If AI is so great, why does it always seem to be on the side of fascism?

[torgo@mastodon.social]

If AI is so great, why does it always seem to be on the side of fascism? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yj97yd6v5o

[marijn@mastodon.social]

@torgo Don't ascribe it agency. It's not on any side, it's spitting out what it's asked to spit out. And the fascists are, unsurprisingly, the group most enthusiastic about the idea of automated lie machines.

[lily_and_frog@mastodon.art]

@torgo

Tells us much about those who think AI is great.

[isaackuo@spacey.space]

@torgo Quintessentially, it's because it is against the side of truth, and truth has a well known anti-fascist bias.

Perhaps the most important consequence of this is that the people developing and owning big money scam AI garbage tend to be anti-truth, and thus tend to NOT be anti-fascist. And thus, tend to be fascist themselves.

Not that there are lots of billionaire techbros that aren't fascist garbage already.

[troglobit@fosstodon.org]

@torgo is not great, obviously. But allow me to point out an obvious little thing here – just about any technology can be used for evil. This has been a fact since the invention of fire, or the wheel.

[apples_and_pears@mastodon.world]

@torgo Foretelling the US what to expect as the November election nears.

[bluewaver22@genomic.social]

@torgo Because the literal tech bro fascists trained it?

[mensrea@freeradical.zone]

@torgo but don't you know, that's what's so great about it. when your project is to destroy democracy having a tool to 10x the fash is really handy

[crazyeddie@mastodon.social]

@torgo Two symptoms of lazy thinking?

Fascism, and having AI do everything for you being two things lazy thinkers tend toward.

[scaletheory@mastodon.social]

@torgo

AI and alternative reality from billionaires is really, extremely bad and needs to be rethought and regulated.
Regulations force bad people to do good for society.
Why else deregulate as they have? Bad people will always be bad until they're eliminated from doing harm.

[torgo@mastodon.social]

@dsp I was being overly broad, I grant you. And I do acknowledge that there are positive impact use cases for Gen-AI. But, when it comes to Gen-AI created images or video, I have yet to encounter such a use case, whereas there is a laundry list of use cases that are actively harmful to society.

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@dsp @torgo

of course you can use AI for good. but AI as it is is VC funded and plutocrat controlled

so it pushes plutocrat political and economic agendas to our detriment

the issue is not that we don't recognize the positive potential of a technology. every technology *can* have a positive impact, that's braindead obvious and thus without merit as an observation

the problem is you don't acknowledge the bulk of AI is used for bigotry and fascism

until that changes, like crypto, AI is shit

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@troglobit @torgo

of course but the bulk of AI out of the gate is plutocrat political and economic agendas

so the theoretical observation that any technology can be used for good or evil has no meaning

the realistic observation is that AI as it exists today is a plutocrat tool to our detriment

until that changes, AI is shit

ignoring the reality to allude to some theoretical possibility is not accurate

[mycotropic@beige.party]

@marijn @torgo

I'd say also that fascism is baked into LLMs not by design or bad faith programming, rather by the basic nature of a neural network/LLM. It's designed to summarize, simplify and return generalizations based on weights. Semantic ablation is a feature not a bug and fascism is an intrinsically simplistic way to classify; us/them, good/bad, right/wrong it fits in perfectly with simplifying and summarizing.

[chemicaleyeguy@mstdn.science]

@torgo #AI is #clankers all the way down. Which is exactly why #fascist #wankers love it *so much*!

[troglobit@fosstodon.org]

@benroyce wow, that’s a very black or white attitude. Although I’m on your side ideologically, I’m thankful it’s not people like yourself that brought us out of the dark ages.

AI is useful and it’s a tool like anything else. Yes, we’ve tried to abolish and stop people from using and even knowing about science and tools before. Remember what happened? We learned that it’s the ideas and values that make us what we are.

@torgo

[dpetravick@mastodon.social]

@torgo I e used a couple of AI engines, it’s useful but they all spend time re enforcing what ever you asked as “great”. I find it a smarmy.

[mycotropic@beige.party]

@SCALETHEORY @torgo

That's a reagan thing across my 60 years. He gave speeches accusing the government of pretty much criminal inefficiency and framed it as misuse of tax dollars. People bought it and didn't mind when they were made less safe by cutting the workforce and deregulation. Conservatives, who by nature didn't trust any government other than the local one, latched onto the mantra that deregulation and less federal oversight improved the public sector since "capitalism always arrives at an efficient use of money" and #Trickledown was born.
Of course the reality is that Well Regulated Capitalism can be manipulated into actually helping people while the fucking wild wild West of Unregulated Capitalism only benefits the capitalist personally. Especially when you maximize the system for sociopathic behavior which brought us the Robber Barons, Musk, Gates and Bezos. Wealth doesn't trickle down, it accumulates. That's all.

[lordcaramac@discordian.social]

@Lily_and_frog @torgo I absolutely love AI as a research field in CS, but I despise the AI business. Capitalism in general is just a cancer of the economy which is killing our civilisation, fascism is just what capitalism turns to when a significant number of the rich have outgrown liberal democracy and want to rule the world without facing personal consequences, and businesses always use automation where the human workers are too expensive or too fickle and unruly. Automating the production of propaganda is a huge step forward for all the authoritarian systems in the world, but the technology itself is just that, technology. You can use a hammer to drive a nail into a plank, but you can also use it to nail a man to a piece of wood and let him hang there until he dies.
Besides, what's marketed as "AI" is but a tiny sliver of actual AI R&D. It's all just Deep Learning, the most popular incarnation of Machine Learning, and even then mostly four kinds of models: Diffusion models (mostly for image generators, but sometimes also for 3D objects or sounds), transformers (LLMs, chatbots, agents), GANs, world models (video generators, self-driving cars). Much of it isn't really ready for production but is being pushed anyway because the investors have sunk so much money into it all that they need to see some returns.

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@troglobit @torgo

joachim:

you're not stupid. you understand the bulk of AI is plutocrat controlled and malicious in intent

you can castigate me all you want. for the crime of what? understanding the real problem?

all that is revealed is that your naivete or willful dishonesty about the dominant problem with AI is profound

why would you do that? do you think people can't see what you're doing? that's embarrassing. do you not see what you're doing? that's far more embarrassing