Even most of of the local and "open" models are exploiting the work of others by training off unethically sourced data without even so much as consent.

There is such a thing as ethical AI, but damn near zero people are doing it that way.

Ok, you have a local model... but did you train it yourself? On what data?

Sadly, modern generative AI is a tool that's built on top of the exploitation of other people's work.

Actual human beings put blood, sweat and tears into their words, art and music, only for it to be used without consent or compensation by unskilled lazy misanthropes to generate an infinite sea of unwanted slop.

There is theoretically an ethical way to do AI (using public domain, creative commons, licensed or original data), but it seems to me that almost nobody is doing that.

Personally I don't care how "useful" people want to claim AI is. For one, I'm not seeing things getting better faster, if anything they're all getting worse. And regardless, the ends don't justify the means, so if we're exploitint people to generate slop I don't really care how nice the slop is.

Slop is a consequence of tool use, not a design feature of the tool.

To me "slop" is a description that reflects the supply and demand imbalance of all generative AI output: there's a practically infinite supply of AI generated stuff (to put it kindly), but very little demand.

For example, someone could generate a book with an LLM faster than any person could actually read it (assuming anyone actually wanted to read it in the first place...), and that represents a fundamental logical problem with regard to the value of things that AI produces.

There are vast amounts of ethical data to train against.

Of course there are. Like I said in the comment above: works in the public domain, works licensed cc-0, original works, works licensed for training, and so on. Ethical AI is possible.

But is that what your local AI is trained on?

If so, cool and good for you, you're using the tool ethically.

But that's not what I'm seeing from >99.99% of AI users out there generating Ghibli-core slop for an audience of 0. Stealing all of Kazuo Oga's background art is not curing cancer or doing anything good for society, it's just blatant exploitation of one man's life's work and legacy so frauds and billionaires can make a quick buck off of people who can't tell the difference between AI slop and human art.

I could go on but you don't really care, you care selectively. Or you wouldn't be using the computer (the tool in front of your hands) undeniably built upon exploitation and compromise.

This comparison isn't exactly working in your favor...

Even assuming some of my PC parts were made in a sweatshop in Asia, how many people were exploited to make it? How badly were they exploited? Were they payed something for their time and effort?

Odds are that the model you're using was trained off a mountain of work from of untold numbers of people, all over the world, who didn't see a red cent for their skills, time or effort. Not only is their work being exploited for other people's profit, nobody even bothered to seek consent to do it in the first place.

This is exploitation of labor on an industrial scale. AI turns the whole world into a sweatshop for every person in the creative working class. Forget talking about the "means of production", creative types today aren't even able to control the fruits of their labor anymore.

It is a tool. It exists. You can't stuff the genie back in the box.

Like every technology, it can and should be regulated to prevent abuse, exploitation and other forms of negative impact. Every new technology introduces new problems, challenges and implications. But unlike what happened with oil and nuclear technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, we shouldn't wait 50-100 years to consider them.

The big problem I have with most AI stans is that you are all so infatuated with the subjective utility of the "tool" that you're unwilling to even have a good faith conversation about the objective impact of this technology on the world and society.

Canada will always have an ally in the West Coast.

The safety dance. Oo the safety dance. Yes the safety dance. The safety dance.

I like a distro with problems that I can relate to.

The anime short series FLCL, sometimes call Fooly Cooly or FuriKuri. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLCL

Adult Swim creating 4 new FLCL series in a naive (at best) attempt to cash in on nostalgia for the original 6-episode show.

The original FLCL was a legendary show. Beautifully animated by Gainax and Production IG at their absolute prime, iconic soundtrack by the Pillows at their absolute prime, and a extremely well-told stand-alone story with a satisfying beginning, middle and end. A cult classic and a diamond in the rough! To me, as close to a perfect show as I think is possible.

Nobody was asking for more FLCL, and the story of the show was absolutely not calling for more. It was over and done. What's more, the group of people and the conditions that made this show possible had moved on.

But then Adult Swim, I guess in an effort to bring back viewers from the old days, decided to make not 1, not 3, but 4 new FLCL shows! The quality was pretty low, the stories were mediocre at best, and the heart and originally simply weren't there. It really was just a cash in, and I think that it has hurt the legacy of the original show.

The powerhouse of the cell, at it again.

When he's right, he's right!

It’s easy to say “you just have to find the good anime, here’s an example” and then discounting the fact that it’s basically one out of 1,000.

Ok, sure... But like, how is this different from any other kind of media? What's the ratio of good movies and TV shows to bad ones? What's the ratio of good music and video games to bad ones?

I would love to tell people to skip the generic stuff and latest flavor of the season anime for masterpieces and cult classics like Akira, Cowboy Bebop, Metropolis, Ping Pong the Animation, Redline, etc., but people will still opt to watch a show about a catgirl with a nicotine addiction and use that as their north star for understanding the medium. (Not seriously judging Chainsmoker Cat, because I haven't seen it and don't know much about it.)

The point being that there is no shortage of good, high-quality anime spanning 50+ years for people who care to seek it out. I've been watching anime for decades and I'm still seeing discovering classic shows and awesome movies that I haven't seen before. So yeah, go watch the good ones and skip the bad ones.

Oh NOW you care about stealing intellectual property!

Fuck off. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, AI assholes.

My daughter was getting into anime a few years ago and even going back to the classics it's really hard to avoid the eye rolling booba jokes and upskirt shots. Maybe I'm just old now.

You are. That's fine, I am too.

I think sometimes people forget that many of these classic manga and anime are from the shonen genre, and are primarily targeting adolescent boys.

That's not to say that people of any age and gender can't watch and enjoy them, but just that they aren't necessarily made with everybody in mind. (Girls can and should enjoy shonen works, just like guys can and should enjoy shojo works.) But much like how many western cartoons were made targeting young kids and will contain jokes and stories that some adults may not always resonate with anymore, shonen manga and anime are made with literal teen boys in mind, and as a result they are mainly made to appeal to the humor, emotions and fantasies of teen boys.

Things like sex, low-brow human and power fantasies sell, in general, to many demographics. But I think that's especially true for teen boys who are in the swing of puberty and young adulthood and generally very stupid and horny.

I think Americans tend to be much more sensitive about sex while being more ambivalent to violence, while the Japanese tend are probably the opposite, culturally speaking. While there is obviously no shortage of "problematic" stuff in various manga and anime, and some creators who take things too far or glorify toxic behavior, I can't necessarily blame Japanese creators for knowing their audience and what will sell.

A classic like Dragon Ball comes to mind: there are plenty of sexual gags, panty shots, strange relationships, pervy dude, and so on. Sex is often played off for comedic value, but it'd be disingenuous to suggest that there isn't a mild horniness to it too. There's also a ton of violence and killing, and the whole thing is really one big power fantasy. We could debate whether or not any of that is a problem or whether it was all key to its success as a manga/anime, but regardless, Dragon Ball was a show that was targeting young men but has endured to the point of becoming a cultural icon, loved by people of all ages all over the world.

In other words, I think that we should expect shonen shows to be a little bit raunchy and immature at times, but some stuff manages to transcend that genre/demographic and rise above it that becoming truly iconic.

To be honest, I think it's hard to have this discussion in the abstract, because a lot of it comes down to what that "specific level of creepy" means, both on the individual level and culturally. I think to what degree sex, violence, drug use, antisocial behavior, etc., are acceptable in media depends a lot on the context.

Most of the popular manga/anime series out there are shonen shows, primarily targeting the tastes and sensibilities of adolescent boys, so I think to some degree sexual content and violence are to be expected.

What's more, I think America is generally more sensitive to sexual content in media than Japan, while Japan is probably more sensitive to stuff like drug use... so there is a cultural aspect to it as well of course.

Jefferies sucks.

Somebody give this dude reverse brain surgery.

Love this!

100% AI slop. These people must think we were born yesterday.

And our world. Don't forget that.

Let's see if people keep voting for him and his party!

Because it's very much not a person, and it didn't learn anything.

A for-profit corporation simply scraped the net and fed a bunch of other people's work (the direct result of human labor) into a system of biased nodes and anthropomorphized it by calling it "intelligence" and "learning".

This is exploitation of labor of the working and creative class, nothing more, nothing less.

It doesn't have the agency of a human being, nor does have the creativity or individual perspective of one. It has no senses of it's own or lived experiences to draw from, and it is not sentient. Furthermore, it doesn't interact with the world or economy like a human being, it does not create things like a human being, and if has no human rights or even copyrights.

LLMs are not people, no matter how some people choose to treat them.