⁂ L. Rhodes@lrhodes@merveilles.town
When I see discussion about "AI for the people" or "community-led AI" or "public benefit AI," the focus is almost always on tooling and infrastructure.
But I don't think you can have any of those things without seriously rethinking the purposes and design of AI.
It's quite possible that LLMs and image generators — which were designed to serve profit-led industries — are simply at odds with community and public benefit. So anyone looking to build ethical and communal AI needs to start not with questions like "How do we democratize existing services?" but rather "What sort of AI would serve the needs of actual communities and societies?"
⁂ L. Rhodes@lrhodes@merveilles.town
The same applies to decentralized social media, by the way. "How do we democratize existing services?" is the wrong question, because the existing services were tailored to the task of extracting value from people's communications with one another. Decentralization and democratization alone will not remedy those harms. To make genuinely beneficial social media services, we have to start by asking what would benefit communities and society at large, then consciously build toward that.
