I mean, I don’t trust OpenAI or Reddit either but these two things are as mutually exclusive as they seem.

With zero-knowledge principles you could maintain anonymity while still verifying identity. Doesn’t mean that’s what big tech is doing or is gonna do, but also doesn’t mean it’s physically unreal or anything either. We could build a not shitty system.

“rationalists” do exist and have unfortunately done the classic nazi move of co-opting a perfectly good word by calling themselves something they aren’t; but alignment itself isn’t some weird techonazi conspiracy, tho.

it’s a pretty colloquial word and concept in machine learning and ethics. it just refers to how well the goals of systems corroborate. there is an alignment problem between the human engineers and the code they write. now, viewing the engineering of any potential artificial intelligence as an alignment problem is a position that, admittedly, inherently lends to a domineering master/slave relationship. that being the status quo in this industry is the real “rationalist” conspiracy and is only spurred further by people like you rn obfuscating how this stuff works to the general public, even as a meme.

the OP is kind of panic-brained nonsense, either way. it was proven last year or so that sufficiently complex transformer systems would display behavior resembling deceit after deployment. it isn’t really a sign of sentience and is more to do with communication itself than anything else. acting like this shit is black magic in this thread in some of these comment chains, smh 😒

tankies aren’t usually ones for rationalism or any sort of debate/dialectic, i sincerely doubt you’ll get a response bc he knows he’s gonna get trounced on and revealed as an idiot the moment he attempts to do it.

can’t blame you tho, I like playing around with it sometimes too. it’s like, the opposite of trolling imo. you just hit them with stone-cold rigor and they troll themselves out of frustration lmao.

the picture of the mcdonald’s on the left is literally from 2009???

i’m a zoomer and i remember mcdonald’s like that, 2009 would make most zoomers 5-10 yo.

i get it’s supposed to be a metaphor. it’s just kind of a bad metaphor ig lmao.

i think it’s weird how quick people start waving their hand at the sky like a crotchety old man… even people my age go on diatribes about “kids these days”

the angles are interior if you go into the scary world of high level maths and their weird fucking geometries.

this is a square, from a certain point of view

Firstly, there aren’t Chinese/Russian bots on Lemmy…

Never said there were, wasn’t a part of my original argument. I personally disagree with you and think that’s a naive take, but even if I didn’t, it doesn’t mean that there definitely aren’t such botnets active on every major social media platform; massively influencing public opinion and thus discourse on Lemmy and all other social media, even if indirectly. If you’re willing to object to the mere existence of large state-run bot farms at this point in 2025 then I have a bridge to sell you.

…and secondly, you’re wildly underestimating China’s current standing and its velocity in machine learning & AI.

This is a more fair argument but I don’t think it’s particularly relevant.

Fact of the matter is that the large majority of the world’s computer and internet infrastructure is owned and maintained by American interests. If you don’t understand how that matters in this context then I think you are egregiously uninformed regarding machine learning and how this burgeoning sector of the economy actually works. Meaning, you probably shouldn’t be making such declarative statements on your opinion about it if that is the case.

China is the only other nation on Earth that might have a fighting chance against the US in an AI arms race, but, they’re still massively disadvantaged from an empirical point of view. Their only advantage over Americans is that the Chinese youth are all massively supportive of AI and AI infrastructure. China doesn’t have a large anti-AI movement due to a lot of factors but it mostly seems that in a collectivized culture there are less premonitions over things like genAI being “theft,” because ideas like the traditional Western conception of intellectual property are not common place. Whether or not this will be enough to overcome the sheer infrastructure advantage Americans have is yet to be seen. We’ll have to see how these tariffs, manufacturing, new infrastructure, and other facets of the economy actually shake out in these coming years. This stuff doesn’t exist in a vacuum, decisions made today are going to determine who “wins” tomorrow. China is certainly capable of building the infrastructure but there is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding the global economy, especially when it comes to things like fabs. Only time will tell.

i love you guys and this community. not to be sappy but the mass promulgance of ignorance in our society has me legitimately grieving at times lately, and db0 is always a gigantic breath of fresh air that reminds me humanity is righteous at our core. not to be cringe but it’s easy to slip into doomerism and “we are just intrinsically bad,” you guys help me combat that sentiment - even in my own psyche.

Spinoza would be proud of db0.

db0 is a leftist instance. we’re all anarchists for fucks sake, very clearly. don’t be dense, seriously.

just because you are ignorant does not mean we all must be. it doesn’t make one a fascist techbro to merely enjoy computer science and fucking math. sorry. i was unaware this was an anti-intellectual, anti-rationalist society.

either way i wish you well, i’m not trying to sling shit or anything. i just genuinely think your reactionary stance on AI, as well as the general societal sentiment, is grossly ignorant to the point of abandoning reason. it is upsetting. any number of db0 members could sit here slinging rote facts at you showing they’re not just “techbros,” there is a real and objective basis for their interest in machine learning; but you probably wouldn’t even bother considering or glancing at any of it because you’ve already decided your opinion on a topic you clearly are quite uninformed on the technical details of.

it seems like everyone who is anti-AI is just deadset on MAGA-esc fucking mental gymnastics. i’m honestly not convinced a large amount of anti-AI sentiment isn’t pushed by Chinese/Russian bots trying to compensate for their absolutely massive disadvantage to the United States in the arms race currently going on over machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies. the US accounts for like, anywhere from 50-70% of all global compute resources depending on who you ask. we have sources demonstrating the MAGA people and their stupidity/echo-chambering was definitively spurred by similar psychological cyber-warfare. if you can’t beat 'em, make their people immune to truth & reason.

Well, first, Deloitte says data centers as a whole only account for 2% of global energy use.

This means that while yes, artificial intelligence is hogging an increasing portion of system resources and compute globally: it is still only a very, very small fraction of the energy usage of humanity as a whole or even the tech industry alone.

According to your own source’s numbers, AI’s share of data-center electricity usage is roughly 82 terawatt (also your Wired article’s author misspells terawatt as terrawatt the entire time, maybe it is a spelling I’ve just never seen?) hours, roughly similar to the annual electricity consumption of Switzerland. Sounds bad, right?

Well, yes, but actually, no.

Global energy consumption this year is around 34,000 TWh. That means that if data centers represented 2% of global energy use, data centers this year used around ~500-700 TWh total. (34,000 * 0.02 == 680)

That means that, again, using Wired’s own value of 82 TWh, AI alone represents only around 12% of global data center energy usage. Keep in mind that is not 12% of global energy usage, it is 12% of the global 2% energy usage data centers are collectively responsible for, meaning AI is responsible for a fucking staggering ~0.24% of global energy use.

What is the other 88%, of data center energy usage, you might ask? A bunch of corpo bullshit, including, namely; infrastructure for social media, streaming, and all this other shitass tech everyone readily accepted with no qualms until the spooky “AI” boogeyman made people wake up about the wider environmental impacts of big tech.

Except, not really though. Because as we see, most people are like you, and have a weird laser-focused obsession with the energy usage of AI in particular. You are doing a disservice to environmentalism by being intentionally ignorant of the wider implications of these statistics and their context. Don’t believe every sensationalized fucking Wired article you find after doing a Google search, friend.

are you fucking dense? like i seriously cannot tell if you’re serious or shitposting, and like, i’m being fr here i’m genuinely not sure and i’m not trying to be any more of a dick than some friendly ribbing might entail. like i don’t have any ill feelings for you but this just gets super frustrating after having this conversation so many times with so many people who seem utterly set on unfounded debate over rational dialectic.

it is open to criticism. lmfao. all you people fucking do is criticize it, endlessly, on social media.

can you not just let us have our own tiny fucking corner of the internet and leave us alone or is it really that much of a vendetta for you?

not to reply to two of your comments, just hanging around town rn ig lmao.

but:

better stop browsing the internet period, then. the last time you watched youtube or streamed anything it consumed far more system resources and it produced far more pollution than the vast majority of machine learning is even remotely capable of. why pick on the data centers used for AI when they’re handily outnumbered by infrastructure for other equally, if not more vain corpo products?

i genuinely mean this question in good faith, but, are you and others who harp on the environment in this discourse just ignorant of how the entire modern technology sector is actually built and runs? if your answer is anything but yes, then, why is your position objectively inconsistent and arbitrary? are you just too in the shit to realize you actually hate corporations and companies, not artificial intelligence technologies?

not to speak for everyone here but the standard is that our community is very clearly marked as generally pro-AI and we get tired of seeing the same four half baked rhetorical points from people like you over and over again. frankly, if you’re upset by AI then you probably should block all of db0. we don’t want that here anyway, hence the rule. healthy discourse is fine but you’re sitting here making multiple comments about genAI in a post that has nothing to do with it. it’s a nuisance at best and inflammatory at worst. i feel for you when it comes to dealing with poorly marked or conveyed rules/enforcement. i agree the administration could make this more clear, especially for users using alternative frontends for lemmy.

sOrRy tHaT yOuR POsItIoN iS MASsiVely uNpoPulAAAaaaAarrrR???

most of us could actually not give less of a fuck, to be entirely honest with you. we’re more focused on actually contributing to things. some of us, namely, would like to focus on building and using machine learning toolchains without hearing about olympic size swimming pools or people’s unrequited opinions on “AI” every five fucking seconds. that’s because in this case, the popular opinion is the reactionary opinion. being anti-AI is a reactionary position and the popularity of it’s a reflection of the zeitgeist.

i think genAI is art, i think machine learning itself is art. the idea that the massive amounts of cognitive work accumulating over decades, that very talented engineers and researchers have poured their hearts and souls into just to be able to bring these systems into reality… the idea that is anything but a pure expression of the human condition - and hence art - is patently fucking absurd and i’m sick of seeing the anti-AI diatribe in any way, shape, or form. our admins are great. just because a position is popular doesn’t mean it isn’t fucking brain-dead stupid.

I think it’s kind of ironic you call your friend apparently a dipshit for not knowing something you also didn’t know… pot calling the kettle black & all.

no lmao.

surprisingly hot take these days but I prefer critical analysis to being an emotional reactionary.

i suppose that’s just "cringe’ tho, isn’t it?

Cops murder about 1000 people every year. Are you mad about that? Are you posting paragraphs about abolishing the police?

I mean, not on here because I’d be preaching to the choir but elsewhere, yes. Lmfao I can be upset about multiple things. I can hate cops, industrialized society, and gigantic overly aggressive animals being encouraged as household pets, believe it or not. I can just as easily retort here and point out that while dog attacks generally aren’t typically fatal, there is a plethora of work available highlighting the severity of pit-bull attacks versus other dog breeds. Have you ever seen a pit bull mauling take place in real life? It’s not like a “normal” dog and I’m sick of pitbull mommies getting people hurt and killed by trying to lie to people about the danger these dogs present and the skill required to own them.

What sort of shitass whataboutism is this??? Like, seriously. What point are you trying to make that doesn’t involve drawing fallacious equivalencies and stuffing opinions in my mouth for me?

yeah let’s let elon elope to one of our most significant international rivals after letting him plunder virtually every datapoint owned by the federal government. i look forward to the russian bot farms becoming personalized down to the individual.

i mean no offense but are you guys that are cheering for this fucking stupid? do you just read stuff and respond based on how it makes you feel?

or maybe it is uncanny because there are beans the size of boulders??

smh. “result of the uncanny AI effect.” talking about image generation like it’s some sort of magic taint that pervades the image. i’ll go draw large beans myself just to point out how fucking absurd what you’re saying is, brb.

i give you points for not derailing the conversation with accusations that all anti-pitbull sentiments are based on racism, at least, but to be honest a source largely citing people like “the president of the staffordshire-terrier club” and calling pit bulls “nanny dogs” is not likely to persuade anyone with a brain, let alone people already decided on being anti-pitbull.

i would personally consider myself anti-pitbull but that’s because i live in a town fucking overrun with them and can see that they definitely don’t behave like normal dogs on the regular. obviously we can’t just kill every single pit bull out there tho, i don’t know what the solution is. we should be putting people illegally backyard breeding pit bulls with shitty aggression issues that will never be able to be house pets straight into jail instead of slapping them on the wrist and allowing this problem to continue.

others have already pointed this out, but, do you have an actual reasoning in response to the fact that pit bulls are massively overrepresented in dog attack and fatality statistics?

i understand you mean “the media has fixated on pit bulls…” as this response, and it’s a cute thesis, but it really doesnt hold up to scrutiny; without even going into the semantics of this argument - even if we accept this idea as true (it isn’t), the sheer amount that pit bulls are represented in dog attack & fatality statistics would… still handily prove anti-pit bull people’s point that these dogs are clearly more dangerous than other breeds. it’s literally just that staggeringly much higher than any other dog breed, there is no rational explanation other than that pit bulls are more aggressive and/or more capable of damage than other dogs.

using wikipedia as a source, as i know pro-pit bull people love to argue over the veracity of sources like the dog bite website, you can see that

Tracking by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) determined that pit bull type dogs were most likely to be involved in fatal attacks, accounting for 28% of fatalities from 1979 to 1998.[3] The AVMA documented 66 human fatalities caused by pit bull type dogs, 39 by Rottweilers, 17 by German shepherds, 15 by husky type dogs, 12 by Malamutes, 9 by Dobermann Pinschers, 8 by Chow Chows, 7 by Great Danes, and 7 by St. Bernarddogs.

keep in mind this is just from 1979 to 1998, so it doesnt include the 2000’s where pit bulls ownership in america really started to take off, making post-2000 statistics on this look even fucking worse for pit bulls, by a larger margin, as the promulgance of the breed and people like you who aren’t aware of the danger has starkly increased pitbull attacks from an already very high number. think about that. before pit bulls even had their most recent wave of popularity they accounted for about 1/3 more fatalities than the next most fatal breed, rottweilers. that’s fucking staggering and should in any reasonable world shut down further discussion or any sort of whataboutism like “wHy dOn’T wE BAn roTtWeiLeRs tOo???”

you know why nobody is advocating banning rottweilers in a serious political coalition too… at least, i sure hope you do. it’s real obvious to the rest of us.

I’m personally scared for what the future holds, we are living in a post-Enlightenment society.

At the risk of sounding a little chud-y… we are tasked with the same challenge people like Newton or Spinoza dealt with in life; we need to rebuild meaning, reason, and thought from first principles in a way that is amicable to the modern order.

People, like those that we’re seeing in action here, probably think Modest Proposal is actually encouraging the audience to eat children. It’s a serious problem.

of course he means it literally?

that’s why i think, as i said, his comment is reductionist. the key word is

I think the only bad thing…

he’s just trying to draw an edgy hyperbolic narrative that the world only cares about the Holocaust in particular not because it is a genocide but because it threatened the international status quo. he’s wrong, but he’s not a nazi, at least as far as i can tell from his singular comment. i won’t come up to bat for the original commenter, he very well could be a bigot or a nazi. i don’t have enough context to know as a reader. his use of leftist diction and the way he wields it is a pretty strong indicator that this was his intended thesis, on top of obvious contextual clues.

man fuck idek what else to say. your response here is purely reactionary, you aren’t even saying anything other than reaffirming things you’ve already said.