• KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      I would argue it’s even more powerful in the hands of someone with artistic skill, between eliminating busywork and their own ability covering for its shortcomings. If it can cut down the work involved in turning a starting sketch into a finished piece then it stands to reason that someone with talent can make use of that even more effectively and use it to amplify their own skilled labor. Even modest talent is enough to go and clean up its flaws, so surely even greater talent could make even better use of it.

      The conclusion I’ve come to it on it is that it’s a powerful piece of productive capital and the fact that Capitalists will misuse it to cause considerable harm shouldn’t stop us from seizing it for ourselves as well - Capitalists have used every new piece of productive capital for harm, and that never stopped the left from repurposing captured machines and factories before. We cannot stop the problems it’s causing and will cause without defeating them entirely, and abstaining from technology out of pride or disgust with its use by Capitalists means we get weaker even as they get stronger.

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          Yeah. Like I started watching the Stable Diffusion community to keep up to date on new developments and resources, and like 90% of the people involved should be locked up for a variety of reasons, and even the more innocent of them are mostly treatbox addicts marveling wide eyed at the tech and eagerly sharing whatever nonsense it spat out in much the same way as a child talking about a dream they had.

          Still, I can’t help but be impressed by the tech itself and how accessible the open source local models are - a midrange gaming rig can easily run them well, and even some AMD cards can handle it ok (with the caveat that some individual cards seem to just hard crash at random with ROCm, like my 6800, which has left me too anxious to do much with it since I’ve started feeling a spike of panic every time I hit generate and the fans start spinning up). It doesn’t require some $5K+ card like commercial AIs do, and the strongest open source tools right now are absurd already.

          I’m convinced that in the right hands it’s got to be an amazing tool, and my cynical and pragmatic side says we should seize upon it and see what heights it can be taken to instead of just leaving it to be a vapid treatbox for the worst people alive.