Alternatively, are there any publications engaging with the future potential of AI in a communist society, or in the lead up to a communist society? A lot of forum discussion used to pertain to the cybersyn project in Chile. But I feel like the LLM/ML/AI discussion is currently on a reactionary back foot.
If you’ve used it, I’m curious as to what potentials do you see from it? Where is it being used effectively where are you encountering it where you go, damn that sucks.
Where it sucks: Every single chatbot and phone tree when calling a support line ends without speaking to a flesh-and-blood agent. It makes me want to throw my phone into the woods.
Where it rules: Fulfilling bullshit work requests like OKRs with AI-generated drivel. Translation work. It tutored me through a Grad-level Statistics class that was all Asynchronous.
I’ve played around a fair bit with Stable Diffusion running locally on my PC and can confidently say it has an absurd potential as a streamlining tool for art because unlike the simple prompt remote tools you have tons of tools available to control composition, pose, details, etc instead of just giving a vague prompt and hitting “generate” over and over like it’s a slot machine and you’re addicted to the rush of seeing if the latest pull will be a winner or more garbage.
That said, if anyone’s actually using it well they’re keeping it to themselves: the hobbyist AI community itself is compromised of the most vapid, talentless dipshits you’ll ever see who want pats on the head for asking the inscrutable machine “pls give good image” while using something like A1111 or Forge because ComfyUI’s extremely simple flowchart UI is too hard for them and they want a single text box they can ask for their skinner box treats instead. And don’t even get me started on civitai, a site that I think I’ve actually gotten addicted to raging at, like I’ll check it multiple times a day just to
about its userbase.
I’ve compared it to things like Poser or Daz3d before, which caused floods of absolute dogshit CGI content made with prefab assets that still haven’t completely subsided to this day, which is made all the funnier because of how many people seem to want a terrible faux CGI look out of image generators. That, the weird sort of soft-focus glossy style that makes me think of like sketchy airbrush art on cars for some reason, and the creepy grasping for photorealism are all weirdly popular with them and it’s all uniformly awful drek.
Still, I paradoxically think it has a ton of potential for more minimalist aesthetics where it can serve as a labor amplifier for an artist that can feed it a sketch with maybe some crude shading, and then fix up the output in short order, it can create out-of-focus filler for backgrounds, etc. I strongly believe that open source models should be embraced and exploited for that purpose by independent artists and the left in general, because the corporate use of proprietary models is not going to stop and we should adapt to the way that’s transforming the landscape and seize upon new capital to compete and survive. The only alternative would be
en masse, and there’s just not a militant anti-AI movement that could do that nor is one going to form because of how abstract and unemotional the problem is.
I’ve been playing with Stable Diffusion too, and the gacha/slot machine comparison is apt.
1 out of 50-100 images feels worth going through the followup of upscaling, tweaking and making something presentable for my low stakes desire of “gallery of wallpapers matching my particular taste.”
The big deal for me is “low stakes.” The catboy twinks have the wrong number of nipples? Your 20-page nobody-actually-reads-it report goes rampant and screams “pork pie!” in the middle of page 12? Nobody dies, no important process is at risk. I don’t trust LLMs with code because “plausible nonsense” isn’t good enough there. One missed subtle ! or & compketely changes the behaviour.
I should try ComfyUI; to be blunt, I went with Automatic1111 because there was a decent walkthrough on how to set it up on a Radeon card (using distrobox to isolate the nastiness that is Ubuntu from the rest of my machine)
IIRC setting up comfyui for AMD is the same as with A1111, it just only works on linux because it doesn’t have directml support. I just cloned the conda environment I used for A1111, IIRC I uninstalled the pytorch libraries from it, then let comfyui install the versions it wanted. I don’t think there was anything more involved than that, just setting up a launch script with the right environment settings to try to mitigate the frequent hard system crashes I get with ROCm which may or may not have been solved by switching from ROCm 5.7 to 6.0, changing a certain kernel value, adding the right environment settings, and underclocking my 6800 even more than it already was - I haven’t crashed since then but I haven’t stress tested it either.