So, lately I have been seeing AI bros always using the “It democratizes coding/game dev/modding/drawing/music creation/video editing/insert a hobby that requires actual skills” argument. And it always just irritates me.
Like, democratizing a skill means giving everyone an equal opportunity, which is what free (specially FOSS) tools do, think Krita, Blender, Godot, etc… You get the tools that you need for said hobby free of charge thanks to the GOATed people that maintain them. And then you learn it.
But AI, it just works on the basis of who has more disposable income to feed the capitalist machine. Like where is the “democratization” when the person with more money gets the better experience. Isn’t that the era of paid software all over again? isn’t that literally the opposite?
Yeah, so that is the end of my rant, I just wanted to vent out to people who will understand that sort of thing (talking about a fine echo chamber ;) )
And I hope people point out that stupid argument when they see meatproxies using it :)
The one downvote is from fElon Musk.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said
We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.
I don’t see how anybody could see this and think it’s democratizing something. It gives the rich a way to reduce their dependency on the skilled worker, shifting power away from the people with skill to the people with money.
There used to be a promise that if you worked hard and studied diligently, you yourself might be able to capture some of that wealth. Now this option is slowly disappearing.
I don’t get it either. If you don’t have the skill to do something you can always pay someone. That doesn’t make you the one with the skill though. If they did it for free then you still aren’t the one doing the thing. You’re just an ideas person. That’s not a bad thing but it usually is the easy part of any creative endeavor.
The way the speak of democratizing skill reminds me of how in the short story “Harrison Bergeron” they made us read of school.
Essentially to make everyone equal they have to handicap others who are smarter.
In our world we are moving towards that unintentionally. In order to make everyone equal that means the access and use of all said tools must be equal too.
In our world we are slowly dismantling all systems of production to replace it with llms. In the future the epstine class wants for us no one will have access to Photoshop or Godot they will only have ai terminal to interact with. Everyone’s equal now and has equal access to approved information, and equal access to said tools. Yet there is no opritunity for thought, intelligence, creativity outside of said tool. You are capped by what information you are presented and what capabilities the tool allows you to have. People who have the capacity to think outside the box are now restrained by an artificial barrier with no real outlet.
Sure in reality there’s always going to be a separate carve out on the internet where people will still access non-ai tools. But we are those people lol, and I wouldn’t say the fediverse is nessisarly thriving. There’s something like .01% of google search users ever hit page 2 on search results, people are just going to use what ever ai tool or popular service is trending.
It empowers fakers and crooks far more than it does anyone else. For the common people to gain power, it was necessary for the nobility to lose theirs. If already advantaged people (in this case by being unburdened by a conscience) gain the most power, that represents a net loss of power for most people.
Plutocratizing just doesn’t sound as marketable
It’s the exact opposite! It privatizes skill. Instead of people learning skills themselves, those skills are owned by the AI company and need to be purchased for continued use and can be taken away with the press of a button.
But if I learn a skill, no one can take that away from me.
I’ll also add it commodifies the output of said skill, the whole point of ai seems to speed up productivity in order for the output to be marketable faster, which just goes against what art is about for example
yeah, exactly, even if they use local models (cuz I am sure some people will try to use that as an excuse), it is still the same problem, just pushed to the hardware cost instead of the tokens
anyways, always happy to see people that haven’t been swallowed by the AI craze
Whenever big tech says they’re “democratizing” something. Replace the word with monetizing.
They reinvent things but with tech to enable them to rent seek. When challenged on it they wave around the tech and wait for the mesmerized crowd applause.
skills have always been democratized. just practice, get books from the library, now you can watch tutorials on youtube! ai capitalizes skills for corporations.
“The purpose of AI is to give wealth access to skill without giving skill access to wealth.”
“Democratizing skill” in online video games is cheating: Letting some program do the work for you.
I absolutely LOVE this analogy
It’s not even strictly an ai thing, they were tossing that word around during the low-code/no-code fad too, and given those tools all required expensive licenses I had the same opinion about it then as you do now.
I think there are two arguments that you’re making.
One is the anti-capitalist angle, corporate ownership of AI only serves to amplify the growing income inequality. It’s build on the destruction of much of the personal computer industry, the labor market, the environments around the datacenters, etc and all we get for this incredibly high cost is the chance to forever pay a rent seeking corporation who stole the collective sum of human knowledge. I super agree with this.
The other is the technology angle. The AI run on the massive datacenters are more capable than the open weight models available to the rest of us so anyone paying into the corporate AI machine is able to have an advantage over anybody else. Agree with this too.
I don’t see AI as replacing actual skilled people who’ve dedicated their time to a hobby. An AI isn’t a better programmer than a person with years experience and it does not create images or music than an artist who’s dedicated years to their craft.
But, it does raise the floor for what a non-rich person with zero training or skill can produce. Most people can’t afford to hire a programmer with 30 years of experience or an artist who has decades of experience but they can produce poor quality but functional code with AI.
It’s kind of like how libraries democratized knowledge. Sure, if you were rich you could afford to buy books, hire private tutors or attend college and that gives you an advantage but libraries gave regular people access to knowledge without the monetary barrier. The rich person still has every advantage but a library creates a path for working people to access knowledge.
Definitely fuck the corporate AI, but the people in the FOSS community who’re working to pry AI for corporate hands and make it accessible for everyone don’t deserve to be lumped in with Sam Altman.
Running a model locally still comes with considerable costs in terms of hardware and electricity. So until it can run on an office laptop with only an integrated GPU, the financial barrier is still quite a bit higher than just having access to a PC, software and learning material.
Also, even FOSS locally run AI models are in practical terms “owned” in a way that most other open source software is not. To make a comparison: if vim were to somehow prevent me from specifically writing the long-awaited sequel Communist Manifesto 2: Communist Harder, I could look in the source code and see why this is happening. Of course this requires skills that not everybody has, but there are enough people with that skill set that it’s unlikely things will stay that way without consequences.
But if an LLM has some kind of slant that causes it to favour certain output, what do I do? Do a big data analysis on the training data, then redo the training with the biases removed from the training data, all without the funding from people who probably want the slant to be there? You have less ability to hold the developer accountable to the users, but at the same time, the high costs involved in making these means you don’t have many real alternatives to choose between.
Lastly, this:
But, it does raise the floor for what a non-rich person with zero training or skill can produce. Most people can’t afford to hire a programmer with 30 years of experience or an artist who has decades of experience but they can produce poor quality but functional code with AI.
This is no more democratising than a carnival shooting gallery handing its customers an AK-47 is. Yes, someone can ask an AI to create a program that does a thing and then verify whether the program produces the result they expect, but they have no way of verifying whether it’s doing what it should be doing and only that. Is it hammering the server it’s interacting with? Is it making network shares accessible over the internet without credentials? They have no way of knowing, because they don’t have the necessary skills. Increasing people’s ability to accidentally and unknowingly cause harm to themselves and others isn’t empowering them.
I compare it to citizen united, or pay to win, where money can boost your participation. And if you believe that citizen united is a good thing, you value democratization of skill
Just leaving this here…
https://gizmodo.com/the-tech-bros-are-putting-swords-on-robots-and-democratizing-mma-2000823619
I have an AKAI MPC. Industry standard music production shit. It uses AI to reverse engineer copyrighted music. It can generate beats. Some of your favorite music was made using placeholder beats. I can give you examples from most industries. I’m telling yall, you’re barking up the wrong damned tree.
I have my doubts that what you’re describing actually uses “AI” in any modern sense of the word (no matter of what the marketing might say), that seems like something that can be done reliably using plain old frequency analysis. Regardless, this kind of application of AI, where it analyses a fuzzy source of data and tries to find a signal in it, is not really the kind of AI this community is really complaining about.
