Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”
Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”
Idk if it’s the biggest problem, but it’s probably top three.
Other problems could include:
Dead Internet theory has never been a bigger threat. I believe that’s the number one danger - endless quantities of advertising and spam shoved down our throats from every possible direction.
We’re pretty close to it, most videos on YouTube and websites that exist are purely just for some advertiser to pay that person for a review or recommendation
Could also put up:
There's actually a much longer list if we expand to talking about other AI systems, like the robot systems we're currently training to use in automatic warfare. There's also the angle of these image and text generation systems being used for political manipulation and scams. There's alot of terrible problems created from this tech.
Power usage
I'm generally a huge eco guy but on power usage particularly I view this largely as a government failure. We have had to incredible energy resources that the government has chosen not to implement or effectively dismantled.
It reminds me a lot of how Recycling has been pushed so hard into the general public instead of and government laws on plastic usage and waste disposal.
It's always easier to wave your hands and blame "society" than the is to hold the actual wealthy and powerful accountable.
Power usage probably won't be a major issue; the main take-home message of the Deepseek brouhaha is that training and inference can be much more efficiently than we had thought (our estimates had been based on well-funded Western companies that didn't have to bother with optimization).
AI spam is an annoyance, but it's not really AI-specific but the continuation of a trend; the Internet was already drowning in human-created slop before LLMs came along. At some point, we will probably all have to rely on AI tools to filter it out. This isn't something that can be unwound, any more than you can undo computers being able to play chess well.
That it's controlled by a few is only a problem if you use it... my issue with it starts before that.
My biggest gripe with AI is the same problem I have with anything crypto: It's out of control power consumption relative to the problem it solves or purpose it serves. And by extension the fact nobody with any kind of real political power is addressing this.
Here we are using recycled bags, banning straws, putting explosive refrigerant in fridges and using led lights in everything, all in the name of the environment, while at the same time in some datacenter they are burning kwh's by the bucket loads generating pictures of cats in space suits.
Here we are using recycled bags, banning straws, putting explosive refrigerant in fridges and using led lights in everything, all in the name of the environment, while at the same time in some datacenter they are burning kwh’s by the bucket loads generating pictures of cats in space suits.
That's, #1, fashion and not about environment, #2, fashion promoted because it's cheaper for the industry.
And yes, power saved somewhere will just be spent elsewhere. Cheaper. Cause that means reduced demand for power (or grown not as fast as otherwise).
Here we are using recycled bags, banning straws, putting explosive refrigerant in fridges and using led lights in everything
lol, sucker. none of that does shit and industry was already destroying the planet just fine before ai came along.
My biggest gripe with AI is the same problem I have with anything crypto crypto: It's out of control power consumption relative to the problem it solves or purpose it serves.
Don't thrown all crypto under the bus. Only bitcoin and other proof of work protocols are power hungry. 2nd and 3rd generation crypto use mostly proof of stake and ZKrollups for security. Much more energy efficient.
Sure, but despite all the crypto bros assurances to the contrary, the only real-world applications for it is buying drugs, paying ransoms and getting scammed. Which means that any non-zero amount of energy is too much energy.
I'm aware of this, but it still mostly just something for people speculate on. Something people buy, sit on, and then hopefully sell with a profit.
Bitcoin was supposed to be a decentralized money alternative, but the amount of people actually, legitimately, buying things with crypto are highly negligible. And honestly even if it did serve it's actual purpose, the cumulative power consumption would still be a point of debate.
Truer words have never been said.
The problem with AI is that it pirates everyone’s work and then repackages it as its own and enriches the people that did not create the copywrited work.
I mean, it's our work the result should belong to the people.
This is where "universal basic income" comes into play
More broadly, I would expect UBI to trigger a golden age of invention and artistic creation because a lot of people would love to spend their time just creating new stuff without the need to monetise it but can't under the current system, and even if a lot of that would be shit or crazily niche, the more people doing it and the freer they are to do it, the more really special and amazing stuff will be created.
Unfortunately one will not lead to the other.
It will lead to the plot of Elysium.
That's what all artists have done since the dawn of ages.
Like Sam Altman who invests in Prospera, a private "Start-up City" in Honduras where the board of directors pick and choose which laws apply to them!
The switch to Techno-Feudalism is progressing far too much for my liking.
Techno-Feudalism
I'll say it, yet again. It's just feudalism. "Techno-Feudalism" has nothing different enough to it to differentiate it as even a sub-type of feudalism. It's just the same thing all over again, using technological advances to improve the ability to monitor and impose control over the populace. Historical feudalists also leveraged technology to cement their rule (plate armor, cavalry, crossbows, cannon, mills, control of literacy, etc).
Techno-Feudalism is a specific idea from Yanis Varifakous, about places like Amazon, Ebay, AliExpress, Steam, Facebook, even YouTube to some extent. It has to do with the Market Place controlling which prices are promoted to buyers and sellers, and is about price fixing and capturing industries that the bulk of the population require to do commerce.
This is a very important concept to note and understand because it relates to the end of two party Capitalism (where buyers and sellers negotiate prices with each other directly).
So no, the use of fuedalism isn't to indicate something about old school mechanisms of war, weaponry, brutality, or repression. It's a reference to the role of economic serfdom and the economic aspects of fuedalism. Comparing those particular aspects to the modern roles of content creators, drop shippers, and consumers. All of whom are forced through the economic lens of markets which are owned or controlled by billionaires who have captured/own these required marketplaces.
Attaching "tech" to everything makes it more palatable. Desirable even. It masks the fact that feudal lords are reinventing everything but with "tech".
AI has a vibrant open source scene and is definitely not owned by a few people.
A lot of the data to train it is only owned by a few people though. It is record companies and publishing houses winning their lawsuits that will lead to dystopia. It's a shame to see so many actually cheering them on.
So long as there are big players releasing open weights models, which is true for the foreseeable future, I don't think this is a big problem. Once those weights are released, they're free forever, and anyone can fine-tune based on them, or use them to bootstrap new models by distillation or synthetic RL data generation.
And a third intrinsic problem is that the current models with infinite training data have been proven to never approach human language capability, from papers written by OpenAI in 2020 and Deepmind in 2022, and also a paper by Stanford which proposes AI simply have no emergent behavior and only convergent behavior.
So yeah. Lots of problems.
While I completely agree with you, that is the one thing that could change with just one thing going right for one of all the groups that work on just that problem.
It's what happens after that that's really scary, probably. Perhaps we all go into some utopian AI driven future, but I highly doubt that's even possible.
If gigantic amounts of capital weren't available, then the focus would be on improving the models so they don't need GPU farms running off nuclear reactors plus the sum total of all posts on the Internet ever.
I’d say the biggest problem with AI is that it’s being treated as a tool to displace workers, but there is no system in place to make sure that that “value” (I’m not convinced commercial AI has done anything valuable) created by AI is redistributed to the workers that it has displaced.
Welcome to every technological advancement ever applied to the workforce
The system in place is “open weights” models. These AI companies don’t have a huge head start on the publicly available software, and if the value is there for a corporation, most any savvy solo engineer can slap together something similar.
The government likes concentrated ownership because then it has only a few phonecalls to make if it wants its bidding done (be it censorship, manipulation, partisan political chicanery, etc)
For some reason the megacorps have got LLMs on the brain, and they're the worst "AI" I've seen. There are other types of AI that are actually impressive, but the "writes a thing that looks like it might be the answer" machine is way less useful than they think it is.
most LLM's for chat, pictures and clips are magical and amazing. For about 4 - 8 hours of fiddling then they lose all entertainment value.
As for practical use, the things can't do math so they're useless at work. I write better Emails on my own so I can't imagine being so lazy and socially inept that I need help writing an email asking for tech support or outlining an audit report. Sometimes the web summaries save me from clicking a result, but I usually do anyway because the things are so prone to very convincing halucinations, so yeah, utterly useless in their current state.
I usually get some angsty reply when I say this by some techbro-AI-cultist-singularity-head who starts whinging how it's reshaped their entire lives, but in some deep niche way that is completely irrelevant to the average working adult.
I have also talked to way too many delusional maniacs who are literally planning for the day an Artificial Super Intelligence is created and the whole world becomes like Star Trek and they personally will become wealthy and have all their needs met. They think this is going to happen within the next 5 years.
Not solving any of the stated goals at the same time.
It's a diversion. Its purpose is to divert resources and attention from any real progress in computing.
AI business is owned by a tiny group of technobros, who have no concern for what they have to do to get the results they want ("fuck the copyright, especially fuck the natural resources") who want to be personally seen as the saviours of humanity (despite not being the ones who invented and implemented the actual tech) and, like all big wig biz boys, they want all the money.
I don't have problems with AI tech in the principle, but I hate the current business direction and what the AI business encourages people to do and use the tech for.
Well I'm on board for fuck intellectual property. If openai doesn't publish the weights then all their datacenter get visited by the killdozer
The biggest problem with AI is that it’s the brut force solution to complex problems.
Instead of trying to figure out what’s the most power efficient algorithm to do artificial analysis, they just threw more data and power at it.
Besides the fact of how often it’s wrong, by definition, it won’t ever be as accurate nor efficient as doing actual thinking.
It’s the solution you come up with the last day before the project is due cause you know it will technically pass and you’ll get a C.
It's moronic. Currently, decision makers don't really understand what to do with AI and how it will realistically evolve in the coming 10-20 years. So it's getting pushed even into environments with 0-error policies, leading to horrible results and any time savings are completely annihilated by the ensuing error corrections and general troubleshooting. But maybe the latter will just gradually be dropped and customers will be told to just "deal with it," in the true spirit of enshittification.
No?
Anyone can run an AI even on the weakest hardware there are plenty of small open models for this.
Training an AI requires very strong hardware, however this is not an impossible hurdle as the models on hugging face show.
Yah, I'm an AI researcher and with the weights released for deep seek anybody can run an enterprise level AI assistant. To run the full model natively, it does require $100k in GPUs, but if one had that hardware it could easily be fine-tuned with something like LoRA for almost any application. Then that model can be distilled and quantized to run on gaming GPUs.
It's really not that big of a barrier. Yes, $100k in hardware is, but from a non-profit entity perspective that is peanuts.
Also adding a vision encoder for images to deep seek would not be theoretically that difficult for the same reason. In fact, I'm working on research right now that finds GPT4o and o1 have similar vision capabilities, implying it's the same first layer vision encoder and then textual chain of thought tokens are read by subsequent layers. (This is a very recent insight as of last week by my team, so if anyone can disprove that, I would be very interested to know!)
It's possible to run the big Deepseek model locally for around $15k, not $100k. People have done it with 2x M4 Ultras, or the equivalent.
Though I don't think it's a good use of money personally, because the requirements are dropping all the time. We're starting to see some very promising small models that use a fraction of those resources.
Would you say your research is evidence that the o1 model was built using data/algorithms taken from OpenAI via industrial espionage (like Sam Altman is purporting without evidence)? Or is it just likely that they came upon the same logical solution?
Not that it matters, of course! Just curious.
But the people with the money for the hardware are the ones training it to put more money in their pockets. That's mostly what it's being trained to do: make rich people richer.
This completely ignores all the endless (open) academic work going on in the AI space. Loads of universities have AI data centers now and are doing great research that is being published out in the open for anyone to use and duplicate.
I've downloaded several academic models and all commercial models and AI tools are based on all that public research.
I run AI models locally on my PC and you can too.
But you can make this argument for anything that is used to make rich people richer. Even something as basic as pen and paper is used everyday to make rich people richer.
Why attack the technology if its the rich people you are against and not the technology itself.
We shouldn't do anything ever because poors
And those people want to use AI to extract money and to lay off people in order to make more money.
That’s “guns don’t kill people” logic.
Yeah, the AI absolutely is a problem. For those reasons along with it being wrong a lot of the time as well as the ridiculous energy consumption.
The real issues are capitalism and the lack of green energy.
If the arts where well funded, if people where given healthcare and UBI, if we had, at the very least, switched to nuclear like we should've decades ago, we wouldn't be here.
The issue isn't a piece of software.
Yeah, the AI absolutely is a problem.
AI is noto a problemi by itself, the problemi is that most of the people who make decisions in the workplace about these things do not understand what they are talking about and even less what something is capable of.
My impression is that AI now is what blockchain was some years ago, the solution to every problemi,which was of course false.
brian eno is cooler than most of you can ever hope to be.
Dunno, the part about generative music (not like LLMs) I've tried, I think if I spent a few more years of weekly migraines on that, I'd become better.
you mean like in the same way that learning an instrument takes time and dedication?
like most of money
That's why we need the weights, right now! Before they figure out how to do this. It will happen, but at least we can prevent backsliding from what we have now.
Technological development and the future of our civilization is in control of a handful of idiots.
And yet, he released his latest album exclusively on Apple Music.
The difference is that he has the choice of not participating in that model, obviously.
Ollama and stable diffusion are free open source software. Nobody is forcing anybody to use chatGPT
Ollama is FOSS, SD has a proproprietary but permissive, source-available license, but it is not what most people would associate with "open-source"
Fair, it may not be strictly FOSS but I think my point still stands. If people are worried about AI being owned by "the elite" they can just run Ollama.
He's not wrong.
I don't really agree that this is the biggest issue, for me the biggest issue is power consumption.
That is a big issue, but excessive power consumption isn't intrinsic to AI. You can run a reasonably good AI on your home computer.
The AI companies don't seem concerned about the diminishing returns, though, and will happily spend 1000% more power to gain that last 10% better intelligence. In a competitive market why wouldn't they, when power is so cheap.
Large power consumption only happens because someone is willing to dump lots of capital into it so they can own it.
"Biggest" maybe. But it's not the only relevant problem. I think AI is gonna pan out like social media did, which is to say it's gonna be a shit show for society. And that would be the same no matter who owned it.
Both AI and social media are a shit show because it's owned by a few people.
Unironically, the best social media is Fetlife. Not that it's perfect by any means--not by far--but it is designed to facilitate bringing people together.
Why is this message not being drilled into the heads of everyone. Sam Altman go to prison or publish your stolen weights.
Reading the other comments, it seems there are more than one problem with AI. Probably even some perks as well.
Shucks, another one or these complex issues huh. Weird how everything you learn something about turns out to have these nuances to them.
most of the replies can be summarized as "the biggest problem with AI is that we live under capitalism"
Reminds me of "biotech is Godzilla". Sepultura version of course
No brian eno, there are many open llm already. The problem is people like you who have accumulated too much and now control all the markets/platforms/medias.
That's... just not true? Current frontier AI models are actually surprisingly diverse, there are a dozen companies from America, Europe, and China releasing competitive models. Let alone the countless finetunes created by the community. And many of them you can run entirely on your own hardware so no one really has control over how they are used. (Not saying that that's a good thing necessarily, just to point out Eno is wrong)
COO > Return.
wrong. it's that it's not intelligent. if it's not intelligent, nothing it says is of value. and it has no thoughts, feelings or intent. therefore it can't be artistic. nothing it "makes" is of value either.
AI will become one of the most important discoveries humankind has ever invented. Apply it to healthcare, science, finances, and the world will become a better place, especially in healthcare. Hey artist, writers, you cannot stop intellectual evolution. AI is here to stay. All we need is a proven way to differentiate the real art from AI art. An invisible watermark that can be scanned to see its true "raison d'etre". Sorry for going off topic but I agree that AI should be more open to verification for using copyrighted material. Don't expect compensation though.
Apply it to healthcare, science, finances, and the world will become a better place, especially in healthcare.
That's all kind of moot if we continue down the capitalist hellscape express. What good is an AI that can diagnose cancer if most people can't afford access? What good is AI writing novels if our homes are destroyed by climate change induced disasters?
Those problems are mostly political, and AI isn't going to fix them. The people that probably could be replaced with AI, the shitty "leaders" and such, are not going to voluntarily step down.
None of it is currently useful to those right now
The biggest problem with AI is that they're illegally harvesting everything they can possibly get their hands on to feed it, they're forcing it into places where people have explicitly said they don't want it, and they're sucking up massive amounts of energy AMD water to create it, undoing everyone else's progress in reducing energy use, and raising prices for everyone else at the same time.
Oh, and it also hallucinates.
Eh I’m fine with the illegal harvesting of data. It forces the courts to revisit the question of what copyright really is and hopefully erodes the stranglehold that copyright has on modern society.
Let the companies fight each other over whether it’s okay to pirate every video on YouTube. I’m waiting.
So far, the result seems to be "it's okay when they do it"
I would agree with you if the same companies challenging copyright (protecting the intellectual and creative work of "normies") are not also aggressively welding copyright against the same people they are stealing from.
With the amount of coprorate power tightly integrated with the governmental bodies in the US (and now with Doge dismantling oversight) I fear that whatever comes out of this is humans own nothing, corporations own everything. Death of free independent thought and creativity.
Everything you do, say and create is instantly marketable, sellable by the major corporations and you get nothing in return.
The world needs something a lot more drastic then a copyright reform at this point.
AI scrapers illegally harvesting data are destroying smaller and open source projects. Copyright law is not the only victim
https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/
Oh, and people believe the hallucinations.
They're not illegally harvesting anything. Copyright law is all about distribution. As much as everyone loves to think that when you copy something without permission you're breaking the law the truth is that you're not. It's only when you distribute said copy that you're breaking the law (aka violating copyright).
All those old school notices (e.g. "FBI Warning") are 100% bullshit. Same for the warning the NFL spits out before games. You absolutely can record it! You just can't share it (or show it to more than a handful of people but that's a different set of laws regarding broadcasting).
I download AI (image generation) models all the time. They range in size from 2GB to 12GB. You cannot fit the petabytes of data they used to train the model into that space. No compression algorithm is that good.
The same is true for LLM, RVC (audio models) and similar models/checkpoints. I mean, think about it: If AI is illegally distributing millions of copyrighted works to end users they'd have to be including it all in those files somehow.
Instead of thinking of an AI model like a collection of copyrighted works think of it more like a rough sketch of a mashup of copyrighted works. Like if you asked a person to make a Godzilla-themed My Little Pony and what you got was that person's interpretation of what Godzilla combined with MLP would look like. Every artist would draw it differently. Every author would describe it differently. Every voice actor would voice it differently.
Those differences are the equivalent of the random seed provided to AI models. If you throw something at a random number generator enough times you could--in theory--get the works of Shakespeare. Especially if you ask it to write something just like Shakespeare. However, that doesn't meant the AI model literally copied his works. It's just doing it's best guess (it's literally guessing! That's how work!).
The problem with being like… super pedantic about definitions, is that you often miss the forest for the trees.
Illegal or not, seems pretty obvious to me that people saying illegal in this thread and others probably mean “unethically”… which is pretty clearly true.
The issue I see is that they are using the copyrighted data, then making money off that data.
This is an interesting argument that I've never heard before. Isn't the question more about whether ai generated art counts as a "derivative work" though? I don't use AI at all but from what I've read, they can generate work that includes watermarks from the source data, would that not strongly imply that these are derivative works?
This is arguably a feature depending on how you use it. I'm absolutely not an AI acolyte. It's highly problematic in every step. Resource usage. Training using illegally obtained information. This wouldn't necessarily be an issue if people who aren't tech broligarchs weren't routinely getting their lives destroyed for this, and if the people creating the material being used for training also weren't being fucked....just capitalism things I guess. Attempts by capitalists to cut workers out of the cost/profit equation.
If you're using AI to make music, images or video... you're depending on those hallucinations.
I run a Stable Diffusion model on my laptop. It's kinda neat. I don't make things for a profit, and now that I've played with it a bit I'll likely delete it soon. I think there's room for people to locally host their own models, preferably trained with legally acquired data, to be used as a tool to assist with the creative process. The current monetisation model for AI is fuckin criminal....
Tell that to the man who was accused by Gen AI of having murdered his children.
I see the "AI is using up massive amounts of water" being proclaimed everywhere lately, however I do not understand it, do you have a source?
My understanding is this probably stems from people misunderstanding data center cooling systems. Most of these systems are closed loop so everything will be reused. It makes no sense to "burn off" water for cooling.
data centers are mainly air-cooled, and two innovations contribute to the water waste.
the first one was "free cooling", where instead of using a heat exchanger loop you just blow (filtered) outside air directly over the servers and out again, meaning you don't have to "get rid" of waste heat, you just blow it right out.
the second one was increasing the moisture content of the air on the way in with what is basically giant carburettors in the air stream. the wetter the air, the more heat it can take from the servers.
so basically we now have data centers designed like cloud machines.
Edit: Also, apparently the water they use becomes contaminated and they use mainly potable water. here's a paper on it
We spend energy on the most useless shit why are people suddenly using it as an argument against AI? You ever saw someone complaining about pixar wasting energies to render their movies? Or 3D studios to render TV ads?
It varies massivelly depending on the ML.
For example things like voice generation or object recognition can absolutelly be done with entirelly legit training datasets - literally pay a bunch of people to read some texts and you can train a voice generation engine with it and the work in object recognition is mainly tagging what's in the images on top of a ton of easilly made images of things - a researcher can literally go around taking photos to make their dataset.
Image generation, on the other hand, not so much - you can only go so far with just plain photos a researcher can just go around and take on the street and they tend to relly a lot on artistic work of people who have never authorized the use of their work to train them, and LLMs clearly cannot be do without scrapping billions of pieces of actual work from billions of people.
Of course, what we tend to talk about here when we say "AI" is LLMs, which are IMHO the worst of the bunch.
In a Venn Diagram, I think your “illegally harvesting” complaint is a circle fully inside the “owned by the same few people” circle. AI could have been an open, community-driven endeavor, but now it’s just mega-rich corporations stealing from everyone else. I guess that’s true of literally everything, not just AI, but you get my point.
Well, the harvesting isn’t illegal (yet), and I think it probably shouldn’t be.
It’s scraping, and it’s hard to make that part illegal without collateral damage.
But that doesn’t mean we should do nothing about these AI fuckers.
In the words of Cory Doctorow:
And also it's using machines to catch up to living creation and evolution, badly.
A but similar to how Soviet system was trying to catch up to in no way virtuous, but living and vibrant Western societies.
That's expensive, and that's bad, and that's inefficient. The only subjective advantage is that power is all it requires.
I don't care much about them harvesting all that data, what I do care about is that despite essentially feeding all human knowledge into LLMs they are still basically useless.