Latest Breaking News

this board will be honest about AI use - we liberals are supposed to be ethical - but I can't deny that I still feel a little bit of skepticism because you use genAI and defend its use.

And that's a fundamentally unethical choice, because you know how AI models were trained, and you're aware of the harm it does.

To me, the AI companies' theft of the world's intellectual property is an absolute wrong. There was never any excuse for it. And it's continuing, every second of every day.

You can't ignore that and decide it's just fine to use genAI (when you aren't being forced to) without making a decision that the rights of all the people whose work was stolen DON'T MATTER.

And honestly, that leaves me wondering if you'd have been just fine with other great injustices throughout history, including slavery, as long as that injustice created some benefit for you.

I've hated seeing DUers using genAI and pushing its use, because to me that's a betrayal of everything liberals and progressives are supposed to stand for.

It's a selective blindness that permits you to enjoy a technology that would not exist without that theft.

I expect DUers to be better than that. To care about the greatest theft of intellectual property in history.

I expect DUers to care about all the other harm done by genAI and the AI companies and AI bros, who are every bit as much a threat to society and the natural environment as the Trump regime is.

Instead, some people who should be more ethical than that are apparently choosing that selective blindness so they can pretend to have knowledge they don't have and don't want to bother to look up. Or pretend to write better than they can. Or pretend they can create music or images or video, when they never bothered to acquire those skills.

Even if those AI users are still ethical in other areas of their lives, their voluntary use of genAI says they're willing to sell at least part of their soul to enable fraud and support oligarchs out to crush the people who provide the world's knowledge and culture.

There are times I want to chalk up AI-using liberals making that deal with devils to naivete - and there are probably a few AI users who aren't aware that genAI exists only because of theft. But most AI users know about that theft, and I've been posting about it for three years on DU.

So what I'm seeing is a lot of people who consider themselves liberal but are anything but liberal - are fans and supporters of AI robber barons and all the harm they do - when they voluntarily use genAI, circulate AI slop because they like it, and defend its use.

I'd simply find this disgusting if RWers were doing it. The theft of the world's intellectual property is a natural fit with RWers.

But when I see liberals happy to use genAI without being forced to, what I feel instead is almost incredulous disappointment, and heartbreak, and betrayal.

Because your embrace of genAI is a betrayal of everyone whose work was stolen, and a betrayal of humanity in general.

Being pro-genAI is being anti-human.

And I hope everyone who's AI-addled figures that out before they sleepwalk out on that genAI plank into a future controlled by tech oligarchs, frauds using genAI, and hallucinating chatbots.

And btw, I'm not the only person who sees genAI and the tech lords controlling it as just as great a threat as Trump is. Maybe a greater threat.

Will Bunch wrote this yesterday:

Is AI's authoritarianism a bigger threat than Trump's?
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/ai-advances-anthropic-claude-20260219.html