I am engaging with this, because I want to believe Lemmy can be better than Reddit.

That being said, while I agree that LLMs and diffusion models should never touch anything close to art, anything that is life or death and anything legal or financial, it’s important to remember, AI is an entire subfield of research in Computer Science, its many decades old and encompasses so many technologies that I could not even name them all.

LLMs and diffusion models are two of its many impressive achievements, we literally solved the natural language processing problem. It took us like 70 years, and because some silicon valley ghouls’ rhetoric, we get (supposedly) well meaning people talking like Luddites.

Fundamentally correct, there is a machine now that can replace some workers, but technology isn’t the problem, the capitalists are. This technology can make so many people’s lives easier, so many things better and it doesn’t need to be expensive or cause harm to the planet, because all of that is a fundamental problem with capitalism, this is not leaded gasoline.

It pains me, when I was entering my teenage years, I had two paths, physics or computer science, for a while I focused on both and in the end, economic pressure along with AI research pushed me into CS.

Now I get to watch decades of research, millions of man hours get trashed on the internet because a few rich ghouls from silicone valley gave it the last push and claimed it as their own.

The Swiss have relentlessly been working on ethically trained models with data willfully contributed and borrowed from the public donain, but we never get to talk about it, or the fact that China’s frontier level models are democratizing what the Americans stole, they didn’t do it out of kindness, but it regardless, gave us back part of what was stolen.

I appreciate you chiming in, it’s nice to see level headed folk.

You’re the exact type of intellectual black hole that poisons any amount of productive discussion on the topic, moral absolutism runs rampant everywhere, but especially on this platform, people love pretending they are better than reddit, Twitter, or w/e. but it’s equally impossible to have any nuance.

Shameful display. Pathetic.

The comment above yours and people who use the same arguments are clearly uneducated on the matter.

Not everyone is spending untold thousands on Claude or GPT models. People still own hardware, that they can use to run frontier models. Most open source contributors don’t have the kind of money these out of touch people think we do. I can’t even justify a subscription to either of those companies and I know I’d make good use of it.

We donate our time to these projects, and with that, our knowledge and skill. The problem is, time is finite amd these moral crusaders don’t even drop a cent to these projects, much less a weekend. The use of LLMs is purely to save time. Some things would never get done without the time compression on offer, but because they need life to be black and white, none of the good that could ever come can be justified.