective way to diamantle democracy is violence.

AI is not stopping anyone from revolting. Guns and the military are.

Whar a stupid fucking take.

Nope. I'd still say social media/social media algorithms.

Imagine if social media didn't exist (beyond small, tight-knit communities like forums about [topic], or BBS communities), but all these AI tools still did.

Susan creates an AI generated image of illegal immigrants punching toddlers, then puts it on her "news" blog full of other AI content generated to push an agenda.

Who would see it? How would it spread? Maybe a few people she knows. It'd be pretty localised, and she'd be quickly known locally as a crank. She'd likely run out of steam and give up with the whole endeavour.

Add social media to the mix, and all of a sudden she has tens of thousands of eyes on her, which brings more and more. People argue against it, and that entrenches the other side even more. News media sees the amount of attention it gets and they feel they have to report, and the whole thing keeps growing. Wealthy people who can benefit from the bullshit start funding it and it continues to grow still.

You don't need AI to do this, it just makes it even easier. You do need social media to do this. The whole model simply wouldn't work without it.

This has been going on for a lot longer than we've had LLMs everywhere.

AI "guardrails" is even a bigger tool governments can use to dismantle democracy and kill freedom. The article starts by quoting the pope who isn't even a democratic ruler, he gets appointed by cardinals who are appointed by the previous pope. AI could have wrote a more useful article.

This is a thing on social media already.

Lots of bad faith conservatives will just output AI garbage. They don’t care about truth, they just want to waste your time. You spend time researching their claims, providing counter evidence - they don’t care, because they don’t even read what you say, just copy and paste into an LLM.

It’s very concerning with the Trump administrations attack on science. Science papers are disappearing, accurate/vetted information because sparser - then you can train Grok to claim that all trans women are rapists or that global warming is just Milkanovitch cycles.

It is and has been an info war. An attack on human knowledge itself. And AI will be used to facilitate it.

This is the inevitable end game of some groups of people trying to make AI usage taboo using anger and intimidation without room for reasonable disagreement. The ones devoid of morals and ethics will use it to their hearts content and would never interact with your objections anyways, and when the general public is ignorant of what it is and what it can really do, people get taken advantage off.

Support open source and ethical usage of AI, where artists, creatives, and those with good intentions are not caught in your legitimate grievances with corporate greed, totalitarians, and the like. We can't reasonably make it go away, but we can reduce harmful use of it.

Creating unbiased public, open-source alternatives to corporate-controlled models.

Unbiased? I don't think that's possible, sir.

When the fuck will you people get it?? Every technology will eventually be used against you by the state

A tool is a tool. What matters is who is using it and for what.

Only if you don’t consider capitalism.

It could also be an effective tool for liberation. Tools are like that. Just matters how they’re used and by whom.

I don’t believe the common refrain that AI is only a problem because of capitalism. People already disinform, make mistakes, take irresponsible shortcuts, and spam even when there is no monetary incentive to do so.

I also don’t believe that AI is “just a tool”, fundamentally neutral and void of any political predisposition. This has been discussed at length academically. But it’s also something we know well in our idiom: “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” When you have AI, genuine communication looks like raw material. And the ability to place generated output alongside the original… looks like a goal.

Culture — the ability to have a very long-term ongoing conversation that continues across many generations, about how we ought to live — is by far the defining feature of our species. It’s not only the source of our abilities, but also the source of our morality.

Despite a very long series of authors warning us, we have allowed a pocket of our society to adopt the belief that ability is morality. “The fact that we can, means we should.”

We’re witnessing the early stages of the information equivalent of Kessler Syndrome. It’s not that some bad actors who were always present will be using a new tool. It’s that any public conversation broad enough to be culturally significant will be so full of AI debris that it will be almost impossible for humans to find each other.

The worst part is that this will be (or is) largely invisible. We won’t know that we’re wasting hours of our lives reading and replying to bots, tugging on a steering wheel, trying to guide humanity’s future, not realizing the autopilot is discarding our inputs. It’s not a dead internet that worries me, but an undead internet. A shambling corpse that moves in vain, unaware of its own demise.