Post #3609942

2026-07-05 17:21 UTC

When Generative AI hit the scene, it took me a really long time to make up my mind about it. Some people around me were (rightly) immediately against it, but I didn't fully understand why. I played with early image generators because I found the results amusing. I was running stable diffusion locally, because I had a machine that could do that. I tried to convince myself that there were places that this tech could be used ethically. I tried to justify it. I tinkered with early LLMs, partially because I found the results amusing and partially because (like many other people in the tech world) I saw in them the promise of a thing that I had long dreamed about and couldn't really articulate. (I was wrong! That promise is not there. These are machines built to look useful while doing nothing.) And, in the meantime, I learned a lot about how these things work. I've seen inside the sausage, I've eaten the sausage. I can say without question, that the sausage is made of people and sewage, and we're just hurting one another and ourselves when we eat it. But there's nuance here, and I want to get into that for a second.

Replies (1)

@ajroach42@retro.social 2026-07-05 17:30

There are a couple of places that I still use or have used or plan to use things that are commonly rolled up in the "AI" bucket, and that I believe are fine. Because "AI" is a bunch of different technologies built a bunch of different ways, wearing a marketing trenchcoat. I use an automatic subtitle generation tool that is "AI" powered, but runs locally and isn't generating anything new, it's trying to identify a thing that already exists. The argument could be made that it was trained on stolen labor in that it was trained by matching existing subtitles to the audio tracks those subtitles correspond to. I decided I was personally comfortable with this, but I understand how other people might not be. It's wrong a lot, but it gives me a place to start from as I'm manually subtitling a thing, and saves me hours of transcription work. I think it's fine. I think it's good even, I like it and I want it to get better.

Open ##3609940