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bruno
@bruno

Saying 'you don't hate AI, you hate capitalism' is like saying 'you don't hate nukes, you hate militarism'

I'm sorry but things like 1001 Nights, an 'AI-native game' currently being promoted-but-not-sold on Steam, are harmful. They are. It being someone's personal interest or student project or research doesn't alter this fact. I don't have 'discomfort' about it, I want it to be destroyed.

Unlike some people who talk about this, I have actual skin in the game. I have spent years building skills that a lot of people with money now want to replace with a shitty imitation. One person's idle curiosity is another person's existential threat. You can't normalize and legitimize GPT and expect me to care about why you're doing it.

Because capitalists view tools like GPT as a weapon to use against people like me.

Because the way the tool itself is built is profoundly unethical.

Because the people who are building the tool, or at least the leadership thereof, are ideologues of an insane right-wing death cult.

Because today's 'little experiments' are justifications and stalking horses for larger-scale destruction of people's livelihoods and the creative craft those livelihoods are built on.

Because you're an useful idiot and a mark, and the instant OpenAI thinks it doesn't need people like you it'll pull the plug on whatever API you're using and make it vastly too expensive to access for any indie team. How do you think this is going to go? Do you think they're going to subsidize you forever? Do you think OpenAI actually wants to be spending money running those servers so your cutesy little 'indie game' can keep running? Do you think water and electricity grow on trees?

You can't claim 'well, I'm not trying to make the world worse' while actively being subsidized by, and in turn promoting, an organization that absolutely is. You can't take free compute power from the fucking machine cult nazis and be like 'uwu i'm just a small bean engineer pursuing things that seem interesting to me'.

So my reaction to people involved with these projects is: Okay, cool. You think your special interest matters more than my life.

I don't think it's smart or nuanced to pretend like this isn't the case. I'm not interested in passively ignoring and enabling as more and more people in the industry decide to compromise on this. I see 1001 Nights has a bunch of festival and event seals on their Steam page. I think those event organizers fucked up profoundly.

The creators of projects like these have no doubt been told some version of this argument many, many times. But they don't care. They care more about... what, exactly? What is a project like 1001 Nights meant to demonstrate or prove? What are you trying to learn?

Because it feels very much like the end goal is to demonstrate that you can use chatGPT to substitute for hiring writers. Which is to say: fuck you, buddy.

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in reply to @bruno's post:

spineflu
@spineflu

100%, AND, they're a funnel. they're designed to get idealists who think its neat to work on the little game projects in the door, but not pay them a high enough grad student stipend to thrive, all the while dangling the position that makes better AI drone targeting systems outside their window at night waiting for their ethical resolve to falter, waiting for them to realize they can buy personal comfort.

or, they get the tenure track AI job and launder sentiment and try to stoke that idealism in their students, in which case they're a funnel for a funnel.

https://cohost.org/voidbrood/post/5926433-empty#comment-23227647-4cad-430d-8333-e3e40637b1ce
one of the commenters on that post got it right

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mtrc
@mtrc

I don't disagree with most of what you're saying here FWIW. My point wasn't that 1001 Nights is okay - I basically say I feel similarly to you about it - more that most objections to it don't actually engage with what they find bad about it. Which leads to people making entirely vibes-based calls on what they feel is "good AI" and "bad AI", and completely disengaging with the politics and economics of the problems behind it. You obviously know a lot about this and have engaged with it a lot. But that's not what I see in the broader audience.

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dog
@dog

Seeing 1001 Nights make it into a "real" gaming event is also, like... people are just allowing themselves to be wowed by technology with zero regard for anything else? The human-developed portions of 1001 Nights are weak, with middling graphics, a cliched plot, extremely shallow gameplay. There's nothing to it but a tech demo of the AI technology which serves to do... nothing? Create a low-quality game that, as a game, is easily weaker than anything else in the event? Do we believe it deserves a place in an event like this because it's using AI?

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Lexie-Plays-Fast
@Lexie-Plays-Fast

The species of tech bro that tries to jam AI into everything, whether it makes sense or not, just as he tried jamming NFTs or blockchain into everything, whether it makes sense or not, has been around for A While.

And they always seem to serve the interests of keeping something potentially technologically interesting but incredibly ruinous around.

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sudo-sanauu
@sudo-sanauu

Yeah. If Chat GPT is the nuke then that seems like a reasonable comparison: a technology made in a harmful way with easy destructive capabilities and only extremely dubious positive ones.

I'm not sure that image classifiers are nukes. There are many ways that they can help the world. That doesn't mean that the ones that exist now are helping the world, but for image classifiers I hate capitalism, not the tech or the object itself in the same way.

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toad
@toad

plus nukes imply global cataclysm — thousands dead, millions with cancer, rapid ecosystem collapse, etc., whereas the consequences of AI seem largely to be, according to the criticisms i see most frequently: some white collar workers and artisans might need to make a career change a few years down the line, and consumer goods will probably get a little worse.

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toad
@toad

this is also true of streaming video, cloud storage, video games, the internet in general, but i feel like these things aren’t similarly being presented as harbingers of catastrophe because they don’t threaten the livelihoods of the handful of artists loudly decrying AI, who have become so central to the conversation around it.

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antijingoist
@antijingoist

Holy shit, way to be dismissive.

  1. you're comparing ants to skyscrapers in terms of usage. Non AI datacenter energy usage was 1% of the total usage, but AI (in this response, LLM) datacenters are growing towards 300%.

  2. Even if no artists loudly decried AI, almost all efforts have trained their AI's by stealing people's work, mixing it in a blender, and spitting it out without providing credit.

  3. It's not a handful of artist loudly decrying usage. It's a lot of fucking people. I'd suggest you look into this more before defending it, but I suspect you have an idea you are wrong.

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