Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All (potentially accidentally while scrolling).
Important notes:
- I donāt use scripts.
- I donāt mass-downvote Communities. If I see a post I generally donāt like when browsing All, I may downvote one post, block the Community and move on.
- Some of the communities I was banned from donāt have any posts in them so I wouldnāt have been able to downvote anything.
- Of all of these Communities, in my history I downvoted one post in one of them. Voting in this manner is not vote manipulation. Itās quite literally a feature of the platform and as a mod of another Community, I would consider it pretty good etiquette.
- One of my bans reads āAppeal Granted, not a brigading memberā but Iām still banned.
- I donāt troll.
WTF is going on here?
EDIT - Updated Info from the conversation below: In the initial image, you can see two āban waves.ā
The 10 bans three months ago stem from a single downvote in one Community. It was @Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477
I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.
The other bans from two months ago are from four total downvotes over a 10-month timeframe in one Community.
I have also stated in this thread that I donāt have issues with AI-gen images, but there are shoddy ones and well-done ones.
EDIT 2: Now unbanned from the ten Communities listed as ā3 months agoā in my initial image, but have been banned from three more because of this thread with the reason given being āself-proclaimed anti-AI brigaderā which are two things I didnāt claim to be. God dammit Lemmyā¦
Donāt know what to tell you. If you donāt see the issue with taking another personās labor and exploiting it for your own capital gain, then I donāt know why youāre even leftist. You sound more like an opportunist at that point.
Corporations are the problem because they are exploiting and stealing other peopleās generated labor for capital gain. If someone else is doing that, itās still bad, because thatās how corporations are started.
Youāre right, capitalism is a problem. Abolishing capitalism is more important than fighting progress in AI development. But we arenāt doing that. We arenāt there. So AIās current existence and commercial implementation is a net negative to society at large.
Itās like a farmer who has painstakingly grown a full crop, only for a random person to walk up with a magical tractor that duplicates the crop instantly, but in a way shittier and inferior way, and then is able to undercut the farmer by as much as they want because they basically have to perform no labor. And then the farmer is given the opportunity to āhealā the harvested crops, but you know. For a lot less. Since the other guy already did the āworkā.
And yeah, Iām not generally that worried about people with their own LLMs or whatever. But theyāre not exactly free tools. Not everyone has equal access to them. If we existed in a communist society where everyone has equal access to the AI, that would be different. But we arenāt. Like why are we even discussing this. āNo ethical consumption under capitalismā isnāt really valid here, because this isnāt consumption. Itās capital production generated from labor theft. Lmao. Can they be used responsibly? Yes. Are they? Largely, no! So whatās the problem? Capitalism, sure! Can we deal with that problem? Nope! Does that mean we canāt create regulative rules to protect laborers from having their labor stolen? No, we could definitely do something about that. Itās called IP laws. Are IP laws perfect? No. Do IP laws do more for individuals than for large corporations? I would guess not. Does it offer them more protection than if they didnāt exist at all? Yes. Could they be reworked? Probably.
Soā¦ whatās your point? Fuck trying to fix things, everyone just do whatever you want, itās the end of days, hopefully revolution comes on its own? Lol, whatever yo.
Original point: some people (didnāt say me) think itās immoral.
Secondary point: IP laws arenāt inherently immoral, they conceptually exist to protect laborers from having their labor exploited by people with more existing capital. They arenāt even good in their current implementation, but believing in some form of IP law under capitalism is essentially a socialist policy.
Third point: When most people think of AI, they think of corporate use. Literally no one gives a flying fuck about your personal models trained on your personal data, except for environmental activists. Who even then, generally begrudge corporations way more than the individual, but they are still technically right when speaking about the individualās personal impact as well. You can say they are ignorant and their position is nothing more than ācapitalism is the problemā, but boiling it down to that is reductive and makes you seem like an idiot trying to argue a black and white perspective. āWe absolutely have no reason to be critical of AI because capitalism exists. Capitalism is the problem, and therefore, AIās impact on exacerbating the problem is completely irrelevant.ā Lmao. Thatās your position. Thatās the position youāre trying to argue.
Fourth point: Itās more important to worry about where we are at than where we want to be. And look around. AI is a problem, and it needs regulation, and regulation of it includes protecting ACTUAL artists.
So capitalism, what Iāve been calling the problem this whole time?
Cool.
There it is!
Boy oh boy, I had no idea people profited from their posts on Lemmy. Clearly Iām missing out!
Ding ding ding!
Some are. Why arenāt you focused on helping those folks rather than complain about a symptom of the problem?
Just the commercial use, and how its been done.
How does that, in any way, relate to people making images and posting them to Lemmy? That some of them used a model that contained other peoples works? In what possible way does that relate to people posting their generated images to Lemmy?
You can download them and use them, there are a ton of resources out there, both with and without the materials youāre concerned a out, freely available and shared.
There is even a completely free AI horde available right here, with peoples donated resources. Thats about as accessible as it can be made.
My point is to focus on the actual problem, not be distracted by the latest method of exploitation. There is always another method, and focusing on just whatās in front letās more line up behind it.
And it always comes to this immorality being based in this point:
Soā¦ Capitalism
ā¦ Wut?
Yup.
Comments made across this post, as well as the mass down votes of AI communities, would absolutely disagree with you.
Since thats the entire subject here, seems like misplaced anger dont you think?
I agree that you canāt ignore things happening right now, but AI has not decimated the workforce. I even gave examples of people who do contracted creative work who explicitly said AI got them work because the work needed to be redone.
Ask any programmer how much they would trust an ai generated application. Let me know when you find one who says anything other than a wild laugh (that doesnt call themselves a vibe coder, pro tip, that is not a programmer).
And then let me know when you can tell me how any of this relates to people posting images to Lemmy.
I always thought the immoraility was not just about theft of labor. The environmental impact is where the real ethical problem comes in. Yes, a single person using their own LLM is a drop in the ocean of power usage, but if everyone used their own LLM, surely that would be even less efficient and more harmful than centralized data centres handling billions of queries (unless of course everyone is using sustainable energy sources).
Not really.
Those corporate LLMs are āeverything and the kitchen sinkā, tuned LLMs are much more efficient.
Now as Iāve said Iām not doing image generation, but I do run quite a few models at home for various purposes. I also have an excessive amount of hardware for my home lab, work, and for general stuff at home.
And yet when I get my power bill with the comparison to my neighbors, Iām lower than average. And I dont have large PVs on the roof or anything, I just use efficient hardware and the rest of my home is specific energy efficient choices.
I do have some pv supplementing, but thatās for some led lights I run for various purposes, connected to solar battery banks. We are going to move, so its not worth it to start a full PV setup here.
Now even without an efficient model, letās take a few more factors. Running a model at home its just responding to your query, no additional data or other processing required.
The corpo stuff though, they are looking at your identity and data, evaluating the question related to advertising and what can be sold to you, or who your information can best be sold to. This sort of stuff is adding on a ton of unnecessary garbage thats burning up cycles forā¦ No reason related to the LLM or other tooling, purely as a profit center at the expense of your privacy.
I pretty staunchly recommend against using corporate owned and run AI, it is detrimental to the environment. As are cars. As are large industrial efforts that sacrifice the environment (often ignoring regulations since the fines are lower than the profit they will make) for the sake of āline go up!ā
Capitalism is really bad for the environment.