cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/54821262
Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).
Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.
AI (LLMs more accurately) is just technology. It’s like saying let’s send all steam machine proponents to gulag. The problem is who controls this means of production. China does very interesting things with AI, it’s only in the west that the assistant/therapist/friend model is growing and being pushed on people and that they want power that doesn’t even exist yet to sustain it - of course they do, they’re tech companies. They want to control electricity because their tech doesn’t work without it. Altman even said he was working on something beyond electricity - he’s delusional, but he still believes it.
But China conversely is investing heavily in renewables and solar power, to the point that in China power is not even considered a problem anymore. Their grid always has 2-3x more power than they use and pretty much all they build nowadays is renewables.
Whether we like it or not AI is clearly here to stay. Maybe it will all fizzle out in some years, who knows - floppy disks also rose and fell to give way to the CD. But we see even socialist countries getting into AI (Cuba is announcing their chatbot, and China is soon to be leading and has already caused two huge scares in the US tech scene), because the technology is very important to get into. The US plans to use it, and is using it, in war, for example. If China said “no we don’t like AI” they would just get picked off by this tech. They have no choice but to understand and embrace it in order to level the playing field.
Frankly Europe is the one that needs to step its game up but we’re 20 years too late for that. We gutted our tech in favor of American software and now we have nothing except startups whose sole purpose is to get bought out by Google and then retire on the money.
Technology is neither noble nor wicked, yes. That said, I was referring specifically to “AI bros”, not all the people researching and making use of AI at large.