Good post by David Golumbia on ChatGPT and how miserable it all is :rat-salute-2:
Marxists: Capitalist technological creation and fixed capital accumulation and automation will lead to mounting contradictions and be the eventual base of a fully automated socialist society
Also Marxists: No, don’t create automation don’t accumulate fixed capital or advance technology. Let’s remain stagnant in 20th century technology forever
And yet if you call someone anti-materialist over this, it breaks their mind for weeks.
Not wanting your quality of life to significantly degrade because tech bros are stealing to commons again is anti-materialist got it.
It is if you don’t have any realistic plan whatsoever to actually eliminate the problem, and instead choose to endlessly complain about it.
Chat GPT can write code. It can debug code. It can design websites. It can translate language better than any automated language translation services. I fail to see how this doesn’t automate socially necessary work and solve problems
Let’s be honest. ChatGPT is copying code snippets from StackOverflow with varying levels of correctness. I guess that is what people were doing anyways though.
What does “being against it” do, though? What specific actions would you take in opposition to deep learning tech?
I’m strict on calling it un-Marxist because carrying out an anti-AI programme would rely on either an unsustainable unending struggle against everyone trying to recreate it, or going full :a-guy: and bringing us so far back into the Stone Age that we can never reindustrialize again.
Most of the problems that people describe with deep learning tech, including what you’re describing, are problems with the system that it exists within, not problems with the tech itself. The abolition of capitalism is the only sustainable and permanent solution to the problem, and would be one that allows humanity to fully realize its benefits with few adverse consequences.
As of right now, I do not think any opposition to AI will actually benefit workers in any way – the most likely outcome would be that huge media companies end up being the only people able to effectively use the technology, which will result in most of the job eliminations we would hope to prevent happening anyways. It’s a fight between media companies wanting stronger copyright (look up the Mickey Mouse curve – we’re due for another expansion of copyright) and tech companies wanting to sell ridiculously overpriced cloud services, and regular artists don’t get a seat at this table under our current system.
My take remains the same, the current way in which capitalists will use AI is bad. But there doesn’t seem to be a solution that doesn’t just end up on a slippery slope and it still doesn’t address the elephant in the room which is how do you actually enforce this.
Society would have to around and see AI art as reprehensible as child porn, so that not only you can get a broad international legislative consensus against it, but also be able to mark sure capitalists enforce this legislation.
So will we get the same consensus with AI tools? Its a rhetorical question isn’t it? We can’t get people organized to do any meaningful climate change praxis and that is an existential threat.
We only have one recent example of something becoming socially taboo in a short amount of time and it was NFTs. If you can convince the entire art community to organize and oppose AI art then maybe AI art could end up just like NFTs. Actual professionals and people involved in the community are the ones that should be convinced to be against it. Wasting time arguing with with the average person wont change anything if half the art community is split on the issue.
