Apropos this post:
https://mastodon.social/@ratsnakegames/116968289735330647
Hitler ceremonially starts the excavation works for the first Austrian autobahn (1938).
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@pluralistic I think your comment in that discussion is a little disingenous. These companies have plundered the internet and the planet to train these models, and are continuing to do so. You write about this yourself.
Adoption of local versions on your computer are using biased data sets crunched at prohibitive environmental cost and the more people doing that the greater the perception of value.
It feels as though you are legitimizing the creation of new autobahns made of the planet's ashes.
I have never said that making transient copies of large amounts of data is bad,because I think it's good. I think the Internet Archive is right to make copies of the web. I think Aaron Swartz was right to make a copy of JSTOR. I support the existence of search engines.
The problem with AI isn't that someone took all the documents and analyzed them. That is socially beneficial activity that should be supported.
@SpacedKitteh The problem with AI is that it's being sold as a way to fire workers, that the companies run crawlers that crash servers, that it's the locus of a catastrophic investment bubble, because it is being pursued without any sensre of proportion to the detriment of the climate and localities, and its backers are fascists. That has nothing to do with "plunder."
@SpacedKitteh There is no concern about "biased data sets" when I'm asking a chatbot to identify places where I accidentally typed a comma instead of a period at the end of a paragraph. There's no concern about "biased data sets" when I get a transcript of a podcast so I can find and quote a segment of it.
@pluralistic In that wikipedia article I read "The first public road of this kind was completed in 1932 between Cologne and Bonn and opened by Konrad Adenauer (Lord Mayor of Cologne and future Chancellor of West Germany) on 6 August 1932."
@brezelradar Indeed, and the first shovelful for the Austrian leg was turned over by Hitler (and the Nazis enthusiastically expanded the German autobahn). I will cop to having written off the cuff with some imprecision, but it's categorically true that Hitler initiated *an* autobahn project, *and* that the current autobahn owes its extent and prominence to a Nazi project.
The point is picking this nit is foolish and gets you nowhere, and substitutes petty pedantry for substantiive engagement
