TranscriptTitle text: This is how you all fucking sound

[A smug tech bro wearing a sideways cap, watch, chain around his neck stands in front of a data center by a lake with dead fish. A smoke stack blows pollution into the air]

Tech bro: AI is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug man in a suit with cigarette in hand stands in a restaurant while two disgruntled diners cough from the smoke]

Suit: Smoking indoors is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug man in a top hat and suit stands in a factory with two sad and dirty children]

Hat: Child labor is already here, there’s no going back.

[A smug plantation owner stands in front of a field with with two angry slaves]

Plantation owner: The Atlantic Slave trade is already here, there’s no going back.

Still Vreni on Bluesky

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[–] 176 points 3 months ago (7 children)

Thats not how it works.

A better example would be "nuclear arms are already here, theres no going back"

Its not a capitalism thing, its an arms race thing.

Once one country starts making nukes you cant stop everyone from following suit to protect themselves.

Same goes for AI, once one country starts doing it, everyone else is gonna need to keep up so they dont lose the arms race.

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  • [–] 51 points 3 months ago* (29 children)

    Yes, but at least at the end of the day you can use nukes to blow stuff up. Presumably your enemies.

    If your enemies win the generative AI "arms" race they can use it to, uh...

    ???

    (Yes, I am aware there are military/governmental applications for neural net learning technologies but they're the types of pattern recognition and signals analysis stuff we already do without needing to build a football stadium sized datacenter every 50 miles and burn the entire nation's GDP on electricity generation. Most of the other applications appear to revolve around a regime using it solely to shoot themselves in the foot, e.g. powering a fantasy army of likely to be highly defective murder robots or using it to propagandize at and spy upon their own population in order to ensure a ready supply of destabilizing internal dissent always exists.)

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  • [–] 23 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    LLMs are not the final state of AI

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  • [–] 61 points 3 months ago* (12 children)

    But LLMs are not the path to the final state of AI, either. And that's assuming only if — and this is a very big "if" — a true general artificial intelligence can even be created using traditional silicon computing methods in the first place. Blithely assuming that it can be is really rather asking past the sale.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Yep, by design LLM cannot become 'inteligent', you can only make it more believable but it's still copying humans not really thinking by itself. No amount of development or money invested will change that, it's not a pokemon it won't just evolve into something different one day.

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  • [–] 34 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    And it's worth reiterating, the current crop of generative "AI" is incapable of producing anything new or novel. All it can do is reassemble existing strings, tokens, and patterns in slightly different ways. Innovation can never come from such a machine. That will have to come from a human.

    The current push is the notion that "hyperscaling," i.e. throwing even more hardware and space and power and money at the same concept, will magically make it something it isn't. Obviously that's not going to work. It'll allow grifters to make a ton of money over it, though!

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  • [–] 30 points 3 months ago* (8 children)

    Except 90% of what people talk about when they refer to AI is LLMs which have no direct military applications other than vague productivity boost claims. You could say the same thing about sending kids to the mines, “our society is more productive sending kids to dig out coal instead of playing. If we don’t send our kids to the mines China will and then we’ll really be behind”.

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  • [–] 27 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    The AI "arms race" as you put it is absolutely capitalism at its core. Replace humans with shitty robots so they don't have to continue paying wages to actual humans. Its just the the first person that makes it work will be able to set the rules for the ones that follow. Getting paid for those rules and making further entrenched in capitalism.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 months ago (17 children)

    The frustrating part is that we could be on the precipice of an amazing time. We could be in a space where it makes sense to dump tons of resources into rapidly progressing automation because it would enable people to finally stop doing tedious labor.

    But a combination of our inability to demand collective ownership of these systems and a similar disdain for social welfare means the prospect is instead terrifying. We need to continue to allow people to work cash registers for well below livable wages because otherwise they’ll starve.

    There is an alternate reality where the end result of AI is that people are just free to live how they want, to socialize, to explore art and novel ideas within their passion, engage in social supports, etc. but instead we will continue to prop up the need for mind numbing and tedious labor out of a fear of homelessness because collectivism is scary and bad

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  • [–] 23 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Once one country starts making nukes you cant stop everyone from following suit to protect themselves.

    Except we did stop. We ended nuclear testing. We downsized our arsenal. We never deployed the high yield, neutron bombs, or other "tactical" variants in subsequent wars. And neither did the French or the Russians or the Chinese. Or even the Israelis.

    Our nuclear program is derelict. It belongs in a museum. There's an outstanding question as to how many of the bombs currently in circulation are duds.

    Unlike with the F-35 or the Bradley Fighting Vehicle or the Predator Drone or even the Virginia class submarine, we're just not putting any more money into nuclear proliferation and improved first strike capabilities like we were 60 years ago.

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    [–] 57 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Thing is: All of the examples still exist to various degrees.

    And just like them AI is not going to vanish. Even more so than the others because AI is information. It's like trying to ban E2E: The genie is out of the bottle.

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  • [–] 24 points 3 months ago

    I mean yeah I have one friend that smokes indoors still and it’s wild to be transported to the 70s when I visit her, and there are casinos where you usually smoke indoors. I just think if these models were trained on the worlds data then we should probably nationalize the data centers or just have the majority of people have affordable gpus again to self host and continue making strides optimizing the models to run on lower vram if people insist on using these things. I think it should be considered cringe to try to make money off them or use them for art, and the other use cases need to be regulated - giant scam apparatus manipulating the shit out of people, propaganda spreading convincing bot accounts, automated cyber attack attempts…ya know all the wonderful and most popular use cases benefiting humanity and improving our lives.

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    [–] 55 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Asbestos is already in all the buildings, we can’t remove it. All the cars already require leaded gasoline, we can’t unlead it.

    Fun fact I didn’t know until recently: if you have a classic car that requires leaded gasoline, they actually sell lead substitute that you mix with modern unleaded gas

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    [–] 49 points 3 months ago

    Except child and slave labour was cheap and profitable. AI is neither cheap nor profitable.

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  • [–] 48 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    Well to be fair to the giant pieces of shit in positions of power all over the states they are trying to bring child labor back as well

    I'd bet good money it's the same people fighting to keep child marriage.

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  • [–] 42 points 3 months ago (13 children)

    As much as I hate ai/llm's, here we're conflating new technologies with bad practices. This is a fallacy.

    However much we hate llm's they definitely aren't going away anytime soon. You can't make laws or policies to make ideas/technologies go away.

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    [–] 36 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    It's comparing apples to oranges.

    AI is software. We never stopped any software change before. Even heavily disliked and banned systems like crypto currency or vpns etc. still exist.

    For the record I agree that AI needs more regulation and we could even force stop development of new models but LLMs will never be stopped in any meaningful way. You can take an open source model and run it today.

    LLMs are here to stay until it's replaced by other technology.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    AI is software. We never stopped any software change before.

    Good point, hard to stop something that has near zero cost of copying (see also 'piracy')

    Which is why techbros are trying to put a moat around it with 'datacentres' . Problem is, as the tech advances, it keeps getting smaller. QWEN 3.6 27B can run fine on a 16GB video card and if you give it more time it'll be as 'smart' as bigger models. Doesn't have as much world knowledge as the bigs, but for many usecases that's irrelevant.

    Really, 'datacentres' are more about stealing compute from the masses so they can rent it back, with control.

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  • [–] 34 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

    I am more mad about people saying "it's improvng exponentially." The rate of improvement is falling, if anything.

    Bunch of people said it because sci-fi made them believe so, and then everyone else went along with it for some reason.

    Either the exponent is 1/2 or people are just having shared delusions.

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    [–] 28 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Smoking indoors, child labor and slavery are all still here, just transformed and under a different coat of paint

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    [–] 27 points 3 months ago
    [–] 24 points 3 months ago (11 children)

    Reminds me of when the stupid "Web 3.0" made up by blockchain freaks was supposed to be the future. Not every technology will be as widespread as the internet. The internet facilitates communication across the entire world and offers many advantages over phone, mail, and other forms of communication.

    The use cases and advantages are clear, even if there was an overly eager hype cycle in the 90s. AI might have some uses, but a clear advantage has not actually been established yet, nor have the legal challenges been ironed out. Remember that the current iteration of AI would not have been possible without breaking tons of IP law, slurping up as much data as possible.

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    [–] 21 points 3 months ago (17 children)
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    [–] 20 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    I find it ironic that every top comment author seems to feel the urge to point out why it's actually different, but never question the point. I'm also sick of people telling me there's no turning back, like, yeah, you do you, bro. My life is great without social networks, which are not going anywhere I guess.

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    [–] 19 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I feel like this comic is bait

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    [–] 19 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    No, because you guys debating with actors who exist only in your head

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  • [–] 17 points 3 months ago* (8 children)

    None of those things were new technology. The assembly line didn't go away when people were angry about being laid off.

    If you're talking about a specific product of AI ("art" for example), you might want to make that clearer. If you're talking about AI in general, you're treating this one thing like it's a reason to try turning back the clock.

    The rational thing to do would be getting politically involved to get AI out of corporate ownership.

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    [–] 16 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (9 children)

    Look, I get pissed off at AI and the AI industry every day. I definitely don't hate it as much as some people, but I'm not a fan either.

    That said, it seems like there's not many comic artists out there who are able to actually articulate a coherent and rational criticism of AI. 90% of anti-AI comics end up being weak, strawman, or just generally sort of confused and vague. It's shocking to me because it seems like the problems and ways to criticize it are so plain. But comics like this and many others show how silly, reactionary, and unthinking a lot of these complaints are. There can be such thing as overreacting to a bad thing, there can be such thing as being confused about what's bad about a bad thing, etc. And in the case of this comic we have confusion about the nature of the problem and about its solution.

    Ngl, it really irritates me seeing these artists think they've served up epic poignant AI ownage when they've really just demonstrated their own poor thinking ability.

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    [–] 16 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    https://futurism.com/data-centers-financial-bubble

    The massive investments being made aren't economically viable.

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    [–] 15 points 3 months ago

    This article assumes the person in the first panel wouldn't want the 3 panels to not still be the case.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago

    Have you guys seen Reddit lately? It’s nothing but bots and AI. Its such a weird time.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    "Leaded gasoline is already there, there's no going back."

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