Summary:
I downvoted pro-AI comments in a post in leftymemes community. It was LLM generated polandball comic (Which is objectively pathetic as fuck) that showed up on my feed, blocked couple of users who I thought were unhinged, and have blocked the whole instance on my client after realizing how rabid these morons are.
I didn’t go looking for AI posts like a vigilante.
One user in question got miffed for being downvoted and banned me from places they moderate.
LLM generated polandball comic
WHY
i literally just made one in like 5 minutes, and i didn’t even need a good or interesting idea. i put in the minimum amount of effort. they are literally balls with no mouth, nose or any other detail, just a circle, a flag and two eyes
AI bros aren’t logical, they’d rather put in no effort to have a machine barf out crap then claim they made it.
Thing is, as someone who has fooled around with locally hosted image gen, it’s actually sometimes a whole fucking lot of work to try and bend prompts to get the stupid algorithm to spit out what you want. They’d rather put in a shit tonne of effort for an objectively worse result.
That is also my thought. If you want to make AI generated content, which is going to cost the environment a ton (40 phone charges per prompt, people) and do prompt after prompt after prompt - then WHY would you waste all that time and pollution on a fucking gag comic that you could draw yourself in five minutes?
To me, that is peak retardation when it comes to AI fanboys. At least use that time and pollution on something worthwhile.
So your telling me that if I go downvote a bunch of stuff in one AI slop community someone will ban me from all of them for me and save me the work of blocking them all?
I complained about slop in the other thread and got banned from at least two, hopefully more. Only found out when I went to block a couple of communities someone linked.
I think I would be willing to pay for a lemmy experience that replaces ai slop posts with ads. Ads with autoplaying videos and sound. Ads that when accidentally clicked open the app store to some obvious malware. Anything that doesn’t kill one rainforest tree per post.
Wait, are you telling me that people who use AI nowadays are completely deranged?
astronaut_pointing_gun.jxl
I noticed just yesterday or maybe two days ago that MysticMuchroom had banned me from !stable_diffusion_witches@lemmy.dbzer0.com calling me an “Anti-AI Troll” in the modlog. I’m fairly certain I’ve had exactly zero interaction with the stable_diffusion_witches before or since.
My guess is that ze had previously banned me from !stable_diffusion_mycology@lemmy.dbzer0.com for downvoting too much and preemptively also banned me from stable_diffusion_witches when ze first created it.
Then ze had the gall to come to this thread to troll and file reports to me (I’m a mod here on !fuck_ai@lemmy.world) about people calling zir out for basically exactly that behavior.
Oy.
I think the need for more explicit rules in the sidebar is getting more crucial. I might see about trying to make that happen soon. I’ll probably start by DMing @VerbFlow@lemmy.world and see where it goes from there.
Edit: And now I think MysticMushroom is evading zir ban. Either that or someone else is impersonating them.
I believe that db0 is here to brigade this thread with downvotes, as well. In the past they have done the same with the admins themselves participating and inciting it even, leveraging plausible deniability to do so but it’s very obvious to those willing to entertain the idea.
I was also in that thread and have blocked the whole instance. Literally the first thing I did when I made my account was block the AI images communities, because I don’t want it in my feed. The .dbzer0 mods have now made it clear that every comm on their instance is an AI image comm, and if you talk about it or complain, you can expect your comments to be removed in the same way they would be if you went into a specifically AI image community. Like, not only is there no requirement or expectation that it be tagged as AI, but you can’t even expect to see it mentioned in the comments because that’ll be censored. They’re really trying to shove it down everyone’s throats and ban anyone who complains.
“Being anti-AI is intrinsically reactionary” is a direct quote from Unruffled. None of them are at all open to hearing criticism or discussion about it.
I crossposted this thread to !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com, and here was db0’s response
Not surprising whatsoever. Someone should really make an alternative to that community that isn’t on dbzer0. YPTB is biased as fuck and they’re not above accusing people like us of sowing drama just because they don’t like criticism of their slop.
Lol it just keeps on getting better, dbzer0’s admins apparently think that banning anyone who downvotes in your community to create an echochamber is somehow a good thing
This is the real problem: they are all jumping to the assumption that MysticMushroom banned TheBat because they downvoted in a “genAI community”, except /c/leftymemes is NOT explicitly a genAI community. Everyone in the thread there on yepowertrippinbastards that supports the mod abuse are all acting under that assumption and keep perpetuating that, yet no one has bothered to check and Mushroom seems to be content with not correcting that.
You can see the proof that the comments they downvoted was on leftymemes:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/19277683
[Source]And here are the other db0 downvotes from that time period:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46245854
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/19270000
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/19269940
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/19267800I also see that there are a lot of weirdly disproportionate downvotes in this thread. I suspect the db0 people are here brigading/vote manipulating, which is something they decry on their own platform. They are such hypocrites.
They just handled this issue
It’s pretty stupid to block an entire instance for being blocked from one community for what is a small issue in grand scheme of things.
if an instance has ignored a community to the point it has become a toxic cesspool then the instance is a complete loss.
I have blocked several instances for the same reason.
It’s not just one community. The whole instance is pro-AI, untagged, and with criticism of it being against the rules.
And if you criticize the mod actions you’ll be accused of starting drama, as I learned from crossposting this there.
Here’s db0’s lovely, totally mature, and not at all condesending response.
Being anti-AI on .dbzer0 is considered “trolling” and “reactionary” no matter what your stance is, how you present it, or what your reasons for it are.
Yup, and db0 is their “benevolent” dictator. I bet if this community were on dbzer0 he would’ve banned it or banned everyone in it and kept it as a honeypot to ban anyone who pushes back against him and his instance’s Pro-AI agenda.
There is no actual rule against criticism of AI. It’s an ethereal rule that they use to exert authoritarian behavior.
dbzer0 instance admin is pro-LLM slop. I’m fine with blocking the whole instance.
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Test.
Lemmy is just as messed up as Reddit. Had my first acct nuked because I argued that Jewish people were supporting a genocide. Not all. But a majority. And boom the Zionists silenced my voice because I’m not cool with genocide.
Honestly. Wtf Lemmy.
I guess in your drive-by downvoting you didn’t notice the huge argument happening in that thread, specifically from people dogpiling the creator for crossposting from the !imageai@sh.itjust.works to !leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com? So it wasnt even originally from our board!
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46162538
I can’t even see the post anymore, OP might have been bullied into deleting it.
I saw it before and didn’t even care for it myself! i hate Poland ball comics, absolute garbage. But the dbzer0 mods have a point. You can’t even mildly critique something like that without the AI haters rolling in to be disruptive. You’ve made this big stink like you were singled out but there’s several loud people in there derailing conversations to complain about AI. In other words, you were brigading.
dbzer0’s AI suckoff stance is awful
It’s really fucking annoying too, because their userbase is generally pretty based on literally any other issue, but they just pick the stupidest hill to die on with the internet-killing machine.
Please help me get this straight so that I don’t misunderstand you.
Are you saying that you agree that people should be banned for downvoting content? So, without commenting or arguing or anything, just downvoting something you don’t like can get you banned?
Why then don’t you just disable the downvoting function for the instance?
Having considered things for a day, I would say that I think @MysticMushroom1776@lemmy.dbzer0.com probably was overzealous banning the OP from all those comms over downvotes. That’s assuming all they did was down vote some comments in that post.
If they were serially downvoting a bunch is posts in those comms then that’s that.
But I don’t otherwise find the anti-anti-ai rules on dbzer0 to be onerous. I criticize AI fairly often, I just don’t do it in the pro-ai comms. Leftymemes is funny territory since it isnt explicitly a pro-ai comm, even if the instance overall is. I do think all comma should post all their rules in sidebar. It isn’t enough to assume Instance rules are also included, since those aren’t immediately visible to a federated user checking the sidebar.
There is no instance rule against criticism of AI on db0. Being “pro AI” is not a blank cheque for authoritarian behavior against anyone who isn’t sucking genAI’s malformed cock.
This happens frequently all over db0, and not including explicitly AI communities. What is happening is that the people that run AI communities have to deal with anti-AI people in the explicitly AI communities, but then the instance in general uses that as a cover to overreact and act like assholes in other communities that are not explicitly AI.
What needs to happen is that they just need to stop being little shits and just make an instance rule and ensure each community includes it in the rules. Instead of having secret rules, they just need to make it explicit and then people can know what to expect.
Yeah, of course I don’t know what OP was really doing there, I’m just going off what they claim to have done.
I haven’t been around leftymemes, but to me, it would not have been obvious that a leftymemes community is pro centralized turbocapitalist AI. But I guess each to their own. It’s just a very random pairing.
And I really wish communities would put down their rules like law and only execute rules that are actually written.
I can’t even imagine the mental gymnastics required to be both “pro-labor” and “pro-AI”. I mean, yeah I’m all about workers rights…but imagine how much money my boss could make if he just replaced us all with robots?
So in an ideal world we would have ai/robots doing labour jobs, while humans are free to do what they want and enjoy life without the wage slavery to survive…
But we do not live in such a world and instead, ai is doing all the creative fun bits and humans are loosing their jobs and not getting any support to live… 🙃
That’s a clear strawman, irrespective of how you feel about the topic. The pro-AI left position is that opposing AI is trying to futilely treat a symptom when one should be fixing the root cause of capitalist exploitation, or in other words: “All your problems with AI can be solved by overthrowing capitalism”. If you disagree then disagree with that position, not a strawman you made up.
All your problems with AI can be solved by overthrowing capitalism
Overthrow capitalism and then I’ll stop complaining about AI, then.
Your instance admin is a piece of shit if he would ban you for being Anti-AI.
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See, now you’re disagreeing with the actual position. If I cared to have this argument (which I don’t) we could now have an honest-ish conversation about the merits and demerits of opposing AI instead of a meaningless circlejerk.
It’s not really, because the “AI” people have gievances with in context is the LLMs that are being shoved down everyone’s throats by every silicon valley giant, with literal trillions of dollars invested in them. Very, very not left wing. I’m left wing - that money can be MUCH better spent elsewhere.
When people complain about AI evangelists they’re complaining about the people who fawn over the aforementioned tech giants, wholesale theft of training data, and enshittification of all platforms by AI slop - not ‘AI as a concept’, so in other words, you’re very much crafting a straw man of your own there.
When people complain about AI evangelists they’re complaining about the people who fawn over the aforementioned tech giants, wholesale theft of training data, and enshittification of all platforms by AI slop
Yeah these are bad things (well mostly, I don’t recognize intellectual property of any form as valid), but that’s irrelevant to my point. I wasn’t criticizing the anti-AI position; I was criticizing circlejerking by pretending the other side doesn’t have valid reasons to think what they think.
The pro-AI left
There is no such thing as “AI”. And most of the “left” in this context is not actually left.
I’m fairly sure doing mental gymnastics and hypocrisy are fairly popular these days. I can come up with a bazillion of other topics where people like to do it. And it’s often both sides, and the people interested in the truth and facts are a bit more rare.
Same thing here. It’s easy to have a strong opinion and to vocalize it loudly. But I have zero information whether this is legit or someone went through 20 posts and downvoted someone because of a personal vendetta. This could be a warranted ban, or not.
I have a hunch though, because I know how that mod moderates. And it’s often because of zir personal agenda.
But I have zero information whether this is legit or someone went through 20 posts and downvoted someone because of a personal vendetta.
Is there really a difference between downvoting posts that show up in your feed and downvoting posts in a shitty community?
I fully admit that if I see a stupid looking community I might click on it and downvote a bunch of posts on the first page that appear to be spreading misinformation or are malicious trolling. Then I skim and if they are mostly downvoted it gets blocked. Sometimes I do the same with users to see if they are shitty overall vs had a bad comment.
As an extreme example, if I downvote a bunch of posts and comments by racists does it really matter if I stumbled across individual posts or comments in the All feed vs looking at a community or user as long as I am doing it because of the content and not their username?
Yes, I think it’s bad. I mean some people have it coming and I’m not mad at you for downvoting those. But a bunch of people do what you do. And once you’re part of a niche community or one about a controversial topic, you tend to get that a lot. Random people wo aren’t members coming by and leaving some negative drive-by comment, or a bunch of downvotes. And most of the time it’s not a well-informed take. Or it’s been debunked countless times already, or not even the specific topic at hand. But more someone pushing their uninformed opinion or the prevalent sentiment… And I mean how would they know it they don’t know a lot about what’s going on, since it’s just someone browsing the “All” feed and leaving drive-by interactions?
The issue is not you doing it or one person. But that quite some people do it. And at the other end it’s just a constant stream of it. And if you want to discuss something you then have to make the rules more strict, start to ban people. And then it might lead to some outcry on yepowertrippingbastards or something like that. I think it’s just a lose-lose situation for everyone. It doesn’t create anything constructive or with substance to it. Main thing it does is drag down the place and poison the atmosphere. I’d rather you just block the community if you don’t like the content, and move on with your day.
Make of this what you will. I also downvote misinformation and bad content. But rarely do I scroll through something just to vote on it or make my opinion known to everybody. (With some minor exceptions.)
I think the main difference is that I don’t see downvoting terrible stuff as the same thing as downvoting positive stuff.
There is a lot of nuance to it. I’d say receiving one downvote feels as annoying as it feels good to receive 5 upvotes. At least to me, so I’d say downvotes are worth more. But yeah, this is kind of a different topic. Upvoting bad stuff or downvoting good stuff is both very stupid. But this isn’t a competition or an excercise in stupidity. Just downvote bad/terrible content and upvote if you think other people might want to read it, too. And use your brain before using the voting system for different purposes than those.
I think “pro-AI” is an overstatement for one comm about generated art. They just want to enjoy the art without the drama.
Maybe the comm needs a better name than “leftymemes” if that’s what it’s for 🤷♀️
.dbzer0 is an explicitly pro-AI instance. It isn’t limited to specific comms, it’s every single comm, AI images are allowed untagged and criticism of them is banned - unless that comm has an explicit rule against AI images, and when I asked a mod (Unruffled) for a list of comms like that, they responded by mocking me.
That;s a great way to put it.
Its like denouncing all of reddit because of one subreddit (not saying you shouldn’t denounce reddit).
But don’t you get it? Once capitalism and its shackles are overthrown, AI will not be a problem. It will be a tool for communist utoparadise. 🫠
AI consumes more resources than Bitcoin, at this point. We are accelerating our own demise, all for the spectacle of watching a computer hallucinate on command. There is nothing more decadently bourgeoisie than that.
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AI development and usage isn’t about to be stopped under any economic system, any more than computers were. But the instance is exclusively anti-corporate, pro-open-source AI. It’s not like they’re waiting for a revolution to try to use the tech more responsibly.
I think the same was said on ozone destroying gases and leaded gasoline. Look where they’re currently. Or should we also encurage the “anti-corporate” use of those? Maybe even stop our fight against big plastic, because open-source plastic making could be an advantage over the corporate stuff?
These are laughably incomparable. You literally can’t use freon or leaded gasoline without causing damage. You can run computers entirely on clean, renewable energy. The issue is the energy generation and mass-scale inefficient use of resources.
Small AI models can be hosted on a laptop. Unless you are advocating for abandoning computers as a technology?
If we didn’t waste energy and resource on the AI, it wouldn’t be as accessible and advanced as currently is, which is fine by me, but not by those who think the AI is like a “little person in the computer”, or that a super AI will solve all of humanity’s problems, including those caused by said AI.
Those are issues with generalist corporate AI designed to replace human labor and search engines. Not small, open-source image generators.
The issue, as always, is that we have dragged our feet on renewables for over half a century, and allowed massive corporations to steer our usage of resources to massive, inefficient “convenience” systems designed to extract as much wealth as possible at the cost of the environment and humanity’s future.
I feel like comparing AI to computers is misleading. AI can obviously be really good, computers can do so much more
Also, its not like all AI has to be so big, stealing from and competing with artists
They should, though. The Earth is burning.
Small AI models can be hosted on a laptop. It’s the corporate AI’s that are burning the world.
They can’t be trained on a laptop. It’s like arguing that beef can be cooked on an electric stove, and ignoring the emissions from the agriculture.
https://www.databricks.com/blog/stable-diffusion-2
We’ve replicated Stable Diffusion 2 for less than $50k, and we’ve open-sourced the training code so you can too! This is a 3x cost reduction from our last blog post and an 8x reduction from the original Stable Diffusion 2, making training large-scale diffusion models from scratch more accessible than ever before.
AI model training is getting more efficient over time, not less. And each model only needs to be trained once, so your analogy doesn’t quite work.
https://huggingface.co/docs/diffusers/main/en/tutorials/basic_training
You can absolutely train a small, specialized model on minimal hardware.
It’s also locally hosted and free to use, so each image generated does not directly incentivize the training of future models, unlike cloud-based subscription services.
Worrying about open-source AI while corporate AI burns orders of magnitude more resources every day is much like everything else with climate change. Even if you somehow stopped it, it would barely be a drop in the bucket against the massive, inefficient behemoths destroying the world.
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