Skip Navigation
384 comments

  • Redditors straight up quote marketing material in their posts to defend stuff, it's maddening. I was questioning a gamer on Reddit about something in a video game, and in response they straight up quoted something from the game's official website. Critical thinking and media literacy are dead online I swear.

  • He may be a sucker but at least he is engaging with the topic. The sheer lack of curiosity toward so-called "artificial intelligence" here on hexbear is just as frustrating as any of the bazinga takes on

    . No material analysis, no good faith discussion, no strategy to liberate these tools in service of the proletariat - just the occasional dunk post and an endless stream of the same snide remarks from the usuals.

    The hexbear party line toward LLMs and similar technologies is straight up reactionary. If we don't look for ways to utilize, subvert and counter these technologies while they're still in their infancy then these dorks are going to be the only ones who know how to use them. And if we don't interact with the underlying philosophical questions concerning sentience and consciousness, those same dorks will also have control of the narrative.

    Are we just content to hand over a new means of production and information warfare to the technophile neo-feudalists of Silicon Valley with zero resistance? Yes, apparently, and it is so much more disappointing than seeing the target demographic of a marketing stunt buy into that marketing stunt.

    • The sheer lack of curiosity toward so-called "artificial intelligence" here on hexbear is just as frustrating

      That's because it's not artificial intelligence. It's marketing.

    • Oh my god it’s this post again.

      No, LLMs are not “AI”. No, mocking these people is not “reactionary”. No, cloaking your personal stance on leftist language doesn’t make it any more correct. No, they are not on the verge of developing superhuman AI.

      And if we don't interact with the underlying philosophical questions concerning sentience and consciousness, those same dorks will also have control of the narrative.

      Have you read like, anything at all in this thread? There is no way you can possibly say no one here is “interacting with the underlying philosophical questions” in good faith. There’s plenty of discussion, you just disagree with it.

      Are we just content to hand over a new means of production and information warfare to the technophile neo-feudalists of Silicon Valley with zero resistance? Yes, apparently, and it is so much more disappointing than seeing the target demographic of a marketing stunt buy into that marketing stunt.

      What the fuck are you talking about? We’re “handing it over to them” because we don’t take their word at face value? Like nobody here has been extremely opposed to the usage of “AI” to undermine working class power? This is bad faith bullshit and you know it.

    • The hexbear party line toward LLMs

      this is a shitposting reddit clone, not a political party, but I generally agree that people on here sometimes veer into neo-ludditism and forget Marx's words with respect to stuff like this:

      The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used.

      - Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 15

      However you have to take the context of these reactions into account. Silicon valley hucksters are constantly pushing LLMs etc. as miracle solutions for capitalists to get rid of workers, and the abuse of these technologies to violate people's privacy or fabricate audio/video evidence is only going to get worse. I don't think it's possible to put Pandora back in the box or to do bourgeois reformist legislation to fix this problem. I do think we need to seize the means of production instead of destroy them. But you need to agitate and organize in real life around this. Not come on here and tell people how misguided their dunk tank posts are lol.

      • I think their position is heavily misguided at best. The question is whether AI is sentient or not. Obviously they are used against the working class, but that is a separate question from their purported sentience.

        Like, it’s totally possible to seize AI without believing in its sentience. You don’t have to believe the techbro woo to use their technology.

        We can both make use of LLMs ourselves while disbelieving in their sentience at the same time.

        Is that such a radical idea?

        We’re not saying that LLMs are useless and we shouldn’t try and make use of them, just that they’re not sentient. Nobody here is making that first point. Attacking the first point instead of the arguments that people are actually making is as textbook a case of strawmanning as I’ve ever seen.

    • Are we just content to hand over a new means of production and information warfare to the technophile neo-feudalists of Silicon Valley with zero resistance? Yes, apparently, and it is so much more disappointing than seeing the target demographic of a marketing stunt buy into that marketing stunt.

      As it stands, the capitalists already have the old means of information warfare -- this tech represents an acceleration of existing trends, not the creation of something new. What do you want from this, exactly? Large language models that do a predictive text -- but with filters installed by communists, rather than the PR arm of a company? That won't be nearly as convincing as just talking and organizing with people in real life.

      Besides, if it turns out there really is a transformational threat, that it represents some weird new means of production, it's still just a programme on a server. Computers are very, very fragile. I'm just not too worried about it.

    • It's not a new means of production, it's old as fuck. They just made a bigger one. The fuck is chat gpt or AI art going to do for communism? Automating creativity and killing the creative part is only interesting as a bad thing from a left perspective. It's dismissed because it's dismissals, there's no new technology here, it's a souped up chatbot that's been marketed like something else.

      As far as machines being conscious, we are so far away from that as something to even consider. They aren't and can't spontaneously gain free will. It's inputs and outputs based on pre determined programming. Computers literally cannot to anything non deterministic, there is no ghost in the machine, the machine is just really complex and you don't understand it entirely. If we get to the point where a robot could be seen as sentient we have fucking Star Trek TNG. They did the discussion and solved that shit.

    • Kinda, but like cool ML is alphafold/esm/mpnn/finite elements optimizers for cad/qcd/quantum chemistry (coming soon(tm)). LLMs/diffusion models are ways of multiplying content, fucking up email jobs and static media creators/presumably dynamic ones as well in the future.

      I doubt people are aware that rn biologists are close to making designer proteins on like home pc and soon you can wage designer biological warfare for 500k and a small lab. Or conversely, making drugs for any protein-function related disease.

      • I doubt people are aware that rn biologists are close to making designer proteins on like home pc and soon you can wage designer biological warfare for 500k and a small lab. Or conversely, making drugs for any protein-function related disease.

        Please elaborate in as much detail as possible, ideally with numerous hyperlinks. (I'm less surprised by this than you might think, but would greatly appreciate being clued into what's going on in this arena right now, as I've been largely cut off from information about it for years now.)

    • It's a glorified speak-n-spell, not a one benefit to the working class. A constant, unrelenting push for a democratization of education will do infinitely more for the working class than learning how best to have a machine write a story. Should this be worked on and researched? absolutely. Should it not be allowed out of the confines of people who understand thoroughly what it is and what it can and cannot do? yes. We shouldn't be using this for the same reason you don't use a gag dictionary for a research project. Grow up

  • Elon Musk could announce he's already been to Mars actually, twice actually, and half his fans would believe it.

  • I am once again returning to this thread (for god knows why probably because I am somewhat unhinged) to question whether one of these LLMs have done something or performed an action without user input. A very strong opinion, but I feel like LLMs are useful at this point to cut corners to solve bullshit problems. Honestly, I am kinda compelled to write a Godamn essay synthesizing material from Graeber with the current information coming out of tech bro hell because I feel like there’s a lot there.

    Even in my own job, my company is using GPT. To do what you might ask? Send emails, create reminders about emails, schedule meetings, respond to client requests that require the intervention of a living human who might have something on their desktop that needs to be shown to the client/edited accordingly. Or create some kind of meeting summary. Again, great. What’s the meeting about? Why can’t we just restructure this conversation in relation to to what end?

    We should all become rightfully intrigued when these “AI” begin acting on their own accord, but right now, they’re being controlled by people with an inhumane agenda, antithetical to the human experience. I guess this is just the case and point why the humanities shouldn’t have been gutted in the west-you can’t answer any of these questions with a formula that won’t end in some form of light eugenics. What happens when it does act by itself and you use it for your bs work? Awesome job! You just reinvented slavery! 🥰

    Functionally of course, none of this matters if it’s “AGI” or not when it’s a power grab of extreme levels by the bourgeois. Whether they admit it or not, humans will still be needed to do their “work” (it’s certainly not labor) and they will slowly use “AI” as a justification to reduce wages, benefits and what have you.

  • Trust me bro, i'm as positive of this as I am of my NFT collection gaining value

384 comments