- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
GrapheneOS is currently defending its use of AI coding tools on Mastodon against complaints by various accounts claiming to be users.
We do not understand where you’re coming from or why you’re so incredibly angry with us. It’s not justified and does not make sense.
I am not a coder in any fashion but this is the make or break frontier for development, particularly FOSS and small scale projects.
AI is evil.
It is an ecological nightmare, socially and economically distructive, prompted on the theft of the knowledge and work of every creative endeavour any person as ever made and pointed at rendering pointless any future aspiration of individual creation someone may have.
The association has been made and it is not going away.
AI in concept is not evil and could be a good thing .
Unfortunately, its implementation has been at the hands of rapacious, avaricious, and narcissistic über-capitalists, which has inextricably linked AI with the evils you enumerated.
In a different timeline, AI was developed slowly, using heavily-vetted and legally obtained data, and rolled out in an intelligent and safe way.
We are better off leaving the appeal to alternate time lines for another conversation, preferably around science fiction or comics.
As it exists, as it was created, “AI” is evil. It consumes resources we can’t afford to waste and is currently supercharging our pollution indexes and creating what may be a catastrophic collapse of already very fragile and unbalanced social and economic realities.
And because we are already into the sunken cost falacy fase, it will never be rewritten or rebuilt. Hopefully, it will collapse in such horrifying way it will create a cautionary tale, but we are not so lucky, so what we are left with is picking up the bits after it.
This kind of system had to be developed inside laboratories, colleges, universities, research centers, to aid into very niche and specific fields of research, not made to be a mass consumption comodity as it is. But it was, as you very well put it, not done that way.
this is such an extremist position, i don’t know how anyone can take it seriously
Never been on the Fuck AI communities? They all think like that.
And like everything in life, things are a lot more nuanced.
Thank you.
AI is not evil. It doesn’t have a consciousness. It doesn’t make decisions.
What is evil, are billionaire capitalists having full control over the technology.
What is evil, is the concept of closed-source.
What is evil, is stealing all creative works without attribution or compensation.
What is evil, is seizing essentially all the silicon to build these datacenters, then soak up all the electricity out of the grid and all the water out of the ground.
The problem isn’t the AI, itself. It’s the means that’s the problem…not the ends.
“Evil” is a subjective term, so it is difficult to make headway in discourse using terms like that. I feel that using objective statements are more effective. Someone that thinks AI is “evil” would do better to say something like “I believe this technology to be a net harm to human society.” While difficult to verify and quantify, that statement at least still is verifiable and quantifiable, unlike “AI is evil”.
To summarize: something that is being created through highly destructive amd predatory means, by completely deranged people, is not evil.
I can’t disagree more. And to quote myself, again, today:
AI is a tool, like a hammer, and should be used as such. And like a tool should require training. The problem is people aren’t using it as a tool and rather look at the hammer and say “go build me a house”. That’s where the issue is. Does a hammer know how to build a house on its own? no. does AI excel at end to end builds? no. but people are using it for said end to end builds.
Devs, vibe coders, god knows who else still to this day fail to understand that AI doesn’t understand how to build things correctly. All the agents care about is getting to a solution as quickly as possible to retain a userbase. that’s it. will what ever it builds scale? no. will it be full of exploits? very likely. will it be able to refactor whatever it wrote? no because it will believe YOU wrote it. so upgrades/improvements to whatever are virtually impossible.
THEN you combine all that with the fact that EVERY AI’s training data, currently, is incredibly out of date. Tech moves too fast for it. So you have people building shit with libraries and what have you that are already out of date and they don’t know that.
Nuclear weapons are a tool, like any other
Good justification to why GOS is right to use AI to detect vulnerabilities. The only true way to protect yourself from an enemy that has nuke bombs is to have some yourself.
Ukraine gave up its stockpile in exchange of promises from both Russia and NATO that no harm would come to them, and would there be harm from one side, the other side would come and help them. They were betrayed by both sides.
AI is very efficient at finding vulnerabilities. Among a see of false positive, they find real ones. It’s much more efficient and faster than human auditing code. So either it’s GOS using it, finding them and patching them, or it’s… someone else.
That’s a great example actually, you just have to differentiate between a nuclear weapon and a nuclear power plant. You can split atoms to build a bomb or heat water, the concept of splitting an atom itself isn’t evil.
Exactly
I think with OP’s analogy, a nuclear weapon is no longer a tool, because the actual tool (nuclear technology) was crafted into something (weapon) that does a specific thing (destroy). But I guess OP should’ve used LLM and machine learning instead of AI.
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Nuclear fission has been used in nuclear reactors for good, and was exceedingly efficient at that time, and has been a significant factor in the recent human history. Just as it’s been with the “evil” use in nuclear weapons.
I’m not aware of any breakthrough that has not been used for both good and evil.
A tool built through nefarious means and consuming resources it should never had chanelled into it.
Then, taking from your words, if the information these machines are working is by default outdated, why insist in feeding it with more and more and expect different outcomes?
Makes no sense to begin with.
So by your logic, a child produced through “nefarious means” is also inherently evil.
Only the mentally ill regard humans as tools, though, so that analogy is only apt for them.
What?
It’s a tool like a gun, specifically purpose built to usher in a technofeudalist surveillance state. Not useful for anything else as is.
Guns are incredibly useful, just like LLMs and diffusion.
For literally one thing only. That was the point of my comment. Unfortunately AI can’t give you reading comprehension.
guns can be used for murder/self defense and hunting, but I suppose thst second one is less common outside Alaska
You should use ai to learn 😁
I recommend https://chat.mistral.ai/chat as they use renewable power to train their models and are european 👍
Pass. Haven’t learn before, not interested in do it now. And if by some reason I wished to do it, I’d grab a few books on it.
You do know those books will also be AI generated, right?
How do you know? Honestly, how can you claim a given author will relay to a meat grinder the effort of compilling a work they will sign and be responsible for?
One added curiosity from me: at what point has the colective surrender of independent thought and action been signed and by whom?
And a final question but feel free to skip this: do you rely completely on LLMs to complete your daily life tasks or are you still able of doing things by yourself?
“Ai” isn’t inherently evil. It’s just a tool. An incredibly interesting and marvelous tool, in theory.
What we make of it and how we use it matters. Noone needs stupid chatbots. People should only be allowed to use them after graduating an exam of what they actually are and how they work. In the current state they’re 90% bullshit and harmful.
But LLMs surely have great and reasonable applications. People often fear what they don’t really understand. And LLMs really are a topic that often even “techies” don’t get, so why should a layman.
Yes, they are environmental Desasters. But try to substract all the trillions of silly nonsensical queries millions of people hammer into chatbots, that once were simple search-engine - queries. And it’s not THAT bad anymore.
The problem you’re encountering is that every human defines evil differently. Those disagreeing with you seem to define evil to include “detrimental to civilized society”, which does at least come from an objective premise, even if you don’t agree with the assessment.
Through that lens, the good it does for people simply cannot outweigh the bad, because they believe the bad to include the end of society. That is what you’re arguing against, and why people with that view are so energized and are unmoved by the counter-arguments. If you want to change their minds, you would first have to convince them their premise is false, not just their conclusion.
Well, tbh, if someone has an opinion that isn’t swayable by facts, why should I take that person seriously? It’s like talking with religious nutjobs. They already have all “answers”.
The facts are clear, relatively simple, and accessible by everyone. And “evil” is generally considered bad. But LLMs are not just “that precise one thing” that could be declared evil. It’s a concept. The application of it changes the good/evil attribution. Chatbot? Obviously bad. Helping to determine cancer in a Patient? Good. Etc.
If people don’t WANT to argue because they already joined a “AI is the devil”-cult, so be it. Not my job to convince anyone of anything 😊
Their opinions may be swayable by facts, but not just any facts. You would need to present facts that confirm that their specific objections are unfounded or overblown.
Facts like “its here to stay” and “it allows you to write more code in less time”, etc, do not address their objections. Stating to them the ways in which it is good does nothing to counter their conception of the ways in which it is bad.
And that’s the nonsense about it. We’re not talking about cars or such, but a general concept. And most likely take one or two specific applications of it and use it as a definition of the thing itself. And even with cars you couldn’t condemned them because tanks exists, and ignore ambulances or such.
Also, it’s usually the exact same group that also mostly uses products of what they hate so much. Microsoft, google, Facebook or any us-american bigtec. If LLMs would be as bad as they say it is, stop funding it. Simple. Really really simple. I don’t use any of those, so it’s possible to actually protest besides big word and vote by wallet.
“AI is just a tool” - #1 thing said by tools.
Machine guns are tools. As are jets and bombs and missiles.
Exactly. Seems you understood the point. Also same as cars, planes, spoons and machetes.
#1 thing said by arrogant turds with no clue.
My point proven :D
If that fills your clueless heart with joy, be my guest 🤷🏻
I’m just going to quote myself, as I’m satisfied enough with the answer I wrote to another reply.
You are confusing capitalism and ai. AI is just a tool. Capitalist will use any tool it can to hurt labor. This is currently born out by history recent and ancient. The luddites attacked the looms not because they were evil. But because the bourgeoisie were using them to exclude and attack labor.
That is a false equivalence.
The looms, the automated treshers, the tractor, whatever machine designed to a fullfil a task that displaced human labour wasn’t designed with the objective to render humans useless. There were periods of transition when people hurt, needlessly, if I may say so, but new occupations emerged.
This is not the same.
For the first time, we are faced with a technology that feeds off human achievement to be built and next states it can dispense and completely replace what enabled it to be put together to start. While consuming resources we can not afford to waste and returning nothing of value.
No, it’s a literal analog. There will still be people operating AI. Even using your own terminology is literally the same.
And I don’t even know where you’re going with the last part. I suggest you familiarize yourself with what AI is actually capable of. The biggest danger of AI is not that it hallucinates more than someone tweaking on meth. But that people dumb and tweaking on meth with too much power will take what it says as gospel. Your liable to make the people in the marketing Departments of these AI companies cum with how badly misrepresenting what these AI are capable of. The same AI that some companies fire their workforces for and are now humiliatedly hiring them back. Because the AI wasn’t capable of what it was sold as.
It is not an analog, in any measurement.
We are talking about a technology that been prompted, since its inception, as the leap that would render human work unnecessary - which is false under many measurements.
When that failed, it was then repackaged as the technology that would enable any person to do anything: write a book, a song, create the new Mona Lisa, write any program they needed or wanted, etc. And again, it failed.
Any major development was always geared towards solving a concrete, tangible, problem. For AI, every proponent for it is trying to find problems to fix with it.
I don’t care about the promises of AI. I care about the cost of it, now and future. It’s not a hand full of niche applications that are going to impress me. Put it towards research, make it truly useful, in the hands of people capable of forcing it to produce results and audit and validate them. It is not a toy, it is not something that can replace human beings in any measurement, it is not something people should be relegating their autonomy and individuality to, which is happening as we are having this conversation.
No need to reply to this. I’m out. I don’t care for any arguments in defence of AI and it’s potential. I’ve made my choice. Keep to yours.
Have a great one. See you around.
It’s not a defense of AI. It’s a pushback on your hysterical flailing against all forms of it. And your inability to engage rationally on the subject. Case in point you hand wavingly deny my point while providing a list of evidence to support it.
If you are going to protest the current deployment of AI, the AI isn’t the problem. The actual issue is the grifting petit bourgeoisie looking to gate keep it as they continue to grift. Destroying everyone and everything in their path. You’ve shown that you know the generative AI isn’t what it’s sold as. But oddly you attack those that technically agree with you, simply because they won’t histrionically flip flop between that and all AI bad!!!1!!ONE!
people are not entitled to employment, and machines are a great way to reduse the labour requirements.
You have the right to express your opinion as you may please but you’re not entitled to have me respect it nor respect you for it, but I digress.
This isn’t Reddit, sadly, because otherwise I’d give you gold for that comment.
By that logic, when all human labour - and I do mean all of it, with no exception - is no longer necessary, thus no income can be earned by any part, how will people survive? I expect them to be, at least, entitled to move out of the way and silently and peacefully disappear.
“I’m just going to quote myself”
Yeah go on buddy, doesn’t make you right though.
AI is an item (as “tool” seems to trigger you people), saying it is “evil” is just stupid and makes you sound like an evangelist lol.
Is it bad? That is something people can actually discuss, but you’re not here for that it seems.
The AI is a consummer of resources we can not easily dispense that returns nothing of objective and equivalent value.
Fresh words, no quotes.
More palatable now?
Oh no we didn’t know that!! /s
Dude, we know the downsides of generative AI and the training of llms.
Is that so hard to understand?
It is. It really is. At any point on any other endeavour, someone said it was enough and the costs did not justify the results. Not with this. So, it really is hard to understand.
Just because it was a nicely worded statement, doesn’t make it universal.
I use a local LLM for our smart home. It wastes a Lil bit of energy, which is still faaaar below my 1500W while gaming. Is gaming evil now? It helps dramatically in ways that were never possible before like “turn on all lights at 40% in the color purple and also turn on music. My fav playlist” followed by a “no, use a warm color and close all windows”.
Not every LLM is a fucking chatbot that eats the planet to “create” a shitty cat-meme for Granny’s Facebook.
Don’t assume everyone uses silly chatbots. That is ONE application of LLMs, and it is indeed stupid and kills out environment for basically no benefit.
Congratulations. Enjoy it.
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS Here you go, argue with GrapheneOS - it’s an open platform, go ahead and make a masto account and share your thoughts with them. Tell them what you think! The rep who handles their masto account is very well spoken and presents rebuttals of value so I advise you bring your A game.
Yeaaaah like deleting their earlier posts to make themselves look better and claiming the “haters” are coming from K*wi Farms.
https://mas.to/@zzt/117246306723269935
Truly good rebuttals right here!
I’m not going to approach them in any fashion. I have already made my decision about their work/product and the GrapheneOS is not of my interest.
The project must have their reasons but I still insist on what I’ve stated regarding AI in general.
You’re right, but don’t encourage people to brigade GrapheneOS. That’s a donation-funded project.
I’m not brigading anyone. They have their reasons, I have my view regarding AI, that is it. I did not attack the GrapheneOS team in any way nor do I intend to.
My bad, I didn’t think of that. My only thought was “$20 says this chucklehead won’t do squat” because we know.