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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44946 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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To which tribe shall the gift of AI fall?

In a not particularly surprising move, FurAffinity has banned AI content from their website. Ostensible justification is the presence of copied artist signatures in AI artpieces, indicating a lack of authenticity. Ilforte has skinned the «soul-of-the-artist» argument enough and I do not wish to dwell on it.

What's more important, in my view, is what this rejection means for the political future of AI. Previous discussions on TheMotte have demonstrated the polarizing effects of AI generated content — some are deathly afraid of it, others are practically AI-supremacists. Extrapolating outwards from this admittedly-selective community, I expect the use of AI-tools to become a hotly debated culture war topic within the next 5 years.

If you agree on this much, then I have one question: which party ends up as the Party of AI?

My kneejerk answer to this was, "The Left, of course." Left-wingers dominate the technological sector. AI development is getting pushed forward by a mix of grey/blue tribers, and the null hypothesis is that things keep going this way. But the artists and the musicians and the writers and so on are all vaguely left-aligned as well, and they are currently the main reactionary force against AI.

I think it will depend mainly on how the issues of "AI racism" and "AI profits going to top 1%" end up playing out. The left is the party of regulation, and there is plenty that they'd like to regulate here. Generally the left's stance towards things they want to regulate is not especially friendly.

I just see AI as perniciously resistant to regulation, unless you have near-unanimous buy-in from all the other countries too.

It's already proven impossible to regulate 3D printed weapons. I'm sincerely doubting we'll be able to regulate all the compute on the planet to prevent someone, somewhere, from training up and distributing new machine learning models.

StableDiffusion is an example of a group very explicitly releasing a powerful model for the purpose of preventing it from being centralized and regulated.

I just see AI as perniciously resistant to regulation

People said that about the internet too.

Hasn’t helped out Kiwifarms that much.

I don't think those two things are at all alike in relevant aspects, though. If people in China invent an alternative internet or kiwifarms, I can't just run it on my own machine.

A sufficiently general interpretation of the argument ("people were calling X resistant to regulation but it turned out to not be, so if people call Y resistant to regulation, it will also turn out to not be") proves way too much though; the exercise of finding historical patterns that were broken is trivial.

They make GPUs that have intentionally crippled crypto currency mining. Could they do something similar for AI? If it's technically feasible I could see that happening, with only universities and tech giants having access to the good stuff.

The crux of machine learning is matrix multiplication, which is a very fundamental operation. It would be damn hard to make a GPU that can do anything useful, without being able to multiply matrices. "Only have access to the good stuff" is probably best accomplished by limiting access to GPUs at all.

"Only have access to the good stuff" is probably best accomplished by limiting access to GPUs at all.

This is already happening. The US government has already banned Nvidia from selling high-end chipsets to customers in China. One important point about the bans is that this not only bans the current top-end chips but also anything they develop in the future with similar capabilities - so in a few years it will cover high-end gaming cards too, and gradually extend lower down the range as time goes on.

That's currently in the geopolitics sphere, but it's easy to see it being rolled out to other customers that the people in charge don't want to have unfiltered access to modern AI tools. If the masses want powerful GPUs they can use an online service like GeForce Now or Dall-E that restricts any sort of dangerous/undesirable behavior.

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