In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
It also makes a way for the poor to be able to afford to get art to make comics and other things when they otherwise would have been unable to hire artists. Generative ai also allows poor people to write code they couldn't before because they couldn't afford the help. It also gives poor people the ability to brainstorm new ideas when they can't afford a team of consultants.
It helps the poor, just like search engines and the internet. There were people back in those days scared of change as well. Gen ai is a huge equalizer or wealth and power. The vast majority of people using Gen Ai are using it for things that they never would have considered being able to hire someone to do anyway.
First of all it concentrates power and wealth on the owners of the models (Microsoft, OpenAI) or the ones that provide the tools (Nvidia).
Yes, there is truth in it, that people who couldn't afford to pay someone to create art, or get consulting, can get this now to a certain extend (if they can afford internet access and pay the AI services they need). But this comes also at the price of lowering the income of the people who provided these services. They now need to compete in the business creation market and not in the market that they trained for. Not everyone can create and maintain a business with or without starting money, just from a skill point of view. Nor does everybody want to.
The concentration of power part is not true unless people keep trying to use copyrights and the legal system to protect themselves from genai, at which point it will be true. Currently there's plenty of self hosted solutions like stable diffusion and services like the ai horde to help even people without gpu for free
You are still reliant on the models trained by these companies. This training is very expensive. And yes there are ioen source models exist (thank god) but there are also closed source models that are very successfully advertised.
And self hosting requires money and skill. This means there is a lot of people who lack both and may then use closed source models.
This is what we've mostly to solved with the AI Horde, where we allow people to rely on self-hosted open models.
This is good news indeed.
But I see the same problems as with email, chat etc. You can selfhost almost everything. But too few people are doing it. You can use Linux as your Desktop and at least 4% are doing it. Still too few if you ask me.
And if most of the people keep using the commercial and closed source options over the self hosted one, then I see this concentration of power. Additionally, there is the risk of regulatory capture, where big companies may try to at least hinder self hosting due to (what I consider) made up risks.
However, its good that there are currently such good open source option. I hope they will grow and become the defacto standard.
@paw @db0
Exactly, this is just a diversionist argument pretending that just because a theoretical possibility exists the problem can be considered solved in practice - it's like the decrepti old capitalist argument that "everyone can start their own company" if they don't like how they're treated as an employee. No they can't, not in the real world out there. That only works on paper, i.e. if you ignore the current distribution of resources and privileges in the existing society and economy.
This is not theoretical. It already is in place and is already serving people. The only reason it's not growing more is because we don't have any marketing and we don't participate in the capitalist rot economy.
@db0
Yep, like I said: doesn't work as advertised "just because actual reality".
Me: "The system works exactly as advertised for thousands of people"
You, a wise person: "The system doesn't work as advertised because not everyone in the world is using it."
You're a very unserious person, so I won't engage further with this nonsense.
The system is explicitly setup so that normal people don't need to set up anything. Experts and enthusiasts are the one doing the complex work, while normies just use a simply client like this and power users can also use more advanced clients.
That's up to all of us to counter by promoting the good solutions instead, not of just despairing and begging politicians to fix this (they won't, they'll promote monopolies instead)
That was always the case. Having said that, I'll appreciate your enthusiasm and that you share this work.