When the fuck will you people get it?? Every technology will eventually be used against you by the state
AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented
Submitted 7 hours ago by Pro@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/ai-dismantle-democracy
Comments
crystalmerchant@lemmy.world 26 minutes ago
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 minute ago
Oh totally man that’s brilliant. Let’s reject technology. It’s bad
Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world 41 minutes ago
If AI can be used to dismantle democracy it can be use to make it flourish. People are the problem.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world 38 minutes ago
It could also be an effective tool for liberation. Tools are like that. Just matters how they’re used and by whom.
match@pawb.social 4 minutes ago
some tools are actually strictly bad to use, like nuclear bombs, landmines, or chemical weapons
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Nope. I’d still say social media/social media algorithms.
Imagine if social media didn’t exist (beyond small, tight-knit communities like forums about [topic], or BBS communities), but all these AI tools still did.
Susan creates an AI generated image of illegal immigrants punching toddlers, then puts it on her “news” blog full of other AI content generated to push an agenda.
Who would see it? How would it spread? Maybe a few people she knows. It’d be pretty localised, and she’d be quickly known as a crank.
Add social media to the mix, and all of a sudden she has tens of thousands of eyes on her, which brings more and more. People argue against it, and that entrenches the other side even more. News media sees the amount of attention it gets and they feel they have to report, and the whole thing keeps growing. Wealthy people who can benefit from the bullshit start funding it and it continues to grow still.
You don’t need AI to do this, it just makes it even easier. You do need social media to do this. The whole model simply wouldn’t work without it.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
Half of it wouldn’t even work if the news media would do their job and filter out crap like that instead of being lazy and reporting what is going on on social media.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 24 minutes ago
One week the whole US news cycle was dominated by “Cheungus posted an AI pic of Trump on truth social”… I mean… I get that the presidency was at times considered dignified in the modern era so it’s something of a “vibe shift”, but the media has to have a better eye for bullshit than that. The indicators unfortunately are that it’s going to continue this slide as well because news rooms are conglomerating, slashing resources, and getting left in the dust by slanted podcasts and YouTube videos.
Some of it is their own fault. People watching the local news full of social media AI slop are somewhat reasonable in turning off the TV and going straight to the source instead of relying on news anchors becoming some type of shitty reaction videos.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
They also shouldn’t report on the horse race. They should report on issues.
Reporting on elections is always disappointing.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
something something lamestream media!
MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 2 hours ago
While I generally agree and consider this insightful, it behooves us to remember the (actual, 1930s) Nazis did it with newspapers, radio and rallies (… in a cave, with a box of scraps).
Grimy@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
I wonder if we are being groomed to hate it because it would be an effective tool to fight fascism.
HubertManne@piefed.social 43 minutes ago
Id rather wash dishes in the netherlands than be a rich russian olgiarch or part of north koreas upper echelon. Why are these rich idiots so stupid about this stuff.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 7 hours ago
Only if you don’t consider capitalism.
thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
Hot take: what most people call AI (large language and diffusion models) is, in fact, part of peak capitalism:
- relies on ill gotten gains (training data obtained without permission, payment or licensing)
- aims to remove human workers from the workforce within a system that (for many) requires them to work because capitalism has removed the bulk of social safety netting
- currently has no real route to profit at any reasonable price point
- speculative at best
- reinforces the concentration of power amongst a few tech firms
- will likely also result in regulatory capture with the large firms getting legislation passed that only they can provide “AI” safely
I could go on but hopefully that’s adequate as a PoV.
“AI” is just one of cherries on top of late stage capitalism that embodies the worst of all it.
So I don’t disagree - but felt compelled to share.
Deceptichum@quokk.au 7 hours ago
Kinda like people focusing on petty crime and ignoring the fact that corporations steal billions from us.
We as a society give capitalism such a blanket pass, that we don’t even consider what it actually is.
notfromhere@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
When you live in a cage, you think of the bars as part of your home.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 4 hours ago
I don’t believe the common refrain that AI is only a problem because of capitalism. People already disinform, make mistakes, take irresponsible shortcuts, and spam even when there is no monetary incentive to do so.
I also don’t believe that AI is “just a tool”, fundamentally neutral and void of any political predisposition. This has been discussed at length academically. But it’s also something we know well in our idiom: “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” When you have AI, genuine communication looks like raw material. And the ability to place generated output alongside the original… looks like a goal.
Culture — the ability to have a very long-term ongoing conversation that continues across many generations, about how we ought to live — is by far the defining feature of our species. It’s not only the source of our abilities, but also the source of our morality.
Despite a very long series of authors warning us, we have allowed a pocket of our society to adopt the belief that ability is morality. “The fact that we can, means we should.”
We’re witnessing the early stages of the information equivalent of Kessler Syndrome. It’s not that some bad actors who were always present will be using a new tool. It’s that any public conversation broad enough to be culturally significant will be so full of AI debris that it will be almost impossible for humans to find each other.
The worst part is that this will be (or is) largely invisible. We won’t know that we’re wasting hours of our lives reading and replying to bots, tugging on a steering wheel, trying to guide humanity’s future, not realizing the autopilot is discarding our inputs. It’s not a dead internet that worries me, but an undead internet. A shambling corpse that moves in vain, unaware of its own demise.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 hours ago
It’s that any public conversation broad enough to be culturally significant will be so full of AI debris that it will be almost impossible for humans to find each other.
This is the part that I question, this is certainly a fear and it totally makes sense to me but as I have argued in other threads recently I think there is a very good chance that while those in power believe that an analog of the Kessler Syndrome will happen in information, and this is precisely why they most of them are pushing this future, that it might spectactularly backfire on them.
I have a theory I call the “Wind-up Flashlight Theory” which is that when the internet reaches a dead state full of AI nonsense that makes it impossible to connect with humans, that rather than it be the completion of a process of censorship and oppression of thought that our imagination cannot escape from, a darkness and gloom that nobody can find their way in… the darkness simply serves to highlight the people in the room who have wind-up flashlights are unable to make their own light.
Tiger@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Great insights, thank you.
blinx615@lemmy.ml 4 hours ago
It’s psychological warfare. By manipulating the social communities they can push the lies they want and most normies will lap it up.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 7 hours ago
And please broaden this beyond AI. The attention economy that comes with social media, and other forms of "tech-feudalism", manipulation, targeting and tracking/surveillance aren't healthy either, even if they don't rely on AI and machine learning.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 5 hours ago
I agree but I don’t think it has much to do with the tool itself beyond it being a superb culpability obscuring tool, what we are witnessing is essentially a birth of a religion just a super lame one.
A status quo where people are not allowed to break in rhetoric or ideology as quality of life plummets will create a rising potential for the introduction of a concept that nullifies or simply exists outside the framework of that status quo worldview that is strangling people.
For people who are obsessed with AI, the unreality of it is precisely what lets AI function as an ideological lifeboat that doesn’t require grappling with the immense issues with our worldviews and assumptions as a society because AI can be added to contexts as a Deus Ex Machina that disguises and explains away incrongruities between our broken world views and the desperate reality caused by them.
noretus@sopuli.xyz 7 hours ago
Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus gets into this as well. It’s a really powerful tool that we are very, very ill equipped to use responsibly.
kaeurennetwo@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I love democracy.
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 15 minutes ago
A tool is a tool. What matters is who is using it and for what.