Summary:
I downvoted pro-AI comments in a post in leftymemes community. It was LLM generated polandball comic (Which is objectively pathetic as fuck) that showed up on my feed, blocked couple of users who I thought were unhinged, and have blocked the whole instance on my client after realizing how rabid these morons are.
I didn’t go looking for AI posts like a vigilante.
One user in question got miffed for being downvoted and banned me from places they moderate.
LLM generated polandball comic
WHY
i literally just made one in like 5 minutes, and i didn’t even need a good or interesting idea. i put in the minimum amount of effort. they are literally balls with no mouth, nose or any other detail, just a circle, a flag and two eyes
AI bros aren’t logical, they’d rather put in no effort to have a machine barf out crap then claim they made it.
Thing is, as someone who has fooled around with locally hosted image gen, it’s actually sometimes a whole fucking lot of work to try and bend prompts to get the stupid algorithm to spit out what you want. They’d rather put in a shit tonne of effort for an objectively worse result.
That is also my thought. If you want to make AI generated content, which is going to cost the environment a ton (40 phone charges per prompt, people) and do prompt after prompt after prompt - then WHY would you waste all that time and pollution on a fucking gag comic that you could draw yourself in five minutes?
To me, that is peak retardation when it comes to AI fanboys. At least use that time and pollution on something worthwhile.
So your telling me that if I go downvote a bunch of stuff in one AI slop community someone will ban me from all of them for me and save me the work of blocking them all?
I complained about slop in the other thread and got banned from at least two, hopefully more. Only found out when I went to block a couple of communities someone linked.
I think I would be willing to pay for a lemmy experience that replaces ai slop posts with ads. Ads with autoplaying videos and sound. Ads that when accidentally clicked open the app store to some obvious malware. Anything that doesn’t kill one rainforest tree per post.
I can’t even imagine the mental gymnastics required to be both “pro-labor” and “pro-AI”. I mean, yeah I’m all about workers rights…but imagine how much money my boss could make if he just replaced us all with robots?
So in an ideal world we would have ai/robots doing labour jobs, while humans are free to do what they want and enjoy life without the wage slavery to survive…
But we do not live in such a world and instead, ai is doing all the creative fun bits and humans are loosing their jobs and not getting any support to live… 🙃
That’s a clear strawman, irrespective of how you feel about the topic. The pro-AI left position is that opposing AI is trying to futilely treat a symptom when one should be fixing the root cause of capitalist exploitation, or in other words: “All your problems with AI can be solved by overthrowing capitalism”. If you disagree then disagree with that position, not a strawman you made up.
All your problems with AI can be solved by overthrowing capitalism
Overthrow capitalism and then I’ll stop complaining about AI, then.
Your instance admin is a piece of shit if he would ban you for being Anti-AI.
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See, now you’re disagreeing with the actual position. If I cared to have this argument (which I don’t) we could now have an honest-ish conversation about the merits and demerits of opposing AI instead of a meaningless circlejerk.
It’s not really, because the “AI” people have gievances with in context is the LLMs that are being shoved down everyone’s throats by every silicon valley giant, with literal trillions of dollars invested in them. Very, very not left wing. I’m left wing - that money can be MUCH better spent elsewhere.
When people complain about AI evangelists they’re complaining about the people who fawn over the aforementioned tech giants, wholesale theft of training data, and enshittification of all platforms by AI slop - not ‘AI as a concept’, so in other words, you’re very much crafting a straw man of your own there.
When people complain about AI evangelists they’re complaining about the people who fawn over the aforementioned tech giants, wholesale theft of training data, and enshittification of all platforms by AI slop
Yeah these are bad things (well mostly, I don’t recognize intellectual property of any form as valid), but that’s irrelevant to my point. I wasn’t criticizing the anti-AI position; I was criticizing circlejerking by pretending the other side doesn’t have valid reasons to think what they think.
The pro-AI left
There is no such thing as “AI”. And most of the “left” in this context is not actually left.
I’m fairly sure doing mental gymnastics and hypocrisy are fairly popular these days. I can come up with a bazillion of other topics where people like to do it. And it’s often both sides, and the people interested in the truth and facts are a bit more rare.
Same thing here. It’s easy to have a strong opinion and to vocalize it loudly. But I have zero information whether this is legit or someone went through 20 posts and downvoted someone because of a personal vendetta. This could be a warranted ban, or not.
I have a hunch though, because I know how that mod moderates. And it’s often because of zir personal agenda.
But I have zero information whether this is legit or someone went through 20 posts and downvoted someone because of a personal vendetta.
Is there really a difference between downvoting posts that show up in your feed and downvoting posts in a shitty community?
I fully admit that if I see a stupid looking community I might click on it and downvote a bunch of posts on the first page that appear to be spreading misinformation or are malicious trolling. Then I skim and if they are mostly downvoted it gets blocked. Sometimes I do the same with users to see if they are shitty overall vs had a bad comment.
As an extreme example, if I downvote a bunch of posts and comments by racists does it really matter if I stumbled across individual posts or comments in the All feed vs looking at a community or user as long as I am doing it because of the content and not their username?
Yes, I think it’s bad. I mean some people have it coming and I’m not mad at you for downvoting those. But a bunch of people do what you do. And once you’re part of a niche community or one about a controversial topic, you tend to get that a lot. Random people wo aren’t members coming by and leaving some negative drive-by comment, or a bunch of downvotes. And most of the time it’s not a well-informed take. Or it’s been debunked countless times already, or not even the specific topic at hand. But more someone pushing their uninformed opinion or the prevalent sentiment… And I mean how would they know it they don’t know a lot about what’s going on, since it’s just someone browsing the “All” feed and leaving drive-by interactions?
The issue is not you doing it or one person. But that quite some people do it. And at the other end it’s just a constant stream of it. And if you want to discuss something you then have to make the rules more strict, start to ban people. And then it might lead to some outcry on yepowertrippingbastards or something like that. I think it’s just a lose-lose situation for everyone. It doesn’t create anything constructive or with substance to it. Main thing it does is drag down the place and poison the atmosphere. I’d rather you just block the community if you don’t like the content, and move on with your day.
Make of this what you will. I also downvote misinformation and bad content. But rarely do I scroll through something just to vote on it or make my opinion known to everybody. (With some minor exceptions.)
I think the main difference is that I don’t see downvoting terrible stuff as the same thing as downvoting positive stuff.
There is a lot of nuance to it. I’d say receiving one downvote feels as annoying as it feels good to receive 5 upvotes. At least to me, so I’d say downvotes are worth more. But yeah, this is kind of a different topic. Upvoting bad stuff or downvoting good stuff is both very stupid. But this isn’t a competition or an excercise in stupidity. Just downvote bad/terrible content and upvote if you think other people might want to read it, too. And use your brain before using the voting system for different purposes than those.
I think “pro-AI” is an overstatement for one comm about generated art. They just want to enjoy the art without the drama.
Maybe the comm needs a better name than “leftymemes” if that’s what it’s for 🤷♀️
.dbzer0 is an explicitly pro-AI instance. It isn’t limited to specific comms, it’s every single comm, AI images are allowed untagged and criticism of them is banned - unless that comm has an explicit rule against AI images, and when I asked a mod (Unruffled) for a list of comms like that, they responded by mocking me.
That;s a great way to put it.
Its like denouncing all of reddit because of one subreddit (not saying you shouldn’t denounce reddit).
But don’t you get it? Once capitalism and its shackles are overthrown, AI will not be a problem. It will be a tool for communist utoparadise. 🫠
AI consumes more resources than Bitcoin, at this point. We are accelerating our own demise, all for the spectacle of watching a computer hallucinate on command. There is nothing more decadently bourgeoisie than that.
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AI development and usage isn’t about to be stopped under any economic system, any more than computers were. But the instance is exclusively anti-corporate, pro-open-source AI. It’s not like they’re waiting for a revolution to try to use the tech more responsibly.
They should, though. The Earth is burning.
Small AI models can be hosted on a laptop. It’s the corporate AI’s that are burning the world.
They can’t be trained on a laptop. It’s like arguing that beef can be cooked on an electric stove, and ignoring the emissions from the agriculture.
https://www.databricks.com/blog/stable-diffusion-2
We’ve replicated Stable Diffusion 2 for less than $50k, and we’ve open-sourced the training code so you can too! This is a 3x cost reduction from our last blog post and an 8x reduction from the original Stable Diffusion 2, making training large-scale diffusion models from scratch more accessible than ever before.
AI model training is getting more efficient over time, not less. And each model only needs to be trained once, so your analogy doesn’t quite work.
https://huggingface.co/docs/diffusers/main/en/tutorials/basic_training
You can absolutely train a small, specialized model on minimal hardware.
It’s also locally hosted and free to use, so each image generated does not directly incentivize the training of future models, unlike cloud-based subscription services.
Worrying about open-source AI while corporate AI burns orders of magnitude more resources every day is much like everything else with climate change. Even if you somehow stopped it, it would barely be a drop in the bucket against the massive, inefficient behemoths destroying the world.
I think the same was said on ozone destroying gases and leaded gasoline. Look where they’re currently. Or should we also encurage the “anti-corporate” use of those? Maybe even stop our fight against big plastic, because open-source plastic making could be an advantage over the corporate stuff?
These are laughably incomparable. You literally can’t use freon or leaded gasoline without causing damage. You can run computers entirely on clean, renewable energy. The issue is the energy generation and mass-scale inefficient use of resources.
Small AI models can be hosted on a laptop. Unless you are advocating for abandoning computers as a technology?
If we didn’t waste energy and resource on the AI, it wouldn’t be as accessible and advanced as currently is, which is fine by me, but not by those who think the AI is like a “little person in the computer”, or that a super AI will solve all of humanity’s problems, including those caused by said AI.
Those are issues with generalist corporate AI designed to replace human labor and search engines. Not small, open-source image generators.
The issue, as always, is that we have dragged our feet on renewables for over half a century, and allowed massive corporations to steer our usage of resources to massive, inefficient “convenience” systems designed to extract as much wealth as possible at the cost of the environment and humanity’s future.
I feel like comparing AI to computers is misleading. AI can obviously be really good, computers can do so much more
Also, its not like all AI has to be so big, stealing from and competing with artists
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Wait, are you telling me that people who use AI nowadays are completely deranged?
astronaut_pointing_gun.jxl
AI Evangelists are cringe people.
I saw some freak at a prostest passing out flyers saying AI was sentient and we need to give it legal rights.
These people are delusional, incapable of living in reality.
That’s what happens when you let AI talk for you, draw for you, speak for you, and even think for you.
Modern “AI” doesn’t think … but then neither are the goons promoting it so rabidly, so…
Exactly my point
Do you remember #freesydney.
Those people were delusional.
You’re exaggerating, right?
Right?
Damn, that’s off the deep end.
Yeah the mental gymnastics of some of these ai moderators is hitting Reddit level of cringe. Downvoted and blocked some ai slop communities that came across my timeline and had one butthurt genius block me from a few places they mod.
Ai bros are just the worst insecure shitheads out there. Absolutely worse than crypto bros ever were.
LOL before you mentioned Crypto I was going to say that they are just like CryptoBros. Do you think that AIBros are worse?
They are absolutely worse. Ai bros have this huge self righteous ego “it’s just a tool” while dismissing all the environmental damages, loss of human made creativity and it funneling money away from creators and into greedy CEOs pockets.
At least the crypto bros stay in the financial sector, Ai shitheads are out claiming it’s the “next ai revolution” on every damn topic.
Even worse are the Ai apologists saying it’s a capitalism problem not an Ai issue. Yeah like you aren’t using the tools of capitalism to give them more power you idiots. You are actively making it worse. You aren’t some resistance fighter stealing the means of production. You are just a cog in their machine.
I have seen that capitalism argument. Cringe.
They get defensive about their virtual girlfriends.
Lol so true, I bet db0 himself has an AI girlfriend, maybe an AI boyfriend too.
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I blocked the whole community after seeing bullshit like “no rule against AI means you must imply that any criticism of AI is against the rules”
I have been debating whether or not to block the entire db0 instance because of its pro-AI stance. It’s weird to me that a self-proclaimed anarchist instance is so pro-GenAI garbage. Even the reasoning of being pro-AI because it’s anti-copyright is dumb as fuck.
Yeah they see themselves as “seizing the means of production” but they aren’t doing shit. You aren’t a freedom fighter using Ai. You are just another tool in their machine and you are giving them more power.
They aren’t pro corpo Ai.
They’re very much against the mass scraping/ddos ai companies are doing.
Hell, db0 contributes to !techtakes@awful.systems a lot.
I still think it’s disgraceful to generate and defend AI slop over copyright ideals. To me, it says they admire bullshit computer generated phantasms more than actual, human art.
Strongly agreed
I see what you’re saying but fuck copyright.
They aren’t pro corpo Ai.
They’re very much against the mass scraping/ddos ai companies are doing.
All of the self-hostable LLMs and image generators (or at least, all of the ones capable of the quality people have come to expect for the last few years) people are using today are trained on massive scraped datasets far beyond the reach of hobbyists. There are many so-called “open source” models which are free to modify (eg, by fine-tuning) and to redistribute, but the data used for the initial training (which hobbyists are allowed to build upon) cannot be published because doing so would obviously be large-scale copyright infringement.
Also, even with the data (which in many cases also needs to be labeled/annotated using human labor), the cost of training such a model from scratch is astronomical.
As a pirate myself, I totally understand how, after reading that Meta’s training data included 82TB of pirated books they torrented, one’s first thought might be “🤤” … but to imagine that this makes Meta our ally in the fight against copyright is some temporarily-embarrassed-millionaire kind of thinking.
You’ve been posting on this instance for 6 days, yet you seem so knowledgeable about the user in question. Insteresting…
Also: Did you really accuse me of being an alt of him?
This is my new account. I was on lemm.ee but they’re shutting down.
@irelephant@lemm.ee .
Everyone should block that corporate bootlicking pro-AI shithole, they’re bad news and nothing good can ever come of them.
I noticed just yesterday or maybe two days ago that MysticMuchroom had banned me from !stable_diffusion_witches@lemmy.dbzer0.com calling me an “Anti-AI Troll” in the modlog. I’m fairly certain I’ve had exactly zero interaction with the stable_diffusion_witches before or since.
My guess is that ze had previously banned me from !stable_diffusion_mycology@lemmy.dbzer0.com for downvoting too much and preemptively also banned me from stable_diffusion_witches when ze first created it.
Then ze had the gall to come to this thread to troll and file reports to me (I’m a mod here on !fuck_ai@lemmy.world) about people calling zir out for basically exactly that behavior.
Oy.
I think the need for more explicit rules in the sidebar is getting more crucial. I might see about trying to make that happen soon. I’ll probably start by DMing @VerbFlow@lemmy.world and see where it goes from there.
Edit: And now I think MysticMushroom is evading zir ban. Either that or someone else is impersonating them.
I believe that db0 is here to brigade this thread with downvotes, as well. In the past they have done the same with the admins themselves participating and inciting it even, leveraging plausible deniability to do so but it’s very obvious to those willing to entertain the idea.
Uhhhh lemmy.dbzer0.com is the pro-AI instance.
Yes, but also quite anarchist(at least from what I have seen) and this is more abuse of power in my opinion.
!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com tends to side with the pro-AI side, it’s not very neutral
Yup as evidence by db0’s behavior when I crossposted this thread there, first thing he did was to accuse me of sowing drama, then act condescending as fuck. And they have the audacity to call us neolibs?
Edit: Fascist pigs banned me from their pro-AI mod abuse community, good riddance.
I agree. This is less an AI problem and more of a singular abuse of power from an individual of the instance inside their moderated communities. I wouldn’t tack it on to the whole instance itself. Plenty are here for pro-anarchy or, like myself, just pro-piracy (in the case of giant corporate powerhouses charging disgusting prices for games and “ad-less” tier streaming services). I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an anarchist, though I do align with some of it’s views, but I wouldn’t call myself anything else, either. I pretty much just don’t enjoy politics.
This is a clear case of mod harassment, rather than instance harassment. But if the only thing they can do is ban OP from instances they don’t even want to see… well, they didn’t accomplish much. So much so, that this could get legitimately posted in “Saved You a Click”. However, its good to put antics like these in the spotlight. Some people need to be power checked.
Like rain on your wedding day.
also quokk.au
Really? That’s a shame.
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quokk.au is also anti voting
Those fascist pigs accused me of being a troll and banned me from there simply for crossposting this thread there
expires: in 14 days
Ok, very disappointed by dbzer0…
Ha! Was curious and just checked - they recently banned me from the same communities. I certainly don’t go looking for AI stuff to downvote but probably have done so a couple times if I see it in /all and it’s egregiously bad. Guess that was too much for them.
Imagine being so incredibly fragile that you ban folks because they downvoted a post on a site where karma doesn’t exist and you had an AI create the content you posted.
I think as more people get sick of AI bullshit, the cheerleaders are seeing the reaction and thinking it’s some dark conspiracy when it’s just folks saying “Hmm, that’s kinda crappy, isn’t?”
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You downvoted me for posting a bash script, I guess I know why now. Vote count does matter a little bit because you’re pushing someone’s post down so others can’t see it. Kind of a bummer when I’m just trying to grow a small community and share with people.
Who honestly keeps track of who down votes what? What is this…
I’m constantly getting down votes because of the community topic. I’m making sure that it’s not someone habitually downvoting. If it were then I would refer it to the admins. People think flipping = scalping so ancaps and others kneejerk downvote. I fixed some broken consoles this weekend and now I’m going to re-sell them, but they don’t understand that. Just like someone downvoted me for using an llm as a search engine to learn how to so something new.
So you keep track of everyone who votes you, then if you decide they’ve down voted you too much you report them? Instead of accepting they disagree with you often?
I think using an LLM to actually learn anything technical is a bad idea too. I implement and maintain AI systems for our company, I understand the wild amount of confident hallucinations it can have. I would down vote that too.
You seem way too fragile to be online honestly. I don’t mean that as an insult, really. But if you get that upset by down votes that you track who down votes you and report them, then the real world will be tough. You can’t let that stuff get to you man, especially from nameless, faceless strangers.
Just a suggestion - don’t say you “created” something when you then go on to say you had AI do it for you.
Except that I wrote most of it first and had to fix problems myself because it was buggy as hell. It really only gave me the jq urI part.
I was also in that thread and have blocked the whole instance. Literally the first thing I did when I made my account was block the AI images communities, because I don’t want it in my feed. The .dbzer0 mods have now made it clear that every comm on their instance is an AI image comm, and if you talk about it or complain, you can expect your comments to be removed in the same way they would be if you went into a specifically AI image community. Like, not only is there no requirement or expectation that it be tagged as AI, but you can’t even expect to see it mentioned in the comments because that’ll be censored. They’re really trying to shove it down everyone’s throats and ban anyone who complains.
“Being anti-AI is intrinsically reactionary” is a direct quote from Unruffled. None of them are at all open to hearing criticism or discussion about it.
I crossposted this thread to !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com, and here was db0’s response
Not surprising whatsoever. Someone should really make an alternative to that community that isn’t on dbzer0. YPTB is biased as fuck and they’re not above accusing people like us of sowing drama just because they don’t like criticism of their slop.
They just handled this issue
Lol it just keeps on getting better, dbzer0’s admins apparently think that banning anyone who downvotes in your community to create an echochamber is somehow a good thing
This is the real problem: they are all jumping to the assumption that MysticMushroom banned TheBat because they downvoted in a “genAI community”, except /c/leftymemes is NOT explicitly a genAI community. Everyone in the thread there on yepowertrippinbastards that supports the mod abuse are all acting under that assumption and keep perpetuating that, yet no one has bothered to check and Mushroom seems to be content with not correcting that.
You can see the proof that the comments they downvoted was on leftymemes:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/19277683
[Source]And here are the other db0 downvotes from that time period:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46245854
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/19270000
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/19269940
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/19267800I also see that there are a lot of weirdly disproportionate downvotes in this thread. I suspect the db0 people are here brigading/vote manipulating, which is something they decry on their own platform. They are such hypocrites.
