But more likely they haven't found the right genere for them, or they're reading primarily low quality books because they're afraid of books that look to smart.

I don't like reading fiction all that much myself. I like hearing discussions of fiction and I'm trying to push myself through most of the classics so I can take part in discussing them. But the thing about reading classics is you can't fully appreciate them from the rack. Reading classics and missing the historical/philosophical/etc context is like looking at a painting with your glasses off. Which probably is also what is pushing these people away from engaging with them. You're just not getting the full picture unless it's something you already like independently. Untill you get to the literature class or the essays or the discussions.

This goes double if you mostly engage with foreign books.

Tldr Tankies, like all authoritarians, are allergic to nuance and will always justify violence against their enemies. This is because marxism-leninism is an authoritarian ideology that serves to justify the actions of those in power against their enemies. I don't know for sure that OP is a tankie, but you know that ISFF's tankie beliefs are why she thinks this isnt a horrific thing to agree with.

FACT: Lesbainism was invented by a transmasculine person. Look him up.

FACT: U S AMERIKKAN "LESBIANS" AND RADFEMS UNRIGHTFULLY TRIED TO PUSH OUT BUTCHES IN THE 70S.

"hey you! you have no meaningful connections and are too afraid to make any! want to talk to your favorite characters instead? they won't judge you, you control the narrative!"

and then they get so hooked on it, its hard to quit and they start overlooking the moral snags. and what makes this latest batch of ads that much more awful is that they are framing the ads to masquerade as other people, using stolen fanart and listing the advertiser as a "user", and deliberately trying to skate around the reasons that make people swear off AI chatbots (saying they're ethically sourced, powered by renewable energy, "not parasocial") so that recovering addicts or skeptics will go "oh, so this one's perfectly fine? no harm with using it, right?"

Roleplaying with people is creating a collaborative story, roleplay with AI is playing an interactive fiction game, but instead of choosing specific options you can write them yourself and can make pretty much any story you want appear before you.

The idea that someone desiring artistic output without Putting In The Work is an individual moral failure and/or an indicator of some form of widespread societal decay.

Anything related to copyright, intellectual property, or the idea that copying something (or in the case of AI, collecting statistical data on something to construct a mathematical model) can be meaningfully described as theft.

The idea that AI generated media is categorically Not Art.

The idea that using AI gives people any form of permanent brain damage or "cognitive decay" or whatever fancy-sounding euphemism for "mentally disabled" people are using this month.

The idea that environmental impact alone makes individual AI usage inherently immoral (while still considering other equally frivolous uses of the internet with comparable environmental impacts morally neutral)

Reacting OPs bullets in order:

- leaving aside 'morality' and 'social decay' the entirely understandable impulse to want something for nothing is nevertheless *incorrect* and the use of the mirage of AI image generators to make it *seem like* you can get what you want with no work or development is *bad for people* because it shapes their *beliefs and attitudes* toward others, especially artists, but also anyone on whose labor they rely.

-sure, fine, who cares. Copyright laws might be a good way of combatting the thing in a tactical sense but I'm not invested in this.

- I guess? I want to return to this later but in itself not a statement I have huge problems with.

- ai chatbots have been repeatedly demonstrated to exacerbate existing problems and be the trigger for unprecedented mental health crises in individuals without a history of mental illness. People who use AI to do things they can do themselves demonstrably begin to *lose the capacity to do those things for themselves.* Some people use loaded language used to try to describe this phenomenon but the phenomenon is *real and bad!* Just because similar language is used to stigmatize people with developmental or cognitive disabilities doesn't make it okay to push people to use the machine that *gives you developmental and cognitive disabilities you did not have before using the machine* and *makes your existing disabilities more debilitating!* It's bad!

- I think the point here is "individual" AI use which like, fine, my one joke image of Drake escaping the international space station as it is destroyed by a jet of cum from the surface of the earth isn't the lynchpin of demand incentivizing the construction of *new and particularly destructive* data centers to support AI, but since AI image generation and so forth isn't actually *good for anything* and *costs nothing not to use* it feels like a no brainer and you're allowed to be annoyed by people thoughtlessly adding their single drop of water to the bucket.

- if anyone actually invokes the soul, they are wackos and can be dismissed. That's fine and cool, but I want to use this as a jumping off point and imagine a worst case scenario where this point is distorting what people mean when they talk about the difference between art created by a person with a specific point of view being expressed in their choices and techniques when making a work and AI output that mimics that without having any intentionality or point of view behind it. There is actually a difference between asserting a nonmaterial soul and accurately describing the process by which the work is produced. This is relevant to the idea that AI is 'categorically not art' because one of the things that AI removes is the *intentionality behind specific choices.* the difference between an AI mashing up data points from millions of images and collage/cutup/mashup art is that *the artist makes the choice of which works to incorporate into their new work* and *which parts of them to use.* As a viewer you are still perfectly capable of having an experience with and interpretation of the image produced by the model, but there is no person on the other end of that you are receiving communication from. There's a prompter, and there are the thousands/millions of artists whose work has been cut up and recombined, but *none of those people made the choices that resulted in the image you are looking at.* The prompter made a choice to write out something that described something they wish they could see, and thousands of artists made choices in making the works that are being cannibalized to construct the final output, but neither of those people make any specific or deliberate choices about how those intentions and techniques are specifically deployed in the construction of the final output. The model connected those things together through the statistical relationship between different nodes of data.

Point being: a good portion of what are pointed out here as 'bad arguments against AI' are all connected to the same idea:

Generative AI tools mimic modes of interactions with other people in a way that is harmful to the user of the tool. Whether it's a chatbot that pulls you into a delusional spiral or an image generator that makes a facsimile of an idea you had while hiding the labor that its production required, it is *talking to yourself* in a way that *looks and feels like talking to another person*. Art is not fundamentally a *consumptive* process but a *communicative* one and AI *mimics* communication, whether through art or conversation, while actually *isolating users from other people!* Some AI critics refer to it as the 'anti-printing press' because it actively *hampers* the capacity for humans to communicate over distance.

And I understand if some people are insensitive in the language they use to talk about it, if they use words that trip your sensors for ableism, for eugenic assumptions, and that makes you suspicious of those arguments. But I urge you to understand the *substance* of the arguments. It is bad to isolate people with the illusion of connection to others. Humans require society and will personify inanimate objects at the best of times, let alone when we are already isolated from others for whatever reason. Many people are already isolated because of existing problems in our society and they deserve compassion and tangible support, but the existence of their suffering doesn't make it neutral to participate in a technology that further isolates even more people!

if, as an example, tech gazillionaires were trying to push down our throats a machine that cuts your legs off, it would actually be fine to object to that on the grounds that it is making more people unable to walk, even though people who are already unable to walk need help and support they aren't getting and are full humans who deserve every consideration that people who can walk deserve. But probably a lot of people would talk about that problem in a way that isn't very considerate of people who already can't walk! And that's not great! but it doesn't mean that the criticism "it makes people unable to walk" isn't a valid attack on the machine that cuts your legs off!

After enough debating everyone will come to the conclusion "The way LLMs are currently used is kinda bad for people in general" which is cool, but the general consensus within leftist spaces right now is treating LLMs and AI as the second coming of Satan that will destroy civilisation as we know it and anyone who isn't strictly aganist it should be ostracized.

This is the expansion of the point made in the post itself

while llms have uses they are being pushed by moneyed interests and embraced by fascists for tasks they are not suited to and that is causing measurable harm both from a public health and economic perspective.

"Art" produced by llms is less valuable both artistically and monetarily, and devalues the work of artists and writers and more workers that are being poorly automated by llms. the environmental impact of the outsized adoption of the technology as part of an economic bubble is causing particular environmental harm in places where data centers are being thrown up and adding unnecessary strain to our existing practices that are already accelerating climate change. Use of LLMs by everyday people is damaging their psyches and capabilities without providing large scale productivity gains.

All of this makes finding the actual good use cases for LLMs more challenging and less likely to be effectively utilized.

LLMs aren't a technology that just exists separately from ideology. There is an ideological push for LLM adoption, a technologists ideology that looks at everything including art, culture and language as a set of statistically connected nodes of data that can be connected and recombined according to mathematical formulae. That's an ideological view that excludes the psychological and economic value and utility of specifically art, culture and language.

This ideological push requires ideological pushBACK, ideology is what societies use to decide how to prioritize effort, and the ideology driving LLM adoption is *bad* and creating *bad outcomes.* Ideological resistance is necessary to correct that and try to ensure that whatever productive uses exist for the technology are actually found and used and ensure that the harm it is already causing is mitigated.

Opposing the use of llms for art, language, and the automation of creative work on various fronts is *important for ensuring that this technology is developed in a way that is beneficial to people and not as yet another lever used to exploit people, devalue labor, damage public health, and further destroy the environment.*

No we are reacting to seeing a bunch of people get their *legs cut off by the machine!* We want fewer people to get their legs cut off by the machine! Ideally none! I think the number of people getting their legs cut off by the machine should be zero and if it's going to be more than zero there had better be a damn good outcome to point to or I'm going to suggest simply turning off the machine that cuts people's legs off!

"You just don't like the machine that cuts people's legs off because the fascists like it"

The fascists like it because they revel in misery and torment! They like it when the machine cuts people's legs off because it makes them feel powerful! The ideology of the fascists and the ideology that produced the machine that cuts your legs off are complimentary!

"your hysteria makes nuanced criticism of the machine that cuts your legs off impossible"

If you think LLMs are uniquely worth critiquing because they're new you might be right, but looking at it from a distance they're not uniquely problematic. They're just as bad as many other things which are also bad, but not only are they not criticized in general, they are not stigmatized. I think taking a plane to go on vacation is ultimately the better comparison, because it is just pure wasteful luxury because "I wanted to" and because "I can".

We all want "ideally no legs cut off by the machine" (implying unique evil again) we all want to live in a perfect world, but what ends up happening is you say the machine is bad the machine needs to change and you get hit with "yes, it does (false statement)" and you go "no it doesn't" and then you end up defending the machine and you're like "how did we get there".

The idea that someone desiring artistic output without Putting In The Work is an individual moral failure and/or an indicator of some form of widespread societal decay.

Anything related to copyright, intellectual property, or the idea that copying something (or in the case of AI, collecting statistical data on something to construct a mathematical model) can be meaningfully described as theft.

The idea that AI generated media is categorically Not Art.

The idea that using AI gives people any form of permanent brain damage or "cognitive decay" or whatever fancy-sounding euphemism for "mentally disabled" people are using this month.

The idea that environmental impact alone makes individual AI usage inherently immoral (while still considering other equally frivolous uses of the internet with comparable environmental impacts morally neutral)

Reacting OPs bullets in order:

- leaving aside 'morality' and 'social decay' the entirely understandable impulse to want something for nothing is nevertheless *incorrect* and the use of the mirage of AI image generators to make it *seem like* you can get what you want with no work or development is *bad for people* because it shapes their *beliefs and attitudes* toward others, especially artists, but also anyone on whose labor they rely.

-sure, fine, who cares. Copyright laws might be a good way of combatting the thing in a tactical sense but I'm not invested in this.

- I guess? I want to return to this later but in itself not a statement I have huge problems with.

- ai chatbots have been repeatedly demonstrated to exacerbate existing problems and be the trigger for unprecedented mental health crises in individuals without a history of mental illness. People who use AI to do things they can do themselves demonstrably begin to *lose the capacity to do those things for themselves.* Some people use loaded language used to try to describe this phenomenon but the phenomenon is *real and bad!* Just because similar language is used to stigmatize people with developmental or cognitive disabilities doesn't make it okay to push people to use the machine that *gives you developmental and cognitive disabilities you did not have before using the machine* and *makes your existing disabilities more debilitating!* It's bad!

- I think the point here is "individual" AI use which like, fine, my one joke image of Drake escaping the international space station as it is destroyed by a jet of cum from the surface of the earth isn't the lynchpin of demand incentivizing the construction of *new and particularly destructive* data centers to support AI, but since AI image generation and so forth isn't actually *good for anything* and *costs nothing not to use* it feels like a no brainer and you're allowed to be annoyed by people thoughtlessly adding their single drop of water to the bucket.

- if anyone actually invokes the soul, they are wackos and can be dismissed. That's fine and cool, but I want to use this as a jumping off point and imagine a worst case scenario where this point is distorting what people mean when they talk about the difference between art created by a person with a specific point of view being expressed in their choices and techniques when making a work and AI output that mimics that without having any intentionality or point of view behind it. There is actually a difference between asserting a nonmaterial soul and accurately describing the process by which the work is produced. This is relevant to the idea that AI is 'categorically not art' because one of the things that AI removes is the *intentionality behind specific choices.* the difference between an AI mashing up data points from millions of images and collage/cutup/mashup art is that *the artist makes the choice of which works to incorporate into their new work* and *which parts of them to use.* As a viewer you are still perfectly capable of having an experience with and interpretation of the image produced by the model, but there is no person on the other end of that you are receiving communication from. There's a prompter, and there are the thousands/millions of artists whose work has been cut up and recombined, but *none of those people made the choices that resulted in the image you are looking at.* The prompter made a choice to write out something that described something they wish they could see, and thousands of artists made choices in making the works that are being cannibalized to construct the final output, but neither of those people make any specific or deliberate choices about how those intentions and techniques are specifically deployed in the construction of the final output. The model connected those things together through the statistical relationship between different nodes of data.

Point being: a good portion of what are pointed out here as 'bad arguments against AI' are all connected to the same idea:

Generative AI tools mimic modes of interactions with other people in a way that is harmful to the user of the tool. Whether it's a chatbot that pulls you into a delusional spiral or an image generator that makes a facsimile of an idea you had while hiding the labor that its production required, it is *talking to yourself* in a way that *looks and feels like talking to another person*. Art is not fundamentally a *consumptive* process but a *communicative* one and AI *mimics* communication, whether through art or conversation, while actually *isolating users from other people!* Some AI critics refer to it as the 'anti-printing press' because it actively *hampers* the capacity for humans to communicate over distance.

And I understand if some people are insensitive in the language they use to talk about it, if they use words that trip your sensors for ableism, for eugenic assumptions, and that makes you suspicious of those arguments. But I urge you to understand the *substance* of the arguments. It is bad to isolate people with the illusion of connection to others. Humans require society and will personify inanimate objects at the best of times, let alone when we are already isolated from others for whatever reason. Many people are already isolated because of existing problems in our society and they deserve compassion and tangible support, but the existence of their suffering doesn't make it neutral to participate in a technology that further isolates even more people!

if, as an example, tech gazillionaires were trying to push down our throats a machine that cuts your legs off, it would actually be fine to object to that on the grounds that it is making more people unable to walk, even though people who are already unable to walk need help and support they aren't getting and are full humans who deserve every consideration that people who can walk deserve. But probably a lot of people would talk about that problem in a way that isn't very considerate of people who already can't walk! And that's not great! but it doesn't mean that the criticism "it makes people unable to walk" isn't a valid attack on the machine that cuts your legs off!

After enough debating everyone will come to the conclusion "The way LLMs are currently used is kinda bad for people in general" which is cool, but the general consensus within leftist spaces right now is treating LLMs and AI as the second coming of Satan that will destroy civilisation as we know it and anyone who isn't strictly aganist it should be ostracized.

This is the expansion of the point made in the post itself