Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All.
Important notes:
- I don’t use scripts.
- I don’t mass-downvote Communities. If I see a post I generally don’t like when browsing All, I may downvote one post, block the Community and move on.
- Some of the communities I was banned from don’t have any posts in them so I wouldn’t have been able to downvote anything.
- Of all of these Communities, in my history I downvoted one post in one of them. Voting in this manner is not vote manipulation. It’s quite literally a feature of the platform and as a mod of another Community, I would consider it pretty good etiquette.
- One of my bans reads “Appeal Granted, not a brigading member” but I’m still banned.
- I don’t troll.
WTF is going on here?
Pretending that an open source AI model that folks run on their own PCs is somehow burning the planet down is nonsense. I have no love for corporate bootlickers or corporate AIs. Although the fuckAI folks have this fantasy we are all pro AI-techno bros on db0, I can’t remember the last time I used genAI or any sort of AI for anything.
I agree with many of the arguments about the potential for corporate AI being used to cause massive harm to workers and society at large. But that’s not what any of our Stable Diffusion communities use, for example. That’s all open source and locally run, and folks who use it can decide to donate some of their PC’s resources to help others with the processing, a bit like FoldingAtHome works.
These images use no more energy that it would take to play a game for 60 seconds. Your arguments are simply invalid for the genAI images on our instance.
Local AI models are not more efficient than corporate ones - you might not need as much energy as a datacenter for cooling, but the actual GPUs and the software that runs on them are similar enough that the necessary enery per image is effectively the same.
Stable Diffusion might be open-source software by some definition of the word, but it was trained on mostly the same unlicensed data as the commercial models, so using it is still plagiarism.
If you don’t want to be mistaken for techbros, you might want to avoid parroting their talking points.
For your first point, using gen AI cannot exceed the usage that my rig goes through during heavy gaming, so there is no difference in my carbon footprint because gaming and gen AI is all my PC is used for. And I’m not going to give up gaming for climate change either.
For your second point, copyright and intellectual property is a figment of your imagination, and one that I just don’t respect or accept as reality. Therefore, anything that any artist makes is as much my property as theirs, and I’ll do what I want with it because the whole idea of artists “owning” shit is capitalist bullshit.