Source (Bluesky)
Text
AI is so fucked. For so many reasons. Flooding us with slop and scams, destroying the usable internet, taking people's jobs, accelerating climate change, disseminating misinformation and fascist propaganda, violating people's privacy, hampering people's ability to think critically...
It's alsk being used to sexually harrass and exploit people. If you've ever posted a pic of a human online, some fucking creep could be making porn with it right now, without your consent. Pics of you, your family, your kids. And they try to convince us there are good use cases for it. \
What I find insidious is that they sell us this evil technology via funny little trends. Make a doll of yourself, Ghibli-fy your pictures... Or convenience, ai overviews, respond to emails for you... And the normies playing with it have no fucking clue they are being used to train it, to hone it.
And every time someone insists this tech is inevitable, don't fight it, it's here to stay, I just feel this pit in my stomach growing, I'm sickened by a world so apathetic and lacking in humanity. Fight this! Stop letting them kill your soul!
The world doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to indulge the cruelest among us.
Like do you think the people who casually play with it would feel differently knowing that by using it they are improving the technology used to generate cp? Should we just start telling them that point blank? Like, I know you probably didn't know this, buuuuut...
AI's issues are not the inherent issues of capitalism. In fact, AI is the byproduct of capitalism. I have a feeling that the Curtis Yarvin types pushed this genAI bullshit onto us, to "destroy the cathedral", as techbros hate the humanities, which include the arts.
The right in general loves to hijack leftist causes to promote their own bullshit. Most of your counterpoints are just a further step on that. Capitalists would say we need the AGI to solve the climate crisis.
AI differs in many ways. If I wanted to ragebait antisemitic boomers that Osama Bin Laden, George Bush, and Barack Obama are Jews and are secretly good friends of each other, I had to hunt down an image of three Jewish rabbi, and photos of the other three subjects in the correct angle and lighting conditions, all top on learning how to do photoshop. There were people already trying to create fake photorealistic CP with heavy editing. Hell, there were even those, who outright just traced CSAM as accurately as possible. All of these required skill. Meanwhile AI only requires some prompting, which not only reduces creativity to "being the idea guy" (and according to my connections, that's what these things were made for), but also the creating of such material. Only thing you need is how to jailbreak the robot in some circumstances, you also usually get enough free tries to do enough damage.
AI is like giving away free machineguns on the street, complete with trying to stop people until they take the machine gun, and if that fail, secretly hanging them onto people's bags.
AI's current form is shaped by capitalist interests just like most other technological advancement under this system, so it is in a way a byproduct of it, I agree. Still, a lot of the problematic parts that people complain about are consequences of the system's inherent incentives, rather than something new AI creates.
The assertion that it's some kind of a plot to destroy humanities such as arts is something I've always found to be questionable. Many Anti-AI people portray the creation of art as something people do purely for fun as a form of expression and different from labor, but that's simply not true. Pretty much every artist has to rely on Patreon backers, commissions, streaming their process for donations to get by, there's a direct incentive to draw what's popular or makes money rather than what one wants to draw for fun. In other words, art has been commodified already which makes it no different from other kinds of labor and it is what AI art essentially tries to replace not unlike how textile mechanization replaced manual sewing for the masses. Despite that, hand-sewing for more niche clothes or items is still alive and well, and I doubt AI will end up killing off the purely-for-the-passion types of art, even if it sadly ends up decreasing the number of artists actively practicing their craft.
As for the ease of access, I fully agree - deepfakes, content for misinformation and the like have been on the internet for a while, and AI turbocharges the amount of these that can be produced making the situation much worse. It's definitely one of the only good anti-AI arguments.