The tool itself is fine when used clearly and purposefully, and those kinds of tools have been used for a long time in various fields, the problem I have with the current hype trends of ""AI"" is that literally nothing fundamentally new was made. People aren't being informed on how these things really work and what they do, there's a lot of dangerous practices and psychological manipulation, and above all these new large models are enormous labor-obfuscating machines. I don't give a shit about private property, IP laws, etc (because I know that's a common response), the problem is that these things are another layer of illusions, an enormous curtain hiding entire industries of data-scraping and theft, of countless people and hours of manual tagging, filtering, training, moderating and mechanical turks, in purely profit-seeking and reckless ways. And not only is all this labor not valued, people aren't even aware it exists, people never have to interact directly with anyone along that production chain. Entire industries becoming ghosts, non-existent, and even more unable to organize and struggle for what they create.

Beyond that, class consciousness is ever harder to teach and agitate for in these domains, because shit like this is purposefully built to hide and disguise exploited labor (often from the labour force of the colonized and victims of imperialism) and privatization.

It's not the stealing that's the problem it's the sneaky, rapid disruption and destruction of existing productions and jobs that it entails, and the privatization of colossal amounts of public data and user-generated data that nobody ever intended to be privatized and extracted for profits. It was always happening in the background of course, but i don't think people realize the impact this will have, to me it's like a closure of the internet-commons. Colossal explotation of Free Labour, the expansion of exploitation in every sphere of "content production" that was previously unreachable.

Drives me fucking insane.

[–] Bloobish@hexbear.net 20 points 5 months ago

So much art and literature both public and private was used to make these types of LLMs and yet no one truly talks about the consequence of stealing that labor and undervaluing it. So many tech bros love to shit on the arts because a robot can make something that is an amalgam of many artists and call it "art" but forget or willfully ignore the labor needed to create that data beforehand, again it's labor exploitation just as you mentioned. Also yeah as used as data scrappers and aggregators these types of machines are amazing and something that should be used, it's just that there needs to be actual human beings making sure the collected data is cleaned and properly organized or else it's just vomiting out useless shit. The humans that do this type of cleaning work are so well hidden or outsourced to other countries that no one wants to acknowledge that there is no way to truly remove the need for human labor and inputs or else the "magic" of AIs would fizzle out and the current boom would turn to a bust cycle similar to when crypto was so fresh in everyone's mind.