Worth repeating: Claims of "AI" democratizing anything (coding, creative endeavors, etc) are always BS. The thing locking out people from doing that is not having the time/resources.
You want to democratize coding/art/creativity? Give people paid time off to do it and access to infrastructure. Easy.
@tante
The slop / plagiarising machine gives giant corporations control,
Also you can't copyright / own any AI generated content. You can be sure if it could be copyrighted, the Corp selling the service would own the copyright.
Surely there's no way that hitching my wagon to one of the three giant world-eating dragons would in any way limit my freedom of movement and choice of direction?
@tante Furthermore: People are not creating, they are commissioning.
"I used Da Vinci to create the Mona Lisa." - some Medici, probably.
@DerGiga The Mona Lisa pictures the noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo. The portrait was commissioned by her husband, Francesco di Bartolomeo di Zanobi del Giocondo.
@DerGiga @tante and every artist who had to wrestle their way through a client’s near-inscrutable ‘prompt’ to arrive at a competent picture knows very very intimately that natural language is a really bad interface for such a purpose, too.
this weird dream of ‘i tell the machine what i want and then i get the picture i had in my head’ is making some very bold assumptions about how well they can wield language.
@tante It ain't democracy, it's dictatorship. A sloptator (wait that sounds delicious...)
Democracy is a visibly collective effort. Everyone has to participate for it to really work. That's the opposite of what AI does, AI absorbs that collective effort and spits it out as its own individual achievement. Like a dictator or a CEO claiming credit for the entire country or company.
I code small websites and automations for silly podcasting and conversion of files. That's it.
I don't see this niche talked about much. I have an attention disability. LLMs help me. Believe it or not. (4/5)
@eurodivergent @tante this is exactly why I stand by #llms democratizing access to software engineering. I know so many people know, from artists to blue collar to family business hustlers to genomics researcher who are now building full fledged software solving problems for them. I assist minimally. They are truly empowered and so much of the alienating side of tech is gone, from replacing photoshop to using local only html gizmos to just knowing that you can get a relay board connected to your music software without spending the whole weekend on arduino frustrations. It cuts off ties to big tech and gets us back to whimsical personal software.
I can’t speak to other domains, but this one is truly real.
@mnl @eurodivergent @tante I think people tend to conflate output with process and semantics confuse us.
If you "commission" an AI as a layperson to write code, you did not code an app or know how the thing works and how to fix issues. Nor did you "create" art by telling a stochastic black box to approximate an output commensurate with what you would have created, if only you had the wherewithal to do so.
Commodification of the output is true, as long as the gatekeeper allows you to afford it.
@eurodivergent @jakob @tante while i don't fully subscribe to computers being purely utilitarian, I agree that how much understanding you want to put into what areas is something each person gets to determine for themselves, and doing things with a computer / understanding what a computer does is not just about coding (and even in coding, there are so many layers. I thought that in order to write printf("hello world") you had to learn how to build an OS and device drivers and how to build a CPU and at some realized that it's ok to rely on preexisting software and not understand everything).
It still gets me because I can't for the life of me not take things like "to be a real programmer you have to understand your code does" literally, because as hard as I try it is just absolutely impossible. At this point I don't even have a reasonable mental model of how the smallest microcontroller work anymore, with them coming with 1200 page datasheets. How am I supposed to understand what my javascript actually does?
But I don't think anybody writing javascript actually does so thinking about even something as high level as assembly instructions (except the odd JIT/interpreter implementer, and even then...).
So I do think it's about the output primarily, because a good output (i.e. something of value to humans) usually requires a lot of care, iteration and going beyond code.
You need to do a real course. You are simply being exploited.
@tante this is an intellectually dishonest argument.
Everything is solvable by "more time and more access to infrastructure" when your limits approach infinity, similar to how, if you gave an infinite amount of monkey an infinite amount of typewriters, one of them will eventually type up with the works Shakespeare.
Take creating an alternative to Android for example, it's a Herculean task not because of the OS itself, but because of a
> wide range of nonfree software blobs that commonly occur in even the most progressive "free software" operating systems.
LLMs are great at pattern recognition by design, including identifying function signatures, recognising common driver patterns, reading Ghidra output, etc.
This takes a problem that was so far considered in the realm of needing state backing to a problem that can be tackled by a relatively small team of dedicated researchers.
So yeah, my bad if I don't give a damn about moralising "AI use" when the alternative is rewriting and drying up the moat of American tech companies that enable surveillance and brutalising of the Global South
@budududuroiu @tante Whatever gets you through the night.
The LLMs are abusing the generosity of the Free and Open Software movements to destroy them by commoditizing the work of the Community.
No matter how noble the goal, these beginnings are unclean.
@DataGhost @tante where is the abuse of generosity if you train and distribute a GPL-licensed LLM? Chinese labs proved it's possible to do on a small budget, efficiently.
Why is me using GPL snippets in my code and further distributing my code as GPL ok, but using GPL snippets in training an LLM and further distributing that LLM as GPL wrong?
As I said above, it seems it's an intellectually dishonest argument
@budududuroiu @tante If you use GPL snippets and comply with the GPL by publishing the work you incorporated it into, you’ve honored the agreement that gave you those snippets in the first place. Good.
An LLM scraping them all, mashing them together, and regurgitating it out of context does not honor the gift of the code. It’s also a violation of the GPL, which uses copyright to enforce the continued freedom of that code.
GPL licensing the model doesn’t help.
> It’s also a violation of the GPL
Under what? GPL gives you the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software as long as you publish the derivative work as GPL too. Releasing a truly open source model with training data, training scripts, hyperparameters, and everything needed to reproduce the model would not violate GPL.
@budududuroiu @tante The output of that open model will incorporate the GPL code it was trained on, generate derivative works, and strip all credit and licensing.
Apparently this is an unsettled area of copyright law, so please set aside “violation of the GPL”.
> generate derivative works, and strip all credit and licensing.
Isn't this already an issue we solve by expecting developers to not strip licensing and credit?
Also, GPL-ness isn't static, when GPL didn't prevent projects from offering managed solutions for GPL code as SaaS, people came up with AGPL.
@budududuroiu @tante Do we expect LLMs to not strip licensing and credit?
It seems fundamental to their operation.
@tante Yeah, if anything it'll do the opposite. Lowering entry costs will drive people out of the market, so that the only ones who can afford to get stuff actually made by a human are the ones who have acquired sufficient money / power to afford it.
E.g. Once upon a time, every chair or table would have been hand-made. Where does hand-made furniture sit in the market, now?
When we look at any piece of technology being offered to us the very first thing we should ask is who ends up in control of the process / who is made dependent on the process?
Convenience can only be considered beneficial when we can trust the service not to screw us
M@ Bntn 🗽
tante
Ray McCarthy
Neo Ehproque
Skjeggtroll
Der Giga
Vítor
Anke
raphael
SlightlyCyberpunk
Patrick H. Lauke
🏳️⚧️PepperTheVixen🦯
euro.divergent
mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl
jakob.pxi
Sasha Chudesnov
rudi
Agavi
Vittelius
Bogdan Buduroiu
Data Ghost
Rycochet
Carsten Pfeffer
Serghei Pogor
GhostOnTheHalfShell
Noah Liebman
Dan Milway
meejah
Carolyn
McNeely
Reid 
Fay 🏳️🌈
James 🦉 #FBPE 🇪🇺
zivi
europlus 
Cary
Eric Lawton