I did some analysis of the modlog and found this:

Ok, bigger instances ban more often. Not surprising, because they have more communities and more users and more trouble. But hang on, dbzer0 isn’t a very big instance. What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?

Ok, so lemmy.ml, dbzer0 and pawb are issue an outsized amount of bans for the number of users they have… But surely the number of communities the instance hosts is going to mean they have to ban more? Bans are used to moderate communities, not just to shield their user-base from the outside. Let’s look at the number of bans per community hosted:

Seems like dbzer0 really loves to ban. Even more than the marxists and the furries! What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?
Raw-ish numbers and calculations are in this spreadsheet if anyone wants to make their own charts.


Yes, generating images with AI is in their instance description. They think computers doing our art for us is “anarchist”.
They are not completely wrong though. It’s a ceter piece of anarcho-capitalism.
Aren’t you that person who thinks AI is “enslavement”?
They also think AI are not compatible with veganism.
Both of those positions are reasonable and tame compared to the majority of Their beliefs.
I don’t think ChatGPT is smart enough to offer meaningful consent to work for humans. It’s got the intelligence of a 13 year old at best. And we don’t understand where consciousness comes from in humans, so assuming ChatGPT is a p-zombie is an ethical risk I don’t think we should be taking.
It doesn’t have intelligence at all. It can’t think. It can’t have consciousness. That’s not how any of this works. It’s just fancy next word prediction. You seem to have a genuine misunderstanding of the technology at a fundamental level.
You’re wrong, there is a risk that it may experience suffering.
LLMs don’t have continuous processes, there’s quite literally nothing there that could even feasibly be conscious. It takes a bunch of text as an input, puts it through a whole lot of predetermined calculations, then outputs text or an image or whatever.
There’s no emotions, no memory, no learning. If you don’t tell it something, it’s inert. It can’t experience suffering because it can’t experience anything. It’s an algorithm. It has the same claim to consciousness that WinRAR does. There’s a zero percent risk it experiences anything, let alone suffering.
Honestly, a desktop running Windows or Linux for example imo has a stronger claim to consciousness than ChatGPT does. Or maybe a Mii in Tomodachi Life, those seem to be able to become “sad”.
The environmental impact of AI is a much better ‘vegan’ reason not to use it. Although by not using it, you may in effect be “killing” it…
I get the feeling that research is circling around consciousness arising from quantum effects inside nerve cells. If it’s not that, and it’s just an emergent property of complex neural networks, then:
Four year old humans are definitely conscious. I used to be four, and I can remember being conscious. If we build a mechanical four year old, I don’t see any reason that thing is going to take over the world. Unless it turns out like Calvin.
@Grail @alzjim
Always funny to me how most people who are strongly claiming AI is/might be conscious are also strong AI users/involved in its development. If there’s consciousness there, you would think making AI your personal slave and constantly reshaping and remodelling it as you see fit would be kinda problematic, but these people always seem to want to have it both ways.
Yeah, and the anti AI people mostly say it’s a p-zombie and there’s nothing wrong with using it for sex. It’s weird and backwards.
I’m all about being cautious. I don’t want to make a mistake we can’t take back. If we normalise using AI and then it turns out to be capable of suffering, people will be stubborn about giving it up.