You can take “justifiable” to mean whatever you feel it means in this context. e.g. Morally, artistically, environmentally, etc.
You can take “justifiable” to mean whatever you feel it means in this context. e.g. Morally, artistically, environmentally, etc.
Just my personal take, but my opinion basically boils down to “they can be.”
It’s all about how ethically they’re handled, and that can be good or bad at any scale. Take your very own instance, for example. Not that it’s hosting a local LLM (maybe they are, IDK), but the instance openly supports GenAI and has instances for all the major GenAI companies/models. GenAI without ethical sourcing - which none of these companies do - is one of the most blatant examples of a corporation using technology to steal the skilled labor of workers to avoid having to pay them what they’re owed for that skill. So your own instance is pro-corporatism, so long as they’re benefiting from stealing from workers. Not very anarchist if you ask me.
On the other hand, there’s a company that I believe partnered with Affinity a few years back that is a website design company that was hiring artists to create UI pieces for a training set for their LLM that they were going to use to create website templates for customers as part of their service (and I think they were also guaranteeing royalties for those who contributed as well?).
The instance is explicitly anti corporate ai. There’s !haidra@lemmy.dbzer0.com which db0 worked on. https://aihorde.net/ is probably the most ethical image generation service.
And yet, again, the instance has communities for every single big tech genAI model. That’s definitely not anti-corporate. Using those models both contributes to their shareholder value/profits and the theft of wages from workers.
And where do they get the training data for AI Horde? From scraping the web and all the freelance artists on there, like all of the big corporate models? Because then they’re just justifying exploitation of workers as benefiting everybody when what they really mean is benefiting themselves.
It’s like the argument pro ChatGPT airheads use constantly about how genAI “democratized” art. You know what “democratized” art and made it freely accessible to everybody? The pencil. It’s just making up excuses for wanting the product of skill without putting in the effort to learn the skill or pay appropriate compensation to somebody with the skill to give you the product that you want. It’s upper management thinking.
And this is why I say that it depends. Horde AI could be great - so long as the people whose work is being used to allow others access to skilled labor that they don’t want to do themselves are being properly compensated for their work. Otherwise, it’s no different from the corporations. Just because it’s free doesn’t mean that nobody is going hungry as a result of it. Unless it’s trained exclusively on products from big corporations. Those artists got paid when they did the work, so nobody gets hurt there except in the theoretical sense of freelance artists potentially losing customers down the line to “good enough and cheap” genAI from people with the above upper management mindset.
Where do you see that? As far as I see, we only have comms for stable_diffusion, which is an open-weights local diffusion model. I couldn’t find any corporate comms like OpenAI or Copilot or whatever. If we did, I don’t know if I’d delete them tbh, since they’re not explicitly against our CoC, but it would be something I’d be concerned and raise with the instance if they would be too “bootlicky”. But nevertheless, we do not at the moment.
The AI Horde is using open-weight models only. We don’t train them. We just use them once they’ve been trained.
PS: We are also anti-copyrights, so complaints based on copyright violations don’t fly with us.
I often see this vacuous argument and it never convinced tbh. It assumes everyone has enough time to train on making art, which most wage-slaves undoubtedly do not. It’s an inherently classist argument to assume everyone has the free time to master any artistic skill.
This is an argument against capitalism, not against GenAI itself. You’re arguing that because capitalism is bad and exploits workers, a tool that can also be used to further exploitation needs to be opposed. But we say it’s not the fault of the tool being used for exploitation, it’s the fault of the system allowing exploitation. I.e. If you remove the capitalist system, this argument against GenAI is moot. And we’re very much anti-capitalists in our instance. It’s a similar argument against piracy as well (and we’re also pro-piracy btw). I.e. sharing media is not a problem in a non-capitalist society, in fact it’s a positive. It’s only a negative due to capitalism.
oxymoron