"On the acceptance of GenAI"https://smallsheds.garden/blog/2026/on-the-acceptance-of-genai/
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@tante even Claude would have added a Select All option
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"Trained on stolen data". Its at best a copyright violation. And I view things like Anna's Archive and Libgen to be internationally renowned Public Libraries.
"Massaged by people in global majority countries" - yes, people work in capitalism. And guess what... You're exploited.
"Trained in environmentally harmful data centers". This assumes that training is always needed, and its not. You can train once, and run X times. Again, you're stretching to make local LLM look horrible.
And really, the rest of these are poor excuses. I won't use poop smear(anthropic), or OpenAI, or other SaaS token companies. I run local, and does not have those things you claim.
Except for the copyright issue. But again, I dont have that much respect for current US copyright.
Its at best a copyright violation
This may be true for published and public data... but that's not the only data that goes into these things. Any data that comes from breaches, users private cameras, and anything else stored with an expectation of privacy is much worse than a copyright violation.
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"On the acceptance of GenAI"
https://smallsheds.garden/blog/2026/on-the-acceptance-of-genai/AI in the modern age is not going away. You shouldn't be shamed for using it, and at this point you should expect it.
Even when the bubble goes pop we are still going to have AI in some form. AI is a useful tool for many people, and it's great when you self host it.
Also, most things AI "steals" isn't really stealing if it's free and public on the internet.
Only thing I really can agree with is environment impacts. At this point though we muck up the environment so much with plastics, overusage of gas, mass deforestation, etc that I don't know how big of an impact that really has. Ideally we would use green forms of energy for everything, and new tech innovation would reduce the absurd amounts of power required to run these supercomputers. Hopefully the ARM architecture is that light in the dark.
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@crankylinuxuser FLOSS Models (which are only freeware) fulfill most of those boxes. Trained on stolen data, massaged by people in global majority countries, trained in environmentally harmful data centers, outsourcing skills to the freeware product a company dumped on me, using a tool that is imbued and trained for how big tech wants to see the world, and effort could have gone to something meaningful. So yeah nope.
@tante @crankylinuxuser I guess some people have zero idea of how AI model training works. They have the impression that "if I run this HuggingFace model in my hardware, it's ethical" but kinda think those models got uploaded there out of thin air, without any implications.
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"On the acceptance of GenAI"
https://smallsheds.garden/blog/2026/on-the-acceptance-of-genai/@tante a lot of this applies to basically all participation in capitalism.
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Its at best a copyright violation
This may be true for published and public data... but that's not the only data that goes into these things. Any data that comes from breaches, users private cameras, and anything else stored with an expectation of privacy is much worse than a copyright violation.
And yes, that is a big issue with the SaaS token vendors. Claude, OpenAI, MS, and the rest do use whatever user data they can get. I am not arguing their horrific behavior.
I'm talking about locally running Qwen, or Deepseek, or other FLOSS models.
That local LLM running on my machine only sees and uses data I provide. And a control-c in the relevant console window kills the LLM.
What folks do not realize is this is #Leibniz's ultimate dream, of being able to do #calculus with words, sentences, and more. He tried to do single word-vectors, but even that had to wait for Word2Vec in 2012.
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"On the acceptance of GenAI"
https://smallsheds.garden/blog/2026/on-the-acceptance-of-genai/@tante i would also add "I accept that the goal is stripping humanity from everything."
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Its at best a copyright violation
This may be true for published and public data... but that's not the only data that goes into these things. Any data that comes from breaches, users private cameras, and anything else stored with an expectation of privacy is much worse than a copyright violation.
@Epic_Null @crankylinuxuser @tante
Data wants to be free. This argument simply doesn't work for those of us that have always been open data, anti copyright.
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@tante @crankylinuxuser I guess some people have zero idea of how AI model training works. They have the impression that "if I run this HuggingFace model in my hardware, it's ethical" but kinda think those models got uploaded there out of thin air, without any implications.
@tante @crankylinuxuser Example: I use Whisper for audio transcription (mostly for accessibility issues, it's harder for me to understand audio messages than text messages), so I know using it, even self-hosted, tick most boxes.
I'm sure it was trained on stolen data (as it constantly returns things like "subtitles by example.com"), I'm sure training it hurt the environment, I'm sure the company behind it (OpenAI) does not have a viable business model (but, to be fair, I don't care about that, governments also don't have a viable business model, they don't have to).
But, since I'm using it for accessibility and there is no alternatives, we need to consider the trade offs and promote research that reduces those issues ethically. Saying "bUt I Am RuNNinG iT LoCAllY so ITs eThICAl" is dumb.
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"On the acceptance of GenAI"
https://smallsheds.garden/blog/2026/on-the-acceptance-of-genai/@tante - of the many ills of generative ai the thing I find most despicable is that it poorer. Yes it makes me poor financially and materially of course, but it makes me poor mentally and spiritually. It robs of your sense of time too, in that you think you don’t have “enough” time to do something so you make the AI do it, robbing yourself a opportunity for to learn something (even if it’s super minute)
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@tante @crankylinuxuser Example: I use Whisper for audio transcription (mostly for accessibility issues, it's harder for me to understand audio messages than text messages), so I know using it, even self-hosted, tick most boxes.
I'm sure it was trained on stolen data (as it constantly returns things like "subtitles by example.com"), I'm sure training it hurt the environment, I'm sure the company behind it (OpenAI) does not have a viable business model (but, to be fair, I don't care about that, governments also don't have a viable business model, they don't have to).
But, since I'm using it for accessibility and there is no alternatives, we need to consider the trade offs and promote research that reduces those issues ethically. Saying "bUt I Am RuNNinG iT LoCAllY so ITs eThICAl" is dumb.
@tante @crankylinuxuser So, my objetive here: sure, current AI is truly unethical and sadly we have lots of people that want to be blind about its issues, but, not all from it is bad.
I can't just say to a illiterate person "can you write for me instead of speaking?" because they just can't do that. I talk with lots of illiterate people, I'm in the construction business, lots of workers only know numbers and how to write their own name. So, Whisper, despite not being ethical, is what I use.
But, are there ethical alternatives? At the moment, I didn't find anything as reliable as Whisper, but there's the Common Voice dataset, which is free, which could be used to solve the issue of being trained on stolen data (but not the environmental issues).
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"On the acceptance of GenAI"
https://smallsheds.garden/blog/2026/on-the-acceptance-of-genai/Oooo...you forgot the biggest one....
*I accept that i am helping to train a replacement for my mind.
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P pelle@veganism.social shared this topic
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@Epic_Null @crankylinuxuser @tante
Data wants to be free. This argument simply doesn't work for those of us that have always been open data, anti copyright.
@komali_2 @crankylinuxuser @tante Every message between you and your doctor or you and your loved ones is data.
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"On the acceptance of GenAI"
https://smallsheds.garden/blog/2026/on-the-acceptance-of-genai/@tante (genai is a shitstain on the word but so is the concept of “stolen data”. i never bring that up as one of the problems, because copying is not theft)
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"On the acceptance of GenAI"
https://smallsheds.garden/blog/2026/on-the-acceptance-of-genai/ -
"On the acceptance of GenAI"
https://smallsheds.garden/blog/2026/on-the-acceptance-of-genai/@tante entirely too vague; you'd be better off explaining what "big tech's vision for the world" is, and how they aid ICE and the IDF, and the U.S. military, and their tech is involved in every recent atrocity, like killing thousands of Iranians, and the ongoing genocide in Palestine...these bullet points sugar coat reality too much
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@buckfiftyseven @ai6yr @tante no. copyright law is bullshit. the problem is power. like in every situation. poor people stealing from the rich: cool. rich people stealing from the poor: fucked.
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@buckfiftyseven @ai6yr @tante I think most running an adblocker is doing so to block data brokers, not the ad itself. Privacy is as much part of the equation here as the actual ad.
@mrbase @buckfiftyseven @ai6yr @tante and considering organizations like ICE are using ads to install spyware on people's phones now, adblockers are absolutely necessary for everyone. i am actually mad at anyone who's not using an adblocker.
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"On the acceptance of GenAI"
https://smallsheds.garden/blog/2026/on-the-acceptance-of-genai/@tante I'd probably add ones for - "I accept GenAI may scramble my mind and induce psychosis"
- "I accept that I am accepting the misinformation and disinformation produced by these tools"
- "I accept that I am contributing to this production" -
"On the acceptance of GenAI"
https://smallsheds.garden/blog/2026/on-the-acceptance-of-genai/@tante this implies that there are only US American AI companies. There are also EU AI companies which are arguably better.
MORE POWER TO THE UNITED STATES 
