"AI" isn't about finding God in Reddit posts (that kind of absurd storytelling is OpenAI's core product though). It's about putting pressure on labor, on wages, on workers. About putting pressure on _you_.

tldr.nettime

tante (@tante@tldr.nettime.org)

Attached: 1 image Not a better comment on what #AI is actually for than this image (found in a chat channel)

Not a better comment on what #AI is actually for than this image (found in a chat channel)

"it's easy to propose a solution if you only understand 10% of the problem" describes 80% of the innovation of the last decade

Mastodon

tef (@tef@mastodon.social)

@glyph total aside but programmers think "version numbers will fix this" despite twenty years of the user agent string proving otherwise it's eas...

"I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power." Exactly.

Ali Alkhatib: Defining AI

I do wish that in 2 years when the AI hype is done some people would do the apology tour. Because I surely would like some.

Some times I think about the wealth that those tech people have. The millions upon billions. And how obviously unhappy they are. How miserable. Like, if I had Zuckerberg money why would I spend a minute with Trump eating McDonalds or whatever? Why have all that money when you are still miserable?

Bloomberg on the new AI economy:

Bloomberg.com

ChatGPT’s $8 Trillion Birthday Gift to Big Tech

Two years in, generative AI’s value to the world is still unclear. But these charts show that it’s been a bonanza for the largest tech firms.

The interesting part is that stock values go up, hyperscaler usage goes up etc. But sill nobody can actually point to what all of that _is for_, what the _tangible benefits_ are for serious people or businesses. (I exclude slop production.)

Does anybody here know of an open source project that - while using a traditional license - enforces other social rules or makes political, ethical or social norms for the intended use of the project explicit and has any forms of consequences for disobedience? Think: "This project fundamentally disagrees with capitalism, Bug reports by Amazon employees will not be answered" or whatever social "contract" you can imagine. Not looking for projects that just say "please only use us in a certain way" but has some form of enforcement going that's not tied to licensing.

Here's the thing. Given its resource demands (hardware, power, data, data processing) "AI" (meaning the big models everyone loves these days) isn't doable without corporations and their exploitative practices. That's why I don't believe in AI as a liberating or publicly beneficial force.

People pretend that HuggingFace is this great open source community thing. But in the end it is a VC funded unprofitable thing that at some point needs to create a big return or die. You can use it right now on VC dime but don't rely on its continued existence as is. And don't believe in them being "the good folks".