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I'm not a fan of this hyper aggressive line-in-the-sand argumentation about AI that pushes it all precariously close to culture war shenanigans. If you don't li

I'm not a fan of this hyper aggressive line-in-the-sand argumentation about AI that pushes it all precariously close to culture war shenanigans. If you don't like a new technology that is perfectly cool and your right to an opinion. Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. That is NOT at all clear, settled, or even correct much of the time. I'm open to that conversation and debate, but diatribes like this make it far too black-and-white with "good" people and "bad" people.

omnimus 3y ago
Are We the Baddies?
logicprog 3y ago
The idea that machine learning like large language models and image generating systems exploit labor might be up for debate, but the fact that they are disproportionately damaging to the environment compared to the alternatives is certainly true in the same way that it's true for Bitcoin mining. And there's more than just those two aspects to consider, it's also very much worth considering how the widespread use of such technologies and the integration of them into our economy might change our political, social, and economic landscape, and whether those changes would be good or bad or worth the downsides. I think it's perfectly valid to decide that an emerging technology is not worth the negative changes it will make in society or the downsides that it will bring with it, and reject its use, technological progress is not necessarily inevitable in the way that every new technology must become widespread.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  how's it more damaging to the environment of you can replace 1k people, that's 1k people staying at home instead of commuting, sure that causes pain if we can't figure out ubi or a way to house and feed the masses, also many of the biggest ai users are working to get their energy 100 percent from solar, wind, and geothermal. AI is something we've been heading towards since the dawn of man. Hell, ancient Rome had automatons. There's no way to stop it. Ideally we merge with the ai to become something else than give it super powers and it decides to destroy us. I'm not sure the benevolent care giver of humanity is something we can hope for. It's a scary but interesting future, but I mean we've also got major problems like cancer, global warming, etc, and ai is a killer researcher, that did 300k years worth of human research hours in a month to find tons of materials that can possibly be used by industry. They're doing similar with medicine, etc... there's many pros and negatives, I'm a bit of an accelerationist, rip the band-aid off kind of guy, everyone dies someday I guess, not everyone can say they were killed by a Terminator, well at least not yet lol, tongue in cheek.
  - acuozzo 3y ago
    > I'm a bit of an accelerationist, rip the band-aid off kind of guy, everyone dies someday I guess Are you volunteering to go first?
  - logicprog 3y ago
    > how's it more damaging to the environment of you can replace 1k people, that's 1k people staying at home instead of commuting, Check my comment above, where I do some rough back of the napkin calculations around this. Training gpt4 for example produced around 6 billion times the carbon emissions a human emits in total in a year, which probably includes commuting, so unless gpt4 removes the commute time of probably a significant fraction more than 6 billion people (since it wouldn't be eliminating their emissions entirely, just their commuting emissions) it is a net loss. Also, we can eliminate commute emissions by having better public transportation and walkable/bikable cities, we don't need to prostrate ourselves before a dementia addled machine God to get there.
- handoflixue 3y ago
  > disproportionately damaging to the environment compared to the alternatives This is a new one to me. Do you have any source for that? Once a model is trained, it seems pretty obvious that it takes Dall-E vastly less to create an image than a trained artist. I have trouble believing the training costs are really so large as to change the equation back to favoring humans.
  - ulbu 3y ago
    It’s so ironic that you have this stance about the value of other people but you feel so humiliated by OP as to think they’re bullying.
    - handoflixue 3y ago
      I think you replied to the wrong post?
  - logicprog 3y ago
    I'm not sure your premise even makes any sense here, because it doesn't take an artist much more resources to produce art then it took them to just exist for the same amount of time. They're still just eating, sleeping, making basic usage of the computer, using heating and light, and so on either way. Whereas someone using dall-e is doing all of that plus relying on the immense training costs of the artificial intelligence. That basic usage of the computer in order to use the machine learning model might be shorter than the basic use of the computer to use procreate or something, but they'll still be using the computer for about the same amount of time anyway, because the time not spent not making art will just be shifted over to other things. So it doesn't seem to me like having machine learning models do something for you instead of learning a skill and doing it yourself will really decrease emissions or energy usage noticeably at all. Furthermore, even if there is some decrease in emissions using pre-trained machine learning models over using your own skills and labor, the energy costs of training a powerful machine learning model like you're thinking of are way higher than I think you are imagining. The energy and carbon emission cost of training even a 213M parameter transformer for 3.5 days is 626 times the cost of an average human existing for an entire year according to [this study](https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02243 https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02243). Does using a pre-trained machine learning model take that much emission out of people's lives? Or a day's worth out of 228,490 lives, perhaps? I doubt it. But we aren't even using such a small transformers anymore either — they actually aren't that useful. We're using massive models lile GPT-4, and pushing as hard as we can to scale models even further in a cargo cult faith that making them bigger will fundamentally qualitatively shift their capabilities at some point. So what does the emissions picture look like for GPT-4? The study above found that emissions costs scale linearly with number of parameters and tuning steps as well as training time, so we can make a back of the napkin estimate that GPT-4 is 8,592,480 times more expensive to train than the transformer used in the study, since it is rumored to have 1.76 trillion parameters versus the 213 million of the model in the study, and GPT-3 was said to take 3640 days to train (despite using insane amounts of simultaneous compute to scale the compute up in conjunction with the scale of the model) versus 3.5 days. This in turn means it is 5,378,892,480 times more expensive to train a GPT-4 than it is for a human to live for one year. And again, to reiterate, no matter what work the humans are doing, they're going to be living for around the same amount of time and using roughly the same amount of carbon emissions as long as they're not like taking cross country or transatlantic flights or something. So it's more expensive to train gpt4 then it is for almost 6 billion people to live for a year. I don't think it's taking a year's worth of emissions off of 6 billion people's lives by being slightly more convenient than having to type some things in or draw some art yourself. And there are only 8 billion people on the planet, so I don't think there's enough people to spread smaller gains out across to justify the training of this model (you'd have to take a days worth of emissions off of 1,963,295,755,200 people to offset that training cost!), especially since in my opinion the decrease in emissions of using machine learning models would necessarily be absolutely miniscule.
akira2501 3y ago
> Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. I don't think this article even remote attempts this claim. The closest it gets is suggesting that if these defenses are too much trouble for you, then perhaps your use case for AI wasn't great in the first place. > but diatribes like this How is this a diatribe? There's nothing bitter about the writing here, it's entirely couched within the realm of personal opinion, and is an unexpurgated sharing of that opinion. Please don't position your arguments so that if I want to share my opinion I have to defend myself from accusations that I'm being exceedingly bitter or somehow interfering with what you intend to do. You're effectively attempting to bully people out of their own opinions for the sake of your convenience.
- stolenmerch 3y ago
  > I don't think this article even remote attempts this claim. It's in the first sentence, "AI output is fundamentally derivative and exploitative (of content, labor and the environment)."
  - Joker_vD 3y ago
    Any fruit of any manufacturing labour is fundamentally derivative and exploitative: it needs raw materials from the environment, and it needs labour for the intended transformation; if anything, the AI output is less exploitative because the raw inputs don't end up destroyed in the process.
- handoflixue 3y ago
  > it's entirely couched within the realm of personal opinion "AI output is fundamentally derivative and exploitative" "If you want custom art, pay an artist." "Human recommendations will always be better." If you can't argue against any of those stances, what stances are up for debate? Surely the person you're responding to was just posting their own opinion, and you're as much a bully as they are?
- trashymctrash 3y ago
  > You're effectively attempting to bully people out of their own opinions for the sake of your convenience. Maybe it's just me, but "bully" seems like a very exaggerated choice of words here.
CuriousCosmic 3y ago
No you absolutely should have to defend yourself. Like the author, I don't want to touch anything you create that is produced with generative AI. The ONLY exception is if you can demonstrate that your model was trained solely on datasets of properly licensed works and that those licenses permit or are compatible with training/generation. But the issue is that overwhelmingly, people who use generative AI do not care about any of that and in practice no models are trained that way so it's not even worth mentioning that exception in this day and age.
rain_iwakura 3y ago
The issue is that without loud declaration like this money men will just soldier on with implementing shittier future. It's always do something first and then ask for forgiveness. But at the point you ask for it it's too late and too many eggs were broken. And somehow you're richer at the end of it all and thus, protected from any consequences. While everyone else is, forgive my French, fucked. Has Facebook been a net positive so far? Has twitter? You may make case for you YouTube, but what about Netflix? It's only been good to us (engineers) and our investor masters, but not for the 90% of the rest, which may I remind you is the distribution that created us in the first place. Sorry for being dramatic, but I do seriously think these things need to be reigned in, and especially people like Altman who while believing themselves to be good-willed (and I have no doubts that he is better man than Musk for example) end up being Robert Moseses' of our generation. That is someone with good intentions who ends up making things worse overall.
- throwaway295729 3y ago
  Why would YouTube or Netflix be a net negative?
  - rain_iwakura 3y ago
    I said YouTube isn't a net negative. Even then you have to think globally, what about children who grew up consuming AI generated abomination animations made with 0 oversight of even its greedy creators? Netflix was the cause for current slate of tax writeoff cancellations (no Netflix no overinvestment by Warner etc and no clumsy Zaslav cleanup), terrible shows being greenlit, homogeneity of camerawork, casting, identity-politics pandering that nobody asked for, oversaturation of the market with streaming services that is almost as bad as cable etc. It's basically a cancer overgrowth, good short-term and terrible long-term. Binge-tv model is also not a good thing, in terms of how much time it takes up, how little it brings in terms of pleasure and validates our growing impatience. I could go on and on. Does anyone even remember Mank or The Killer? Imagine Poor Things being Netflix-only release. Nobody would even say a single peep about it outside of niche film twitter accounts. Generally speaking, if you've read "Seeing Like a State", then you can apply the same logic to companies and the entire industries, or really any aspirations of "man". We crave control and fear uncertainty, so we make environments far more deterministic, which brings more short-term profit but ruins the environment (be it nature or film itself). Look at Disney, Iger created the superhero movie boom (by making it super deterministic and boring: every movie is part of a giant puzzle so that each piece brings money) but in the process killed Star vehicles, killed experimentation (by directors, actors), and now Scorsese and Coppola need to throw around their weight to reverse the course. Sure, A24 exists, but before this all movies were A24 movies essentially. Now a major star being in a horror movie is an "Event". (Who is even a star anymore? DiCaprio, Cruise? These people were around since 80s. You think Chris Evans will have the same longevity?) Yeah, there were similar periods of dominance (80s action movies) but they weren't so precisely fine-tuned and featured greater directorial freedom and less emphasis on being non-offensive. I guarantee you none of you will quote Avengers (Ultron onwards) in next 20 years. People still quote Terminator 2 or Predator or Lethal Weapon, despite them also being brainless flicks (some not so brainless actually). Look at Dr Strange 2, they forced Raimi to stop being Raimi basically (the first movie has some good moments), and made him fall in line with the "agenda", because the plan™ is too important to compromise on. In reality the plan™ is the money perputuum mobile lol. Sure, these people were always greedy, but stochasticity of the system allowed for good stuff to pass through their Eyes of Sauron lmao. Tbh I don't even know why I'm responding a "throwaway" account.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. You, personally, likely are not (apart from electricity use but that's iffy.) But the technology you want to use could not exist, and cannot continue to be improved, without those two things. That's not unclear in the slightest, that's just fact. > I'm open to that conversation and debate, but diatribes like this make it far too black-and-white with "good" people and "bad" people. I get that any person's natural response to feeling attacked to defend oneself. That's as natural as natural gets. But if shit tons of people are drawing the same line in the sand, no matter how ridiculous you might think it is, no matter how attacked you might feel, at some point, surely it's worth at least double checking that they don't actually have a point? If I absolutely steel-man all the pro-AI arguments I have seen, it is, at the very best: - Using shit tons of content as training data, be it written, visual, or audio/video, for a purpose it was not granted for by it's creators - Reliant on labor in the developing world that is paid nearly nothing to categorize and filter reams upon reams of data, some of which is the unprocessed bile of some of the worst corners of the Internet imaginable - Explicitly being created to displace other laborers in the developing and developed world for the financial advantage of people who are already rich That is, at best, a socially corrosive if extremely cool technology. It stands to benefit people who already benefit everywhere, at the direct and measurable cost of people who are already being exploited. I don't think you're a bad person for building whatever AI thing you are, for what it's worth. I think you're a person who probably sees cool new shit and wants to play with it, and who doesn't? That's how most of us got into this space. But as empathetic as I am to that, tons of people alongside you who are also championing this technology know exactly what they are doing, they know exactly who they are screwing over in the process, and they have said, to those people's faces, that they don't give a shit. That they will burn their ability to earn a living to the ground, to make themselves rich. So if you're prepared to stand with them and join them in their quest to do just that, then I don't think anyone is obligated to assuage your feelings about it.
- pseudo0 3y ago
  Your "steelman" is embarrassingly bad. Why play devil's advocate if you're going to do such a bad job of it? Here's an alternative: - As a form of fair use, models learn styles of art or writing the same way humans do - by seeing lots of examples. It is possible to create outputs that are very similar to existing works, just as a human painter could copy a famous painting. The issue there lies in the output, not the human/model. - Provide comfortable office jobs for people in economically underdeveloped countries, categorizing data to minimize harm for content moderators worldwide. One piece of training data for a model to filter harmful content can prevent hundreds/thousands of people from being exposed to similar harmful content in the future. - Reduces or eliminates unpleasant low-skill jobs in call centers, data entry, etc. - Creates new creative opportunities in music, video games, writing, and multimedia art by lowering the barriers to entry for creative works. For example, an indie video game developer on a shoestring budget could create their own assets, voice actors, etc. - Reduces carbon emissions by replacing hours of human labor with seconds of load on a GPU.
davidthewatson 3y ago
^^ THIS ^^ The middle road I've taken is that I use various consumer AI tools much the way I used the Macintosh or the Atari ST with MIDI when they showed up while I was in music school, as tools that may be used as augmentative technology to produce broader and deeper artistic output with different effort. There's something mystical and magical about relinquishing complete control by taking a declarative approach to tools that require all manner of technique and tomfoolery to achieve transcendent results. The jump from literate programming to metaprogramming to what we have in the autonomous spectrum is fascinating and worth the investment in time, assuming the output is artistic, creative, and philosophical. AI is not free, but the price being paid comes at the cost of creators trying to create safe technology usable by anyone of any age. Given the similarity to selling contraband, these AI tools need far more than just conditional guard rails to keep the kids out of the dark web... More like a surgeon general's warning with teeth. Bard and Bing should be treated as if they were Therac 25, because in the long run we may realize that like social media, the outcome is worse.
- cwillu 3y ago
  Please don't do “^^ this ^^”, comments are reordered here.
  - davidthewatson 3y ago
    Thanks for the reminder. I won't make that mistake again. I'm guessing the spatial affordance, for lack of a better phrase, of "^^this^^" arose with ephemeral comments on irc, but is clearly dependent on the message list being static, which is not true here; hence, the technique is out-of-place here. Good to know. Thanks again.
000ooo000 3y ago
>Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. Why should you be free of accountability for the effects of your actions?
- stolenmerch 3y ago
  Because the effects of my actions in this case have yet to be demonstrated, let alone shown to cause harm. The author claims there is expoititive harm to labor, the environment, and maybe others. That is not at all obvious or provably true yet. As I said, I'm open to the discussion, but I can't defend myself in good faith when people claim some slam dunk moral certitude. Again, don't use generative AI if it makes you feel bad, but there is absolutely nothing clear cut yet about this radically brand new technology.
  - quickslowdown 3y ago
    The flip side of that coin is brazen "ingenuity" with complete disregard for the consequences is just as bad as blindly declaring all AI is bad. We need people like the person writing this article so the starry eyed people who are too excited about AI and pushing it into everything are kept in check.
  - 000ooo000 3y ago
    >The author claims there is expoititive harm to labor [...]. That is not at all obvious or provably true yet. Not at all obvious? These models are trained on vast amounts of content, much of it copyrighted, and basically none of it licensed.
    - handoflixue 3y ago
      Human artists have been training on the same content for decades and no one seemed to complain. You can argue that machines should be held to a different set of legal and ethical standards, but it's certainly not obvious. Most factories are designed based on vast amounts of prior manual labor, so it's not like "automating a manual process based on analyzing existing methods" is new, either. Why is it okay to automate the knowledge of all those other craftsmen, but not that of painters?
godelski 3y ago
I'm with you, but I think it is a bit more complicated. I think a reason for a lot of pushback is because these systems are being over sold. A lot of tech over promises and under delivers. I'm not sure it is just an AI thing rather than the limit in which you can edge forward the amount of acceptable exaggeration. It definitely is frustrating that many things are presented as binary. But I think we can only resolve this if we dig a little deeper and try to understand the actual frustration that is being attempted to be communicated. Unfortunately a lot of communication breaks down in a global context as we can't be reliant on the many implicit priors that may be generally shared across different groups. Complaining is also the first step to critiquing, but I think you're right that we should encourage criticisms over complaints, but I think we can attempt to elicit critiques from complaints too, and that we should.
plorg 3y ago
This is a bad take, chief. You're not a smol bean. If someone is telling you that the technology you are using is harmful to many people and to society as a whole the least you could do is to make an argument that either those harms are not what is being claimed or that there are significant benefits that outweigh the harms. "Don't say it's bad, that makes me feel bad so we shouldn't talk about it" is both a weak and useless position.
boffinAudio 3y ago
ALL technology can be weaponized, and what you are sleep-walking into is an era where AI is easily weaponized against not just nation states or groups, but the individual. Either have this conversation now, or face the consequences when weaponized AI is so prevalent, you will have to dig a hole in the ocean to escape it ..
qgin 3y ago
There's a version of the future where AI actually takes larger and larger chunks of real work while humans move towards spending more and more of their time and energy on culture war activities.
worksonmine 3y ago
> Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. Can you please give me access to your private repositories? I'd like to se if there's anything useful there for me to sell. You shouldn't say no, at least I ask politely and use the magic words. It can only benefit humanity right? I'm not against crowdsourcing LLM models, but copyright is copyright. I say that as someone who pirates heavily, but I'm not a hypocrite about what I do.
StreetChief 3y ago
Your name is "stolenmerch"... I wonder if that colors your perspective at all.
xigoi 3y ago
> I'm not a fan of this hyper aggressive line-in-the-sand argumentation about fossil fuels that pushes it all precariously close to culture war shenanigans. If you don't like a new technology that is perfectly cool and your right to an opinion. Please don't position it so that if I want to use fossil fuels I have to defend myself from accusations of polluting the air and the environment.
- cwillu 3y ago
  I'm not sure what you think you did here, but juxtaposing climate change with copyright squabbles really brings out how much of a first-world-problem such squabbles really are.
  - xigoi 3y ago
    Are you going to pretend that the emissions caused by the enormous usage of energy by ML training and inference are not a thing? Also, I wouldn’t morally have a problem with AI companies violating copyright if they weren’t hypocritical about it and open-sourced their software. Anyways, the main message of the analogy is that you can’t just wave away the moral responsibility for the consequences of your actions. It wasn’t supposed to be a comparison of severity.
satisfice 3y ago
You should have to defend yourself if you are going to use this unreliable, untested, irresponsible technology. Everyone who wants to do things that completely ignore the reasonable concerns of their fellow citizens should feel some heat, at least.

omnimus 3y ago

Are We the Baddies?

logicprog 3y ago

The idea that machine learning like large language models and image generating systems exploit labor might be up for debate, but the fact that they are disproportionately damaging to the environment compared to the alternatives is certainly true in the same way that it's true for Bitcoin mining. And there's more than just those two aspects to consider, it's also very much worth considering how the widespread use of such technologies and the integration of them into our economy might change our political, social, and economic landscape, and whether those changes would be good or bad or worth the downsides. I think it's perfectly valid to decide that an emerging technology is not worth the negative changes it will make in society or the downsides that it will bring with it, and reject its use, technological progress is not necessarily inevitable in the way that every new technology must become widespread.

gremlinsinc 3y ago
how's it more damaging to the environment of you can replace 1k people, that's 1k people staying at home instead of commuting, sure that causes pain if we can't figure out ubi or a way to house and feed the masses, also many of the biggest ai users are working to get their energy 100 percent from solar, wind, and geothermal. AI is something we've been heading towards since the dawn of man. Hell, ancient Rome had automatons. There's no way to stop it. Ideally we merge with the ai to become something else than give it super powers and it decides to destroy us. I'm not sure the benevolent care giver of humanity is something we can hope for. It's a scary but interesting future, but I mean we've also got major problems like cancer, global warming, etc, and ai is a killer researcher, that did 300k years worth of human research hours in a month to find tons of materials that can possibly be used by industry. They're doing similar with medicine, etc... there's many pros and negatives, I'm a bit of an accelerationist, rip the band-aid off kind of guy, everyone dies someday I guess, not everyone can say they were killed by a Terminator, well at least not yet lol, tongue in cheek.
- acuozzo 3y ago
  > I'm a bit of an accelerationist, rip the band-aid off kind of guy, everyone dies someday I guess Are you volunteering to go first?
- logicprog 3y ago
  > how's it more damaging to the environment of you can replace 1k people, that's 1k people staying at home instead of commuting, Check my comment above, where I do some rough back of the napkin calculations around this. Training gpt4 for example produced around 6 billion times the carbon emissions a human emits in total in a year, which probably includes commuting, so unless gpt4 removes the commute time of probably a significant fraction more than 6 billion people (since it wouldn't be eliminating their emissions entirely, just their commuting emissions) it is a net loss. Also, we can eliminate commute emissions by having better public transportation and walkable/bikable cities, we don't need to prostrate ourselves before a dementia addled machine God to get there.
handoflixue 3y ago
> disproportionately damaging to the environment compared to the alternatives This is a new one to me. Do you have any source for that? Once a model is trained, it seems pretty obvious that it takes Dall-E vastly less to create an image than a trained artist. I have trouble believing the training costs are really so large as to change the equation back to favoring humans.
- ulbu 3y ago
  It’s so ironic that you have this stance about the value of other people but you feel so humiliated by OP as to think they’re bullying.
  - handoflixue 3y ago
    I think you replied to the wrong post?
- logicprog 3y ago
  I'm not sure your premise even makes any sense here, because it doesn't take an artist much more resources to produce art then it took them to just exist for the same amount of time. They're still just eating, sleeping, making basic usage of the computer, using heating and light, and so on either way. Whereas someone using dall-e is doing all of that plus relying on the immense training costs of the artificial intelligence. That basic usage of the computer in order to use the machine learning model might be shorter than the basic use of the computer to use procreate or something, but they'll still be using the computer for about the same amount of time anyway, because the time not spent not making art will just be shifted over to other things. So it doesn't seem to me like having machine learning models do something for you instead of learning a skill and doing it yourself will really decrease emissions or energy usage noticeably at all. Furthermore, even if there is some decrease in emissions using pre-trained machine learning models over using your own skills and labor, the energy costs of training a powerful machine learning model like you're thinking of are way higher than I think you are imagining. The energy and carbon emission cost of training even a 213M parameter transformer for 3.5 days is 626 times the cost of an average human existing for an entire year according to [this study](https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02243 https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02243). Does using a pre-trained machine learning model take that much emission out of people's lives? Or a day's worth out of 228,490 lives, perhaps? I doubt it. But we aren't even using such a small transformers anymore either — they actually aren't that useful. We're using massive models lile GPT-4, and pushing as hard as we can to scale models even further in a cargo cult faith that making them bigger will fundamentally qualitatively shift their capabilities at some point. So what does the emissions picture look like for GPT-4? The study above found that emissions costs scale linearly with number of parameters and tuning steps as well as training time, so we can make a back of the napkin estimate that GPT-4 is 8,592,480 times more expensive to train than the transformer used in the study, since it is rumored to have 1.76 trillion parameters versus the 213 million of the model in the study, and GPT-3 was said to take 3640 days to train (despite using insane amounts of simultaneous compute to scale the compute up in conjunction with the scale of the model) versus 3.5 days. This in turn means it is 5,378,892,480 times more expensive to train a GPT-4 than it is for a human to live for one year. And again, to reiterate, no matter what work the humans are doing, they're going to be living for around the same amount of time and using roughly the same amount of carbon emissions as long as they're not like taking cross country or transatlantic flights or something. So it's more expensive to train gpt4 then it is for almost 6 billion people to live for a year. I don't think it's taking a year's worth of emissions off of 6 billion people's lives by being slightly more convenient than having to type some things in or draw some art yourself. And there are only 8 billion people on the planet, so I don't think there's enough people to spread smaller gains out across to justify the training of this model (you'd have to take a days worth of emissions off of 1,963,295,755,200 people to offset that training cost!), especially since in my opinion the decrease in emissions of using machine learning models would necessarily be absolutely miniscule.

akira2501 3y ago

> Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. I don't think this article even remote attempts this claim. The closest it gets is suggesting that if these defenses are too much trouble for you, then perhaps your use case for AI wasn't great in the first place. > but diatribes like this How is this a diatribe? There's nothing bitter about the writing here, it's entirely couched within the realm of personal opinion, and is an unexpurgated sharing of that opinion. Please don't position your arguments so that if I want to share my opinion I have to defend myself from accusations that I'm being exceedingly bitter or somehow interfering with what you intend to do. You're effectively attempting to bully people out of their own opinions for the sake of your convenience.

stolenmerch 3y ago
> I don't think this article even remote attempts this claim. It's in the first sentence, "AI output is fundamentally derivative and exploitative (of content, labor and the environment)."
- Joker_vD 3y ago
  Any fruit of any manufacturing labour is fundamentally derivative and exploitative: it needs raw materials from the environment, and it needs labour for the intended transformation; if anything, the AI output is less exploitative because the raw inputs don't end up destroyed in the process.
handoflixue 3y ago
> it's entirely couched within the realm of personal opinion "AI output is fundamentally derivative and exploitative" "If you want custom art, pay an artist." "Human recommendations will always be better." If you can't argue against any of those stances, what stances are up for debate? Surely the person you're responding to was just posting their own opinion, and you're as much a bully as they are?
trashymctrash 3y ago
> You're effectively attempting to bully people out of their own opinions for the sake of your convenience. Maybe it's just me, but "bully" seems like a very exaggerated choice of words here.

CuriousCosmic 3y ago

No you absolutely should have to defend yourself. Like the author, I don't want to touch anything you create that is produced with generative AI. The ONLY exception is if you can demonstrate that your model was trained solely on datasets of properly licensed works and that those licenses permit or are compatible with training/generation. But the issue is that overwhelmingly, people who use generative AI do not care about any of that and in practice no models are trained that way so it's not even worth mentioning that exception in this day and age.

rain_iwakura 3y ago

The issue is that without loud declaration like this money men will just soldier on with implementing shittier future. It's always do something first and then ask for forgiveness. But at the point you ask for it it's too late and too many eggs were broken. And somehow you're richer at the end of it all and thus, protected from any consequences. While everyone else is, forgive my French, fucked. Has Facebook been a net positive so far? Has twitter? You may make case for you YouTube, but what about Netflix? It's only been good to us (engineers) and our investor masters, but not for the 90% of the rest, which may I remind you is the distribution that created us in the first place. Sorry for being dramatic, but I do seriously think these things need to be reigned in, and especially people like Altman who while believing themselves to be good-willed (and I have no doubts that he is better man than Musk for example) end up being Robert Moseses' of our generation. That is someone with good intentions who ends up making things worse overall.

throwaway295729 3y ago
Why would YouTube or Netflix be a net negative?
- rain_iwakura 3y ago
  I said YouTube isn't a net negative. Even then you have to think globally, what about children who grew up consuming AI generated abomination animations made with 0 oversight of even its greedy creators? Netflix was the cause for current slate of tax writeoff cancellations (no Netflix no overinvestment by Warner etc and no clumsy Zaslav cleanup), terrible shows being greenlit, homogeneity of camerawork, casting, identity-politics pandering that nobody asked for, oversaturation of the market with streaming services that is almost as bad as cable etc. It's basically a cancer overgrowth, good short-term and terrible long-term. Binge-tv model is also not a good thing, in terms of how much time it takes up, how little it brings in terms of pleasure and validates our growing impatience. I could go on and on. Does anyone even remember Mank or The Killer? Imagine Poor Things being Netflix-only release. Nobody would even say a single peep about it outside of niche film twitter accounts. Generally speaking, if you've read "Seeing Like a State", then you can apply the same logic to companies and the entire industries, or really any aspirations of "man". We crave control and fear uncertainty, so we make environments far more deterministic, which brings more short-term profit but ruins the environment (be it nature or film itself). Look at Disney, Iger created the superhero movie boom (by making it super deterministic and boring: every movie is part of a giant puzzle so that each piece brings money) but in the process killed Star vehicles, killed experimentation (by directors, actors), and now Scorsese and Coppola need to throw around their weight to reverse the course. Sure, A24 exists, but before this all movies were A24 movies essentially. Now a major star being in a horror movie is an "Event". (Who is even a star anymore? DiCaprio, Cruise? These people were around since 80s. You think Chris Evans will have the same longevity?) Yeah, there were similar periods of dominance (80s action movies) but they weren't so precisely fine-tuned and featured greater directorial freedom and less emphasis on being non-offensive. I guarantee you none of you will quote Avengers (Ultron onwards) in next 20 years. People still quote Terminator 2 or Predator or Lethal Weapon, despite them also being brainless flicks (some not so brainless actually). Look at Dr Strange 2, they forced Raimi to stop being Raimi basically (the first movie has some good moments), and made him fall in line with the "agenda", because the plan™ is too important to compromise on. In reality the plan™ is the money perputuum mobile lol. Sure, these people were always greedy, but stochasticity of the system allowed for good stuff to pass through their Eyes of Sauron lmao. Tbh I don't even know why I'm responding a "throwaway" account.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

> Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. You, personally, likely are not (apart from electricity use but that's iffy.) But the technology you want to use could not exist, and cannot continue to be improved, without those two things. That's not unclear in the slightest, that's just fact. > I'm open to that conversation and debate, but diatribes like this make it far too black-and-white with "good" people and "bad" people. I get that any person's natural response to feeling attacked to defend oneself. That's as natural as natural gets. But if shit tons of people are drawing the same line in the sand, no matter how ridiculous you might think it is, no matter how attacked you might feel, at some point, surely it's worth at least double checking that they don't actually have a point? If I absolutely steel-man all the pro-AI arguments I have seen, it is, at the very best: - Using shit tons of content as training data, be it written, visual, or audio/video, for a purpose it was not granted for by it's creators - Reliant on labor in the developing world that is paid nearly nothing to categorize and filter reams upon reams of data, some of which is the unprocessed bile of some of the worst corners of the Internet imaginable - Explicitly being created to displace other laborers in the developing and developed world for the financial advantage of people who are already rich That is, at best, a socially corrosive if extremely cool technology. It stands to benefit people who already benefit everywhere, at the direct and measurable cost of people who are already being exploited. I don't think you're a bad person for building whatever AI thing you are, for what it's worth. I think you're a person who probably sees cool new shit and wants to play with it, and who doesn't? That's how most of us got into this space. But as empathetic as I am to that, tons of people alongside you who are also championing this technology know exactly what they are doing, they know exactly who they are screwing over in the process, and they have said, to those people's faces, that they don't give a shit. That they will burn their ability to earn a living to the ground, to make themselves rich. So if you're prepared to stand with them and join them in their quest to do just that, then I don't think anyone is obligated to assuage your feelings about it.

pseudo0 3y ago
Your "steelman" is embarrassingly bad. Why play devil's advocate if you're going to do such a bad job of it? Here's an alternative: - As a form of fair use, models learn styles of art or writing the same way humans do - by seeing lots of examples. It is possible to create outputs that are very similar to existing works, just as a human painter could copy a famous painting. The issue there lies in the output, not the human/model. - Provide comfortable office jobs for people in economically underdeveloped countries, categorizing data to minimize harm for content moderators worldwide. One piece of training data for a model to filter harmful content can prevent hundreds/thousands of people from being exposed to similar harmful content in the future. - Reduces or eliminates unpleasant low-skill jobs in call centers, data entry, etc. - Creates new creative opportunities in music, video games, writing, and multimedia art by lowering the barriers to entry for creative works. For example, an indie video game developer on a shoestring budget could create their own assets, voice actors, etc. - Reduces carbon emissions by replacing hours of human labor with seconds of load on a GPU.

davidthewatson 3y ago

^^ THIS ^^ The middle road I've taken is that I use various consumer AI tools much the way I used the Macintosh or the Atari ST with MIDI when they showed up while I was in music school, as tools that may be used as augmentative technology to produce broader and deeper artistic output with different effort. There's something mystical and magical about relinquishing complete control by taking a declarative approach to tools that require all manner of technique and tomfoolery to achieve transcendent results. The jump from literate programming to metaprogramming to what we have in the autonomous spectrum is fascinating and worth the investment in time, assuming the output is artistic, creative, and philosophical. AI is not free, but the price being paid comes at the cost of creators trying to create safe technology usable by anyone of any age. Given the similarity to selling contraband, these AI tools need far more than just conditional guard rails to keep the kids out of the dark web... More like a surgeon general's warning with teeth. Bard and Bing should be treated as if they were Therac 25, because in the long run we may realize that like social media, the outcome is worse.

cwillu 3y ago
Please don't do “^^ this ^^”, comments are reordered here.
- davidthewatson 3y ago
  Thanks for the reminder. I won't make that mistake again. I'm guessing the spatial affordance, for lack of a better phrase, of "^^this^^" arose with ephemeral comments on irc, but is clearly dependent on the message list being static, which is not true here; hence, the technique is out-of-place here. Good to know. Thanks again.

000ooo000 3y ago

>Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. Why should you be free of accountability for the effects of your actions?

stolenmerch 3y ago
Because the effects of my actions in this case have yet to be demonstrated, let alone shown to cause harm. The author claims there is expoititive harm to labor, the environment, and maybe others. That is not at all obvious or provably true yet. As I said, I'm open to the discussion, but I can't defend myself in good faith when people claim some slam dunk moral certitude. Again, don't use generative AI if it makes you feel bad, but there is absolutely nothing clear cut yet about this radically brand new technology.
- quickslowdown 3y ago
  The flip side of that coin is brazen "ingenuity" with complete disregard for the consequences is just as bad as blindly declaring all AI is bad. We need people like the person writing this article so the starry eyed people who are too excited about AI and pushing it into everything are kept in check.
- 000ooo000 3y ago
  >The author claims there is expoititive harm to labor [...]. That is not at all obvious or provably true yet. Not at all obvious? These models are trained on vast amounts of content, much of it copyrighted, and basically none of it licensed.
  - handoflixue 3y ago
    Human artists have been training on the same content for decades and no one seemed to complain. You can argue that machines should be held to a different set of legal and ethical standards, but it's certainly not obvious. Most factories are designed based on vast amounts of prior manual labor, so it's not like "automating a manual process based on analyzing existing methods" is new, either. Why is it okay to automate the knowledge of all those other craftsmen, but not that of painters?

godelski 3y ago

I'm with you, but I think it is a bit more complicated. I think a reason for a lot of pushback is because these systems are being over sold. A lot of tech over promises and under delivers. I'm not sure it is just an AI thing rather than the limit in which you can edge forward the amount of acceptable exaggeration. It definitely is frustrating that many things are presented as binary. But I think we can only resolve this if we dig a little deeper and try to understand the actual frustration that is being attempted to be communicated. Unfortunately a lot of communication breaks down in a global context as we can't be reliant on the many implicit priors that may be generally shared across different groups. Complaining is also the first step to critiquing, but I think you're right that we should encourage criticisms over complaints, but I think we can attempt to elicit critiques from complaints too, and that we should.

plorg 3y ago

This is a bad take, chief. You're not a smol bean. If someone is telling you that the technology you are using is harmful to many people and to society as a whole the least you could do is to make an argument that either those harms are not what is being claimed or that there are significant benefits that outweigh the harms. "Don't say it's bad, that makes me feel bad so we shouldn't talk about it" is both a weak and useless position.

boffinAudio 3y ago

ALL technology can be weaponized, and what you are sleep-walking into is an era where AI is easily weaponized against not just nation states or groups, but the individual. Either have this conversation now, or face the consequences when weaponized AI is so prevalent, you will have to dig a hole in the ocean to escape it ..

qgin 3y ago

There's a version of the future where AI actually takes larger and larger chunks of real work while humans move towards spending more and more of their time and energy on culture war activities.

worksonmine 3y ago

> Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. Can you please give me access to your private repositories? I'd like to se if there's anything useful there for me to sell. You shouldn't say no, at least I ask politely and use the magic words. It can only benefit humanity right? I'm not against crowdsourcing LLM models, but copyright is copyright. I say that as someone who pirates heavily, but I'm not a hypocrite about what I do.

StreetChief 3y ago

Your name is "stolenmerch"... I wonder if that colors your perspective at all.

xigoi 3y ago

> I'm not a fan of this hyper aggressive line-in-the-sand argumentation about fossil fuels that pushes it all precariously close to culture war shenanigans. If you don't like a new technology that is perfectly cool and your right to an opinion. Please don't position it so that if I want to use fossil fuels I have to defend myself from accusations of polluting the air and the environment.

cwillu 3y ago
I'm not sure what you think you did here, but juxtaposing climate change with copyright squabbles really brings out how much of a first-world-problem such squabbles really are.
- xigoi 3y ago
  Are you going to pretend that the emissions caused by the enormous usage of energy by ML training and inference are not a thing? Also, I wouldn’t morally have a problem with AI companies violating copyright if they weren’t hypocritical about it and open-sourced their software. Anyways, the main message of the analogy is that you can’t just wave away the moral responsibility for the consequences of your actions. It wasn’t supposed to be a comparison of severity.

satisfice 3y ago

You should have to defend yourself if you are going to use this unreliable, untested, irresponsible technology. Everyone who wants to do things that completely ignore the reasonable concerns of their fellow citizens should feel some heat, at least.