Honestly it feels like I’m taking crazy pills some days. I run local models on my system, and the technology is legitimately fascinating. I am not talking about the broligarchy, merely the underlying technology is weird and fun to play with.
One thing is for certain - the box Pandora had this thing lying around in has been kicked open, and it cannot be shut. We’ll just have to figure out what that means for all of us.
Good question. I think there’s some truth to it. Somehow a lot of fascist people love AI. For example a certain president posts a lot of gen AI pictures, sometimes videos of himself dropping poo on the citizens. Other regimes just use it to manifest some video surveillance dystopia. And to be frank, there is no other tech to enable surveillance on that level.
It’s also a good tool to manipulate people on a grand scale, make custom propaganda, exploit psychology…
LLMs and related systems are made in a completely top-down way. They’re under control of the Chinese government and a few select US tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and their companies. They get to shape it. And they’re kind of Anti-Robin-Hoods. They steal from the poor, the workers and artists, and give to the rich. They get more power and money. And I didn’t yet mention Peter Thiel and some other companies who are working on some AI assisted version of doomsday, or at minimum some scifi dystopia with predictive policing and that kind of stuff.
Also comes with a few fascist side-effects. Like disposession of land, polluting the environment and poor people get to suffer the consequences of climate change. Rich people can just buy a new house and clean water…
I mean not all AI is fascist. But I see lots of reason to believe it aligns well with fascist wet dreams. And not so much with their opponents’.
On contrary: Space travel helps all of us. I get to learn new science things. Get to use my sat nav in the car… 400 TV channels… a more precise weather forecast… We needed to advance material science for space travel, push solar cell technology, which I can make use of as of today to break free from big oil… I also got to contribute some taxpayer money to make it happen, so it wasn’t just forced upon me by oligarchs…
One argument is that those who make LLMs have a high amount of control their output. It’s giving a lot of control of open source to the whims of those companies to become reliant on LLMs
Think about the potential for providers to add plausibly deniable backdoors, general lower quality code, etc. when they think you are working on a project they care about. The precedent is there with Anthropic publicly stating that Fable was built to intentional sabotage quality when they think you are working on AI research related tasks or distillation. That kind of stuff can be subtly baked into open models as well
tools shape our perception of the world, and in turn us. neutrality is tacit approval. when a fascist company develops a technology, and some people say “we don’t want technology developed by fascists”, the “compromise” position is “you could have some technology developed by fascists”
if you look into operation paperclip and all the politics following that, you’ll see that there was a ton of pushback. the german scientists were literal nazis, but in the worst way; they were the compromising kind. only that the compromise was between “kill people” and “don’t kill people”, so the result was “kill some people”. and living in that environment changes your perception of the world. as the song goes, “once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? that’s not my department” says wehrner von braun
Honestly “just a tool” is the same as “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. The phrase frames the context as if EVERY tool can have plenty of reasonable non-destructive purposes.
i understand there are a lot of facist AI companies, but how can an entire technology be facist?
That’s like saying space travel is facist because pretty much all of it was built on work by literal nazi scientists.
Do we throw out all the related advances too? Satellite communications, GPS, etc.?
Honestly it feels like I’m taking crazy pills some days. I run local models on my system, and the technology is legitimately fascinating. I am not talking about the broligarchy, merely the underlying technology is weird and fun to play with.
One thing is for certain - the box Pandora had this thing lying around in has been kicked open, and it cannot be shut. We’ll just have to figure out what that means for all of us.
Good question. I think there’s some truth to it. Somehow a lot of fascist people love AI. For example a certain president posts a lot of gen AI pictures, sometimes videos of himself dropping poo on the citizens. Other regimes just use it to manifest some video surveillance dystopia. And to be frank, there is no other tech to enable surveillance on that level.
It’s also a good tool to manipulate people on a grand scale, make custom propaganda, exploit psychology…
LLMs and related systems are made in a completely top-down way. They’re under control of the Chinese government and a few select US tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and their companies. They get to shape it. And they’re kind of Anti-Robin-Hoods. They steal from the poor, the workers and artists, and give to the rich. They get more power and money. And I didn’t yet mention Peter Thiel and some other companies who are working on some AI assisted version of doomsday, or at minimum some scifi dystopia with predictive policing and that kind of stuff.
Also comes with a few fascist side-effects. Like disposession of land, polluting the environment and poor people get to suffer the consequences of climate change. Rich people can just buy a new house and clean water…
I mean not all AI is fascist. But I see lots of reason to believe it aligns well with fascist wet dreams. And not so much with their opponents’.
On contrary: Space travel helps all of us. I get to learn new science things. Get to use my sat nav in the car… 400 TV channels… a more precise weather forecast… We needed to advance material science for space travel, push solar cell technology, which I can make use of as of today to break free from big oil… I also got to contribute some taxpayer money to make it happen, so it wasn’t just forced upon me by oligarchs…
You can train a model. Today.
One argument is that those who make LLMs have a high amount of control their output. It’s giving a lot of control of open source to the whims of those companies to become reliant on LLMs
Think about the potential for providers to add plausibly deniable backdoors, general lower quality code, etc. when they think you are working on a project they care about. The precedent is there with Anthropic publicly stating that Fable was built to intentional sabotage quality when they think you are working on AI research related tasks or distillation. That kind of stuff can be subtly baked into open models as well
tools shape our perception of the world, and in turn us. neutrality is tacit approval. when a fascist company develops a technology, and some people say “we don’t want technology developed by fascists”, the “compromise” position is “you could have some technology developed by fascists”
if you look into operation paperclip and all the politics following that, you’ll see that there was a ton of pushback. the german scientists were literal nazis, but in the worst way; they were the compromising kind. only that the compromise was between “kill people” and “don’t kill people”, so the result was “kill some people”. and living in that environment changes your perception of the world. as the song goes, “once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? that’s not my department” says wehrner von braun
“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”
Over the past 5 years or so, I have really come to despise the phrase “just a tool”.
Honestly “just a tool” is the same as “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. The phrase frames the context as if EVERY tool can have plenty of reasonable non-destructive purposes.
Tell us more. Your ideas sound unique.
Go fuck yourself with your tired, “bUt WhAt aBoUt VaCciNeS,” argument.