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On one hand, many things that you think are “AI” are actually humans in another country pretending to be an AI chatbot
Since your target audience appears to be developers and software engineers, have there been any reported cases of human “AI” coding chat bots?
You know that would be a really great scam. Perfect way to get access to people’s computers
Most of these arguments are conflating AI with the people using them.
Labor exploitation, scraping without consent, military contracts, surveillance policing, grid strain and hardware prices driven up by speculation are real harms. But none of them are properties of a statistical language model.
They come from concentrated capital and state power, and whatever technology arrives next will get used the same way.
Just like we’ve seen everything in your list, done by the same people, using different technology.
We have had hardware speculation during the crypto craze.
These same companies (Google) have been taking your data without consent to power their surveillance advertising.
Datacenters have always been power and water hungry, the ones powering LLMs are exactly the same ones that exactly the same companies have been building since the Internet began.
Essentially every major advance in technology has been used for state surveillance and in the military. AI is simply the latest capability.
Models reproducing licensed code, poor code quality and floods of junk contributions. These are real problems with the technology itself. And the solution to most of these things is to iterate, build better models trained on consentually obtained data.
Yes, you should still be mad at what the AI companies are doing. I am too. Just keep in mind that Google was evil before Gemini and will certainly be on the forefront of fuckery with whatever technology comes next as long as people keep getting tricked into misdirecting their anger onto the technology.
Unfortunately “AI,” and LLMs in general are, at present, wholly inseparable from the people who use them, and especially, (and more pressingly), the
peoplecorporations that make them. This is the reason I maintain my opposition to “AI” (and LLMs in general) despite machine learning as a field and LLMs as technology being truly fascinating, and having immense potential.In my ideal world the corporations pushing “AI” wouldn’t exist, the datasets and recipes would be open, and model training would be a community led effort with Folding@Home style distributed compute used for training, pretty much removing the viability of “AI” companies. Without “AI” companies pushing for adoption, strong social pushback can be used to reign in the slopification of the commons. With those two together (and likely many other smaller changes elsewhere) LLMs can be seen for what they really are and their real pros and cons evaluated.
But that world isn’t currently feasible, and probably won’t ever be. Neither is toppling even a single corrupt corporation on the level of Alphabet, or Microsoft. So all we can do is evaluate whether we consider certain software’s use of “AI”/LLMs is acceptable, and advocate for not using them. Which is why I think efforts like openslopware, and pages like this are a positive thing, even if I don’t necessarily agree with some of the specifics.
Putting “AI functionality”, i.e. the denoising models I developed that are included in Darktable in the same realm as LLM slop is an interesting choice.
I collected all of the training data myself and did all of the training on a university GPU (which is consumer grade, I plan on continuing the work on my own machine). Everything is open (research, data, code) and reproducible.
I’m curious what’s the ethical or other issue there.
Edit: I posted a discussion on their issue tracker: https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware/issues/1628 , of course it was closed right away and I was blocked from the repository and my response was deleted and they limited responses to contributors-only.
Looks like ethical AI is too sensitive of a subject for ethical-foss-admin.
I guess people have grown phobia for the word “AI”. Nobody even looks for the definition and use. Technically anything capable of computation/problem solving can be labeled as such, if we are willing to stretch the rules far enough. Even mechanical computers. But those are not in the spotlight right now.
Can the blind anti LLM jerk stop already it’s the same 2024 2025 arguments. Agentic coding has massively improved this year even local open source LLM’s are getting good
You talk about it being “blind” right under exhaustive list of reasons why.
The fact that these arguments appeared before doesn’t make them less true. Yes, the coding quality of LLMs has increased, and, notably, it stopped producing as many bugs all over the place, and even got to review bugs made by humans.
But it doesn’t remove all other issues from the table, namely:
- Issues of licensing and stolen code, potentially causing copyright problems which most open-source projects are poorly fit to resolve and may go down because of them
- Environmental impact of model training, huge data centers threatening water supplies, producing tons of e-waste, creating noise pollution, increasing power demand, including one from unclean sources at the critical point when we should reduce it as much as possible
- Deterioration in skill level of human coders and lack of avenues for juniors to learn to code properly, which is likely to stay as an essential thing to have
- Outside coding, there are many ethical issues around companies producing LLM models, as many have ties to the military and police, and are heavily misused to fuel fascist regimes
- And more.
Issues of licensing and stolen code, potentially causing copyright problems which most open-source projects are poorly fit to resolve and may go down because of them
What, we care about licenses and copyright now?
Big tech has stolen all code and now everything it “open source”. You’re not going to get into legal trouble for using LLM generated code there’s no precedent for that. The only ones getting sued are the big tech companies who stole the code.
Environmental impact of model training, huge data centers threatening water supplies, producing tons of e-waste, creating noise pollution, increasing power demand, including one from unclean sources at the critical point when we should reduce it as much as possible
Sure but that’s mostly them training a gazillion new models. You could ban models from providers that are doing all these things and thus promote more efficient models.
Deterioration in skill level of human coders and lack of avenues for juniors to learn to code properly, which is likely to stay as an essential thing to have
Valid but understanding architecture and delegating writing the code and especially tests is becoming much more important than just artisan writing it these days.
Outside coding, there are many ethical issues around companies producing LLM models, as many have ties to the military and police, and are heavily misused to fuel fascist regimes
Like I said there’s local models as well. China puts out plenty of great open weight stuff like GLM5.3 which will likely have to run in the cloud but it’s still open weight.
I see your point. I don’t think China-made local models are panacea by any means though, even through it’s good they try to make it more efficient instead of just throwing gazillions and watching the world burn. It is still a very massive, very problematic operation.
Running LLMs locally, especially considering the pace of development, is just going to distribute the e-waste issue and make parts availability even worse, as I doubt your average hardware would be busy around the clock as it is in data centers (and so we’ll need much more of it). It is better for some things (like privacy or reliability or screwing with incentives of those turning the economy and the world upside down for a quick grift), but it doesn’t solve the others.
As per legal aspects, time will be our judge. I’d love not to give a damn about copyright, but it still exists.
LLM’s can save tremendous time now. You see projects like C&C Generals running on a tablet, or Lego Racers on web which would require tonnes of manual labour and now they’re just a few LLM prompts. It’s gotten to the point these kind of projects which would have been multi-year undertakings in the past have become “unimpressive”
Yes they’re not perfect and they do make mistakes. That’s why understanding architecture is more important than ever. But manual coding is really becoming a thing of the past. Agentic coding progress over the last year has pretty much solidified that. It’s still not perfect but it’s really good now.
Any industry that throws billions of dollars into something will make progress and now that progress has been made there’s not much of a point in just resisting the tech itself. Therefore instead of pleading against all AI I believe it’s much better to plead for open weight or open source and efficient AI.
The problem is like with the Luddites that you don’t own the machine (AI) and the largest companies want to keep full control over them. It’s a problem with the system ruling you not with the technology itself.
The technology is undoubtedly good. All technologies are, if you ask me. The problem is about externalities, but they do matter and cannot be viewed separately.
Currently, as things stand, the development and, notably, use of the technology comes with a massive threat to several important areas. This is why many pieces of software that ban LLM contributions make a for now caveat.
Relying on it now, under current circumstances, is dangerous and damaging, even if sometimes it is a tremendous help. It may get better once we have truly efficient models and training, do not reinvent the wheel from scratch 20 times over, do not screw entire economy over it, put guardrails on the use of technology against people, and have a cheap, resource-efficient, and long-relevant hardware to run it. But we’re not there yet. We’re going to space with a gunpowder barrel here. Workable? I guess. Reasonable? No.
Stop trying to take performative outrage away from liberals, it’s literally their whole identity.
