This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The fun part, here, however, is that the swarm isn't fighting to keep one small person or group deplatformed and defunded.
They might have a shot at succeeding (for a while) if they were.
What they're doing is trying to hold back a technology that is:
A) Already out of the bottle; and
B) backed by billions of dollars and incredibly smart and motivated people at the end of the day.
So the task of preventing AI art from largely displacing human artists is just as doomed to failure as, say, trying to prevent BitTorrent software from allowing people to pirate movies. The new equilibrium is coming, but one can make a huge show of resisting it for a while.
If they want to have a ghost of a chance at success it's going to require levels of authoritarianism that would at least require them to go full mask-off.
I can already smell the grifts from here. On the other hand, these people might actually believe this tech is an existential threat to their careers. And they might be right.
This is actually concerning to me. Google's OpenAI and the like are happy to bow before the AI Safety crowd (the 'no racist chatbots' ones, not the 'no paperclip apocalypse' ones) so long as they can still make a gorillion dollars off the technology, and that means they really have no interest in allowing the existence of seedy AI applications like porn generators. That just brings bad PR to the whole field, for literally zero benefit. (Google isnt going to be entering the smut market anytime soon) Thus I worry that we're seeing the begginimgs of another unholy alliance between the progressive left & big money, nominally in the name of moral puritanism but with the real purpose of shoving the AI cat back in the SaaS bag.
I'd not worry too much, since as mentioned people can still use BitTorrent to download movies despite there being billions of dollars going into creating such movies.
Probably, but not for any reasons that are unique to AI, I think.
I wonder if a better example is 3D printed weapons - the full might of the state is cracking down on them, yet it's still possible. BitTorrent is technically simple, there's no capital cost AFAIK. Models need to be trained, expensively.
But trained models are not so hard to distribute and I'm not sure it is trivial to detect when someone is in the act of training a model, there's just so much compute in the world.
So go after general-purpose GPUs. We're already deploying more and more DRM tech everywhere, and AI/ML loads look sufficiently different from graphics ones that it should actually be quite easy to force (or coordinate) GPUs to require a signature with a key stewarded by Microsoft (like with UEFI) before they load and evaluate anything that looks like an ML model.
Training the latest models already requires something that is far from consumer-grade.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link