I’m in the same boat. I actually agree with 90% of veganism. Animals shouldn’t suffer needlessly. People should eat less meat and animal products. Factory farming is horrifying and unethical. Where it falls apart is the universal claim of “Therefore, even the smaller regenerative and ethical farms are evil, because ALL animal use is unethical.” Which, if you follow the logic and consequences, requires us to either support millions of animals in domestic environments without ANY method of financial independence beyond donations or government support. Or, we drive dozens of distinct species to extinction, simply because some people feel personally attacked when I make an omelette. If we could ask the animals themselves, I struggle to believe that a happy cow living on a dairy farm would prefer non-existance to getting milked occasionally when they want to.

I have very little respect for anyone who cannot justify opinions, or get offended when beliefs are questions. If you don’t want your beliefs questioned, don’t announce them.

I’ve tried to have this discussion SO many times, and every time I’m treated like there’s nothing I love more than raping goats and torturing pigs.

That cow that lives on the hobby farm, spends its days roaming fields and eating flowers, then gets milked in the evening and petted with genuine love and affection, is not worse off because the farmer didn’t create a formal contract in order to obtain it’s consent to be milked.

It gave its consent by walking to the milking station, and waiting to be milked.

“Nuh uh! That’s not consent! It didn’t learn English and say the words ‘I consent to being milked,’ therefore milking it is evil!”

Lol wow. Way to show your stupidity. Newtonian physics is a single branch, dipshit.

Organic chemistry is dictated by physics, which is only a single step away from pure mathematics.

I asked what argument you were trying to make, because you keep changing the subject of the conversation to the point of incoherence. But you’re obviously too much of a pathetic religious cuck to engage with actual reason. 👍

Have a meaningful conversation of how an all powerful, good God can allow so much suffering. Either he isn’t good or he isn’t powerful.

Evolution is driven by adversity. Organisms experience stress, seek to relieve themselves of that stress, and improve upon their function iteratively over billions of years.

So is the all-powerful God constrained by physics or not? What argument, precisely, are you making? When the initial comment was to defend the belief in an all-powerful God.

You’re engaging dishonestly and changing the subject entirely. No comment was made on what humans worship or why, every comment was directed at a supposedly all-powerful God.

You made an argument that this all-powerful God was constrained by physics. Then it cannot be an all-powerful God.

That’s the argument against creationism and religions with all-powerful deities.

Magic rock to blame for all my problems? I honestly have no idea what you’re getting at here. Theists blame magic for their harms. Atheists accept it as blind consequences in an uncaring universe. You’re literally assigning theistic beliefs on atheism.

So then this all powerful God isn’t smart or powerful enough to make a universe in which suffering isn’t necessary. Seems pretty limiting for an all powerful, all knowing being.

Do you also make justifications for billionaires that destroy the world? Because you’re putting quite a bit of energy in to justifying something that is supposedly beyond comprehension. Wouldn’t the more honest answer just be “I don’t know.”

No, I don’t think I will. Because I don’t believe there is any answer I can give you that won’t be merry with more insults and arrogance. I made the claim that sentience cannot exist in a purely mechanistic system, like a wrist watch. Because there is nothing there unexplained, unknown, or more nuanced than gears and springs.

The burden of proof lies on you to explain how a wristwatch could have any degree of sentience. And insulting me does nothing but show the emptiness of your claim, and the fragility of your pseudo-wisdom.

Denying ALL knowledge by taking a bong rip and saying “But how can we ever really know?” It’s not wisdom or humility. It’s pretending ignorance is wisdom.

Okay, then you’re upset about copywrite infringement and the resale of the models. I’m not talking about those. You made the universal claim that the technology itself is bad. I’m saying its the PEOPLE who are acting unethically that should get your hate.

You are actively antagonizing people who should be your allies because you’ve decided carte blanche to hate it all, convincing yourself there’s no possible way any of it could be legitimate or ethical.

What about models trained on research papers? Those are LITERALLY designed to spread knowledge.

Are you really going to call me amoral and fracture the opposition to blind greed and destruction, just because I experiment with these local models? What about the scientists that use custom LLMs? Or the research teams?

Okay, then you’re not actually engaging in any degree of coherence. Your ignorance is not wisdom, despite what you seem to have convinced yourself.

Please explain to me how a wristwatch is sentient or conscious.

But you see, it’s okay when they gatekeep because they’re defenders of truth and humanity! Gatekeeping is a good thing when used on people you don’t like! What’s that about equal accessibility and ableism? Shut up! AI bad!

Because if you post a public message on a public forum that everybody can see, you don’t get to decide how your words are used. That’s the fair use license. It doesn’t require additional consent.

And how precisely is it unethical to train an LLM on public data? You keep making that assertion, but it’s built off of a supposed “Lack of consent.” When the fair use license was brought up, you seemed to retreat to the concept that using fair use data to make fair use software freely available to everyone is somehow bad?

You need to explain how the process itself is bad, not just use guilt by association. It seems more like you’re building an opinion based on vibes, not actual reason.

Good for you. Keep wielding that shield of ignorance indescriminantly. Do you also think cryptography itself is harmful, or are you focusing on the specific use and harm caused? Guess what, the technology that made the crypto stupidity possible was used for far more than just gambling on imaginary coins. Once again, you’re conflating the worst implementation of a technology with its use as a general rule. Would you defend a small set of positive and ethical uses of LLMs? Or do you condemn the entire tech, on the assumption that it is inherently bad? Do you know precisely where and how the tech developed for crypto is helpful to you, and improves your privacy and safety?

Lol no. Actually cells are demonstrably NOT sentient. They have no capacity for choice. No capacity for emotion or experience. They are literally molecular machinery. And we(scientists) understand that machinery to a shocking degree.

If you think cells have any degree of sentience, then you must make a similar argument for advanced clockwork machines. Not robots, pure wind-up clockwork automata.

Are you aware of “Implied lack of privacy?” It means places where you cannot reasonably assume privacy, like a public beach or supermarket. Public forums and public wikis are about as implied lack of privacy as it gets. If you post a guide on stack exchange on how to solve a programming issue, you revoke your rights in how that information is used. This includes using it to create new software. If you decide you don’t like a program I created using your guides, well… That’s too bad for you.

And no, this is not victim blaming, because I’m not defending actual theft or telling people to protect themselves more. I’m stating you cannot steal something that has been freely offered to the entire world.

Lol, tell me you don’t understand anything about the technology without telling me you don’t understand anything about the technology. Nobody here is defending scraping artists libraries or using copy written material. Go find a different strawman to cry at.

Yyyyyyyyup. Even attempts at honest discussion get polarized. “If you use AI(LLMs) you’re an unethical AI-Bro!”

Oh… I didn’t realize that my self-hosted open source small model trained on Wikipedia and Stack Exchange was unethical. Thank you for showing me the error of my ways.

Arguing against your staunch certainty is not the same as fully believing the counter point. I don’t believe LLMs are conscious either, but claiming to be the arbiter of sentience is quite arrogant. Especially when we don’t understand it ourselves.

Yes, we understand the mechanisms of biology, but we do not understand our subjective experience of freewill, or if it even exists.

Which is why your claim is both a strawman and a non sequitur.

And reading briefly through the comments, most people seem to be arguing against your certainty, not actually claiming to believe the opposite.

Are cells sentient? Bacteria, fungi, etc. Do you think they have any degree of interiority, like how simple animals do?

Nice strawman you got there. Is this relevant to the post, or do you just feel like calling random unrelated people dumb?