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I think most AI people are on X, because the dialogue here is so oppressive

They're on X The Everything App Blaze Your Glory because they can use grok to make csam

Nice! A use for AI! Also wow that was rather a mean reply 😢

And amongst AI advocates, there's too often the same tedious fallback to arguments of inevitability and "progress", which excuse the enabling of the bad actors in tech, and advance their authoritarian project. It's a failure of imagination, in addition to being complicit in their political goals...

The ultimate "right" answers are going to involve complex solutions that will feel dissatisfying at first, and that's hard to get across to people. First, there isn't one killer alternative, just like there shouldn't just be "use Bluesky instead of Twitter". There needs to be a healthy ecosystem...

And all of the options in that ecosystem have to be radically different than what people think of as being intrinsic to "AI" today. It is possible to build systems that use data consensually. It is possible to build systems entirely on renewable power. It is possible to build actually open systems…

I think the "inevitability" frame, coming hot on the heals of the "we stole all your art and you can't stop us, peasants" opening bid, is about 50% of why everyone hates it now. I think it's intended in a larger "progress marches on" sense, but...

You won't be able to have conversations about the utility of this technology with artists, whose whole livelihoods were robbed, until there is a restitution. Bad actors and the monopolization of commercial creative industries have pushed this to a breaking point.

I've been working on the push to compensate creators for years, including building platforms for how developers can directly pay content owners. That's another reason why I think people need to actually engage in a conversation that doesn't push everything underground.

AI is bad and sloppers should feel shame. It's normal to feel shame when you're doing something that disgusting.

It doesn’t accomplish anything, just like you feeling ashamed about your Instagram account while Zuckerberg still profits off of you doesn’t accomplish anything. It’s a poor theory of change for actually stopping harms from big tech. Just lets you feel smug while nothing changes.

The conversation always seems to focus on "use". Which I think most rational people can admit there are great focused cases where this technology can be applied. However, considering all aspects of our current landscape, it's extremely difficult to imagine it getting better before it gets worse.

a few billionaires control how/when/what we use this technology for. That would have to be broken up. We need laws to do that. We need a judicial system that respects the rule of law to uphold them.

The US government does not currently have any incentive to move towards a utopian society where AI can be applied in a measured, smart, healthy way.

It's good that they feel shame. They should

except it doesn't stop the resultant harm from happening. Like, how does you having an instagram account that you feel guilty about, but that Zuckerberg still profits from, help anybody? It doesn't, it's just useless in every way.

People who use it should feel shame. I include myself in that. It's a feeling one should embrace so that it is only used when strictly beneficial and to not trust the results.

If you don't have a clear logical explanation you can give for why it was helpful for a given task that overcomes the shame, then you should not use it for that.

I don't feel any shame about using a model I trained on my own writing that runs on my own machine, and it's insane to suggest that I should.

Stealing from artists and destroying the environment should make you feel ashamed.

It doesn’t accomplish anything, just as you feeling ashamed about having an Instagram account while Zuckerberg profits from it doesn’t accomplish anything. It’s a way of making some people feel morally superior about a thing while not actually causing any accountability or change to the real harms.

“AI Bad” is reductive. Large language models, slop generators, and C- student aggregators are garbage tech, *and* they’re being pushed onto consumers, *and* data centers are destroying resources, *and* data harvesting methods for the vast majority of slop products are wildly unethical.

Nobody outside of techbro circles will be sad when the bubble bursts, but just like the dot com bubble, the technology will still exist even after a bunch of VC assholes jump off of something tall.

I know you’re excited for people to die in despair, but I have to say going from “AI bad is reductive” to “but actually AI bad and AI men evil” was truly something LLMs are just a technology, they are not evil. You hate them because you hate the people in tech, and you only know theirs