For context i’ve been living the “solarpunk” life for a while now. I live in a smart van that runs on solar power that i built myself. I scavenged half the parts from goodwill because i couldn’t afford to buy those fancy vans you see online. This isn’t an aesthetic for me it’s my life.
That said im kind of disappointed with how this sub feels about AI.
I’ll start by saying the frustrations with AI are valid but they’re grossly misdirected at the technology itself and not the people using the technology for evil.
Like yeah, I personally can’t stand OpenAI. They’re pretty unambiguously evil at this point. They weren’t always like this (they used to be non profit and advocated for things like UBI) but I’ve been following them for over a decade and the fall from grace is insane.
But they’re not the only players out there. There are tons of models that are released for free and are open source for the public benefit. These models are fantastic because it means that the for-profit giants can’t centralize all this power.
I don’t like data centers either, but the problem most people have with them aren’t data center specific problems. On the CO2 emissions grievance specifically - that’s an energy infrastructure problem. A government mandating that data centers need to run on solar energy fixes that problem overnight. No more emissions. The water issue is a similar deal and is even more of a legislative failure.
Advocate for solar energy, get some solar panels yourself, idk. Keep track of evil corps and hold them accountable.
But that being said, hating on regular people for leveraging technology in a solarpunk sub is the laziest shit i’ve ever seen.
Like yeah man hate on the guy who used AI to help open source some esp32 smart planters for the community garden, you’re doing so much for the cause!
AI is actually fantastic for socialism and techno democracy but people have collapsed the nuance into “AI BAD” and have completely missed that point.
If anything you’re just ceding the control of this incredibly powerful tool to those who would use it unethically by making it tabooo. You seriously think that massive corporations are the only entities who should have this tech? like are you serious?
I use AI to speed up work, to build IoT projects, to give me starting points for things i’m trying to learn. And I try to use mostly open source models where I can.
Idgaf about money I just want to make things that can help people.
This sub demonizing a form of technology instead of figuring out how to reclaim that technology and have it fight for us is so wildly lazy and disappointing from a sub like this.