In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture. Generative AI is (in most cases) just a fancy way for cooperations to steal art on a scale, that hasn’t been possible before. And then they use AI to fill the internet with slop and misinformation and actual artists are getting fired from their jobs, because the company replaces them with an AI, that was trained on their original art. Because of these reasons and some others, it just feels wrong to me, to be using AI in such a manner, when this community should be about inclusion and kindness. Wouldn’t it be much cooler, if we commissioned an actual artist for the banner or find a nice existing artwork (where the licence fits, of course)? I would love to hear your thoughts!

  • patatas@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    3 days ago

    Literally the only thing AI does is cause its users to cede autonomy. Its only function is to act as a (poor) facsimile of human cognitive processing and resultant output (edit: perhaps more accurate to say its function is to replace decision-making). This isn’t a hammer, it’s a political artifact, as Ali Alkhatib’s essay ‘Defining AI’ describes.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
      2·
      3 days ago

      AI is, quite literally, a tool that approximates an output based on its training and prompting. It isn’t a political artifact or anything metaphysical.

      • patatas@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        3 days ago

        AI is a process, a way of producing, it is not a tool. The assumptions baked into that process are political in nature.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
          1·
          3 days ago

          I really don’t follow, something like Deepseek is quite literally a program trained on inputs that spits out an output depending on prompts. It isn’t inherently political, in that its relation to production depends on the social role it plays. Again, a hammer isn’t always capital, it is if that’s the role it plays.

          • patatas@sh.itjust.works
            1·
            3 days ago

            And that social role is, at least in part, to advance the idea that communication and cognition can be replicated by statistically analyzing an enormous amount of input text, while ignoring the human and social context and conditions that actual communication takes place in. How can that not be considered political?

            • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
              1·
              3 days ago

              The social role of a tool depends on its relation to the overarching mode of production, it isn’t a static thing intrinsic to a tool. AI doesn’t care about advancing any ideas, it’s just a thing that exists, and its use is up to how humans use it. This seems to be all very idealist and not materialist of you.

              • patatas@sh.itjust.works
                1·
                2 days ago

                If I made a tool which literally said to you, out loud in a tinny computerised voice, “cognitive effort isn’t worth it, why are you bothering to try”, would it be fair to say it was putting forward the idea that cognitive effort isn’t worth it and why bother trying?

                If so, what’s the difference when that statement is implied by the functioning of the AI system?