Wow, strugglesession.net is having a moment over this one.
Edit to add: They’ve removed the post. https://hexbear.net/modlog/73?actionType=ModRemovePost
Western leftists continuously struggle with the need to distance themselves from the barbaric society they grew up in and too often get tripped up in “distance as abstention” rather than “distance as revolution”. The “master’s tools” are, by this mindset, evil because the master uses them, rather than because of how the master uses them. So we get a sort of symbolic, rather than material, resistance. Waging resistance largely in symbolism, in “discourse” removed from praxis; praxis is dirty, flawed, with warts and all. And every time the warts show, it is only used as further evidence that the barbarism can only be resisted in the realm of symbolism, that anything too close to the dirt will have a corrupting influence and replace one barbarian with another. A paradigm that hinges, in part, on the imperialist-pedaled lies that AES states were and are an abject failure, that they are corrupted rather than flawed, lost rather than transitioning, and that better is only possible through a sort of ideological purification in the “marketplace of ideas”.
A+ post. There are hundreds of examples of this, but I’m reminded of the anarchist blanket rejection of cops, intelligence services, armies, borders, structured organization… no, proletarian states absolutely need all of these things to survive, but the way they function in a communist society is completely different, because they serve workers, and not capital.
People who grew up in capitalist countries have never seen how these things can manifest themselves in positive and healthy ways, so they ignorantly denounce their communist equivalents.
Well said. I remember getting caught up some in the ACAB type stuff myself in my initial transition to lefty politics. And although I’d probably still agree with it in the context of the US and the way its system operates / has operated, it’s not universally applicable and a system that was going to try to replace the US in the region would need something like cops still (but actually serving the workers, like you say).
They also have no solution to the supposed problems, just “don’t use it” and crybullying people who disagree with you into agreeing. I guess I should just ignore what China is doing with it and pretend like Hollywood sci-fi movies were documentaries.
There definitely appears to be a kind of tunnel-visioning that can go into it. Like there are valid criticisms of the way the west approaches AI and how that approach embodies, or even accelerates, capitalist tendencies. But ecological destruction didn’t start with AI, that has been going on for decades at least. Replacing workers via automation didn’t start with AI, that has been going on for… what, centuries?
If AI can be a wakeup call for some people, that helps them reach class consciousness, then great. But if they stop at “AI bad, boycott it, shame, shame, shame” and don’t go beyond that, it’s not really helping the working class.
In the storied history of the exploiting classes and their abuses and barbarism, AI’s abuses are tame, honestly. If people had the same energy for anti-imperialism as they do for anti-AI, maybe liberation would be moving faster in the imperial core. But AI comes more directly for them in a way that imperialism doesn’t. For the people living under the shadow of empire, I don’t see the same kind of kneejerk response. Like Explosive Media that I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the Iranian group doing those anti-imperialist AI Lego videos. They are in an existential war for survival and they are taking advantage of the tools available to them. They know there’s no self-actualization for them within the imperial framework, no chance of “getting theirs” and living a quiet, safe white picket fence life. AI coming for jobs is nothing next to the terror of imperial bombs and the prospect of one’s homeland being turned into a graveyard just cause the empire is mad that a people won’t kneel.
tbf, probably shouldn’t train in certain methods of warfare the yankee reich possesses
unless we’re going to declare a protracted people’s war on ten year old girls of course
The method is sound though: missiles and drones. It’s the target that matters, the same method used by Iran to bomb US bases and troops hiding in hotels is cool. In context: we should use AI to produce propaganda aimed against imperialist, not their victims.
Also the quote comes from “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder” so it’s aimed exactly correctly even after over a century :D
i was referring to the method of warfare being terrorism, which the am*rican empire is good at, with the means being missiles and drones
it was mostly a joke about the quote, but i guess it didn’t landmy opinion on LLMs is that they’re a tool like any other
Well said. It’s difficult to even have a neutral opinion on AI without feeling like a pariah these days. I guess that’s just a microcosm of the political situation in Amerika where everything feels like tribalism.
Yeah, the fracturing is a screwy thing. To an extent, it’s something the exploiting classes manufactured and benefited from (along racial lines, gendered lines, and more). But by this point, it seems like it’s something of a runaway monster that has taken on a life of its own, probably in large part due to the empire being in decline, along with the vilification of an alternative (though I have some hope in the numbers sympathetic to socialism and communism, whether or not they all fully understand what it is).
It’s like there’s something of a “whose podcast do you listen to” thing now (figuratively speaking and sometimes, literally) where things can be fractured to the point of differing views based on which niche piece of media somebody ingests on a regular basis. Like the antithesis of people having a holistic worldview. It makes me think we really need more work done on dialectical materialism and making it easier for people to grasp it and apply it to organizing and worldview because that stuff really helps with a more holistic view. Even with my (I feel) elementary grasp of it, it is still a night and day difference vs. trying to understand the world through a lens of individualism and idealism.
You cooked.
Thanks. I’m sure I’m taking some inspiration there from Gabriel Rockhill, Jones Manoel, and others.
lmao they banned me for 30 days and then orlando@hexbear.net started harassing me privately after, some people on that instance are really unhinged
Part of why I moved to grad after being on hexbear from the beginning and wasting too much of my labor there as a mod. It’s mostly good comrades but the culture always seems to get absolutely dominated by a few vocal radlibs.
Better than most social media still, but Christ I wish you could force people to read theory and join an org (or maybe it’s good that these people are stuck polluting online communities and not wrecking IRL orgs)
Yeah, most people there are alright and genuinely nice, but there is a really toxic lib minority there that’s overly represented unfortunately. Grad being a Marxist space really helps filter that sort of thing out.
that orlando person was being extremely beligerent in that thread, I’m surprise you were the one who was banned.
That of itself says a lot about moderation on there. It’s also amusing how they couldn’t find a reason in the thread to ban me, so put it down as me having multiple accounts. Never mind the fact that my accounts predate federation and hexbear. It’s like yeah, I made two identical accounts seven years ago just for this moment. 🤣
deleted by creator
Hexbear has a crybully problem.
you can really tell Americans are well represented on that instance 🤣
No one ever can nor wants to
mailto:a fediverse user, so that’s a silly bug.haha I never even noticed, I guess markdown parser thinks it’s an email
I remember the Israhell burning flag debacle. Clique behavior is too common there.
Yeah that kind of stuff is pretty cringe.
Cringe is being diplomatic. Horrifying how supposed leftists had so little self interrogation that they had to “yelled” at after two years, and made to realize the flag of Israhell isn’t a holy symbol and its defilement not anti-jewish.
agreed
Oh hexbear
neverchange.
But it’s sLoP (another thought terminating cliché losing all meaning to become a word to describe things people don’t like, like woke)
Is it really a thought terminating cliche? It’s shorthand for the fact that LLMs and other gen “AI” produce hallucination ridden unoriginal output by their design. It’s a dead-end technology that cannot be relied upon for anything serious, everything it does must be verified in such a way to render the automation aspect useless. And the “art” aspect is insulting, there can be no message or human experience conveyed by a statistical average of real art.
It’s a dead-end technology that cannot be relied upon for anything serious
I’m sorry you are completely wrong. Do LLMs produce slop? Yes. Are LLMs useful? Also yes. The software industry, at least at the high end, is transforming rapidly because of this technology. The question of whether or not LLMs and other generative AI techniques along those lines are generally applicable is still an open one. But at least in some industries such as software it is certainly not a dead-end technology that cannot be relied upon for anything serious.
I work in tech and I develop software. LLMs generate code a lot faster than a human, but it is simply worse code; it is buggier, it is less secure, and it is less technically correct to the specifications. It takes more time to get that code up to snuff after the fact, especially given the verbose bloated code bases created by LLMs, than to write it by hand such that it was correct from the start. Also considering the real costs of running these things in such a way that you get any sort of “usable” result ends up costing more than having an engineer do it right, I stand by my point.
This may have been an accurate assessment 18 months ago, but it is not anymore. If you’re not getting good results out of the latest models it’s more of a you problem than a model problem at this point. And not to be completely rude here but at the level of people getting paid 7 figures USD to develop software LLMs are being widely used for basically all code. We need to move past this cope about their capabilities.
Sure, and thats why all of these companies have to force us to use this shit with quotas, mandatory tooling, and chiding about being 100x devs and being left behind. I’ve yet to meet an LLM booster in a senior technical position that actually handles code in any meaningful way. You can find plenty of execs making claims about it though. You’re just saying shit
I’ve been through it with this shit at my last two workplaces. People are willing to claim the output is solid because they can just keep running agents non stop to fix their issues and run a quick skim over the output, a bit of extra agentic use to run some tests and call it a day. They don’t care about code quality anymore, if it runs, ship it.
I’ve seen people ship a ton of features at once. 3 PRs in a day, 250 file changes. Just quick skim it, or even better, get a senior dev to run the diff through another agent and have that agent review the code because the senior is too overworked on reviewing slop he has to outsource his job too. Approve it.
And when it breaks we just cross our fingers because nobody knows how any of it works.
I am not just saying shit. I am telling you, as a person working for such a company, that this is real and this is happening. This is not executives talking shit. Although yes executives do talk a lot of shit and have unrealistic expectations. Coding was never really the slowest part of software development anyway.
everything it does must be verified in such a way to render the automation aspect useless.
While there’s no formal mathematical proof that P ≠ NP, all signs point it being so. Even if literally everything must be verified as you say, it still very often takes less time to verify a result than to generate it.
If my codebase needs to pass a manual code review which finds an endless slew of LLM hallucinations that need correcting, it adds an immense amount of time to the process to rectify them. And these tools create insanely long winded and bloated code bases so the review itself is much longer from the outset. We’re not talking about rigorous mathematical proofs, it’s much more akin to a smoke test, and even that is a huge burden to bear when using those tools such that I view them as useless from this caveat alone. And it’s basic best practice in the industry to perform these reviews, they are vital to quality results.
Even hobbyist software dev work would feel this impact. If you aren’t testing the functions an LLM writes you will be putting buggy work with major obvious edge cases and vulnerabilities out there. The tests they write for themselves are often incomplete, happy path, or plainly avoiding actual testing by just asserting true.
From seeing these shortcomings in a field where technical proof and automated testing is a possibility, I can only imagine the level of human review necessary on less quantitative work to ensure any sort of reliability or accuracy. They cannot be trusted as accurate or authoritative at any point in the chain. ML can be useful as statistics for fuzzy and approximate data, but that’s really where the usefulness ends
It doesn’t matter whether that specific use case is fruitful or not. I wasn’t making a case for it.
My point is that it doesn’t take less time to verify a result than to generate it. You can generate stuff all day but to verify it takes a lot more effort and tjme
This is true in some use cases and false in others. In the use case you presented, it is true.
And yet, I’ve gotten help from LLMs with code in two different ways: 1) Where I check everything at the door and manually write out or rewrite in my own words, only using the AI as an assistant for the method at most. 2) Where I don’t know enough in the language, so I go back and forth, trying a solution it gives me and then going back to it when corrections are needed.
2 is definitely more painful and I would probably be extra wary of using it in production business code and insist on review from someone who is literate in the language. BUT, there have been occasions where if I didn’t have 2 as an option, I may have never written the solution at all, or it would have taken me weeks or months of learning to get there. If I could be assured the “personal learning then completion” path would happen, that would lessen the value of 2, but being real, I cannot remotely guarantee it. Whether it’s a matter of time, motivation, etc., even someone who is already literate in some programming like myself, will not necessarily find it easy to learn every new language, library, etc., or always find it to be a motivating pursuit worth doing.
In other words, sometimes we are not talking about space-faring code and we’re talking about whether something with largely trivial consequences for mistakes, and a low friction path to fixing them, will ever get made at all. This is the kind of area where LLMs shine, since they don’t need to be without error, they just need to be “good enough” that it empowered somebody to make something that wouldn’t otherwise have gotten made.
there can be no message or human experience conveyed by a statistical average of real art.
Does a kid’s messy stick figure fridge drawing have a message and human experience conveyed? Or does it only mean something because the parents are proud of their kid for being able to do it at all?
Another way of looking at it is: Are Explosive Media’s Lego videos not conveying a message? AI not having the conscious will and worldview to actively choose to generate a specific message does not prevent humans from using AI generation as a means of helping them construct a message. The idea that AI is bad for crafting a specific message is a point that has become harder to defend over time, the better AI gen has gotten at listening to highly specific prompting.
A lot of the “left” is really just petty bourgeois who long for the days of early-stage capitalism. They center their politics around being anti-monopoly and anti-big-tech and pro-small-business and the self-employed. They really just want “capitalism that works” rather than wanting to move beyond capitalism. AI has done more than any other technology to bring the contradictions between the capitalist mode of production and the regular working person to the forefront, by exposing the enormous disconnect between what regular people actually want and what the bourgeois wants, with this enormous all-encompassing technology progressing and being utilized in a way that is entirely out of touch of the common person. But, rather than recognize this disconnect stems from the disconnect between the material interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, people have instead begun to blame it on the technology itself. This is why Luddism is ultimately a form of liberalism, as their “goal” is to destroy the technology to return to an earlier stage of capitalism when the contradictions were not so apparent, and thus to prolong capitalism’s survival.
AI is going to in large part be the answer to scarcity. But yes, it’s imperative that the working class take control of its usage and development
AI is going to in large part be the answer to scarcity
How?
Edit: Read the other comments in response to this and that answered my question.
I am incapable of approaching this subject in a mature way, so I’m just going to reference Wumpus World instead.
