somehow "nuanced" AI takes are just pro-AI takes in damp gauze

[anghraine]

No doubt this merely reflects my own bourgeois morality or whatever the fuck, but I have absolutely zero tolerance for every single post that's like "the only problem with AI is capitalism and you're all just Luddites about it, the measurable environmental harm is NBD, and also data scraping from people without permission, acknowledgment, or recompense is fine actually."

They keep trying to obscure their basic argument that scraping art without credit of any kind to the artists is totally cool by plastering it over with Marx quotes and a lot of buzzwords about communism, neoliberalism, corporations, etc. But let's be real: this is bullshit sophistry. Data scraping without informing the people whose data is used, much less gaining their consent, much less recompensing them in any way at all, much less enough to compensate for this process's profound disrespect for their skills and professions, is unethical. It would be unethical in a communist utopia and it is worse in reality. AI is not bad in any and all cases, but the ways it is being trained and used are wrong, and extremely so, and the environmental harm is both significant and intrusive, which is also bad.

Yes, people are prone to jumping to extreme hyperbole about it, or believing said hyperbole, because of the Internet's usual habits and because various forms of "AI" are being imposed on people in a particularly obnoxious way and because the data scraping is genuinely super shitty and because being forced into extremely reluctant complicity with something that harms the noticeably worsening world around us is deeply frustrating. But the AI techbros' practices really are unethical and the idea that you can rationalize and deconstruct and obfuscate this to the point where every moral failing in the world is either a) a problem entirely reducible to capitalism or b) not a problem is beyond absurd, and in some ways, beyond contemptible.

Comments

[dragoness_e]

Given that data scraping for training fodder requires making copies of the data in question, I think some tech companies have left themselves wide open to very large criminal copyright infringement lawsuits.

[anghraine]

It does seem likely to be super illegal! I kind of wonder if part of the reason they're trying to shove it down everyone's throats (and make us participatory in their own lack of ethics despite how much many users dislike the intrusiveness of all this half-baked glorified autocomplete...) is to get away with as much as possible before geriatric lawmakers start regulating it.

[chestnut_pod]

I saw --was sent!-- an extremely irritating "rebuttal" post by a friend the other day which could go work in Washington for all the cherry-picking it did about environmental impact. It's in the news every day!

[anghraine]

I saw one on my dash from a friend and the OP's sophistry around the environmental impact and uhhh basic ethics and almost everyone nodding along was incredibly discouraging! Maybe we even saw the same post, lol.

[chestnut_pod]

I rather hope so; that would mean there's just the one!

[anghraine]

I'm pretty sure there isn't just one, unfortunately! I've seen multiple """nuanced""" AI takes that were just pro-AI takes in a mask, just with varying priorities.

[lotesse]

*applause*

[anghraine]

Thank you!!

God, today Facebook asked if I wanted to use AI to respond to my mother's post about her hospitalization and gratitude towards me and my best friend for helping so much. >_