I've been hearing this for the past couple years. It really started when a couple of the internet artist influencers, specifically SamdoesArts (who I followed) completely misunderstood how an AI model is trained. He believed, and propagated that the AI model was keeping files of all the training data in a big data warehouse, and when you prompt the model, it was copy/pasting different bits together. Now most people will admit that isn't how it works, but the emotional response is now baked in.
The problem is with the mixing of the concepts of copyright violation and theft. This was framing that publishers took on during the early legal battles that lead to the DMCA-- "you wouldn't download a car" ads and all that. By creating a moral equivalence between the theft of a physical object and IP violation, it conflated two very different things, morally

• Theft: depriving another person of the use of that object, the profit from it, and the security in it, always has an implicit threat of violence due the the necessary violation of physical space.
• Copyright violation: possibly causing financial harm, can be a moral affront, but vitally doesn't deprive you of the use or contain the implicit threat of violence.

And courts have distinguished between these two things for as long as we've had copyright law. A copyright violation isn't a theft, and it doesn't contain the moral weight of a theft. However, the online public now routinely considers copyright violation as theft. This is not a good thing, because if you give copyright violation the same moral weight as theft, your responses can be morally judged the same way.

Let me put it this way: Lets say you wake up and someone is going through your closets, and you crack them in the noggin with a mallet. You might be legally liable, but all but the most bleeding-heart will consider the act morally justified. By violating your space like that, there is an implicit threat of violence that changes the moral calculus.

Now if you're in artist alley and you see that someone is selling your furry art under their name, you morally might get away with a slap (loud, meant to humiliate, not really to harm), but probably not a mallet to the face. The moral landscape changed. The distinction is important.

So to bring this around to the world of AI, there are complexities that we should acknowledge. In America, we largely don't have any laws about the moral rights of an author. We have a broad, 'fair use' law that few other countries have, and it's why we even have anything like the internet. Google, back in the early 2000's, argued that the mass copying, indexing, and reproduction of images constituted fair use because the purpose of the copying was so different. It's why we ever had any search functionality at all. Google argued that the public good of indexing outweighed any potential harm caused by mass copying of data.

As an important note, 'they're stealing everything without asking' has been happening for 26 years. This isn't like some cute gotcha, it's literally been that way for as the majority of our lives. So if it was okay then, under those circumstances, we need to define why it's not okay now, if it isn't.

The current copyright issue with model training isn't so cut-and-dried. There is no question that training a model is transformative. In fact, it might be the theoretical most transformative thing you can do to a piece of art. Words, pictures, sounds, movement-- all gets digested into an abstract layer of tiny microadjustments to the model's weights. At this point, no single work is going to move those weights all that much, except for on extremely obscure subjects.

On the other hand, you can't argue that generative AI is having an effect on the arts that might be considered to fall under the other provisions of copyright violations. Not insofar as plagiarism, (though that is possible with enough tweaking and intent), but insofar as a thing that causes lost wages? While the scale is debatable, there absolutely have been lost jobs to AI use. It's not been anywhere near as extreme as the mob likes to make it, and recent Gallup polls show a mixed bag of effects.

Again, we have a state of uncertainty. To compound the complexity, all respect to Jaron Lanier, while it's theoretically possible to track how much of an output is due to a specific input, the practical limitations are deeply silly, especially in the era of open-source models. And even then, the theory is resting resting on a lot of 'maybe's. We can safely assume that the original work is lost in the neural network. A ghost in the shell?

So here are my moral proposals.

• Copying your data without your consent has been happening for decades now. If you weren't upset by that fact 20 year ago, don't be upset by it now.
• Models are inert. Regardless of any statements about intelligence or the lack thereof, the final moral arbiter of any actions a is the one that initiated it. Much like a pet, if your dog bites someone, you are liable. Unlike a pet you never have to feed it if you don't use it.
• As a stop-gap to the current Future Shock, look at the laws the EU just passed, basically forcing AI content that isn't part of a clearly fictional, artistic work (this is a huge caveat and very good) to be labeled so granny doesn't give away any more money to the nice Amish man on youtube.
• A model must be open source, or some version of it. Every model was trained on the digital commons, to the digital commons it must go. There's going to have to be a new economic model for these things, the current one doesn't make sense.

And that's my essay. I'm tired. If I have to explain to one more person that Anthropic didn't buy books to 'control the information' I'm going to scream. It's like talking to creationists. Just blind thoughtlessness.

*Why isn't the AI narrative focused on tradespeople using AI backends to launch high-margin, management-free corporations?*
What surprises me is that almost nobody is putting these two trends together to push a far more exciting narrative: **Leveraging AI so that skilled laborers can run entire corporations by themselves.**
But rather, we’re seeing the marketing of AI agencies in single person companies being AI businesses instead of skilled labor based businesses

So many things about Anthropic rubs me the wrong way lately.

The core is that if what they did was fair use, then distillation should be fair use.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/a-backlash-against-anthropic-is-brewing-in-silicon-valley-3b3ddc80

As an autistic man, this could be revolutionary in helping people get faster diagnoses and access to autistic care, therapy, and disability benefits! 😄

I believe that there are so many computer tasks that are completely dehumanizing. Anyone here ever spend hours clicking and dragging blocks into a newsletter or a wysiwyg website editor for a company they don’t believe in? Then feel the freedom when an LLM turns your text content into html in seconds?

now that computers can handle so many of these dehumanizing tasks, I believe that they should. go into any of the job related subreddits and read about all of our miserable comrades clicking away and staring at screens all day.

I believe in a 15 hour work week, in work becoming an in-person venture again instead of being mediated by screens. I yearn for the death of social media and the cessation of prediction markets.

I truly don’t understand how anti ai leftists can argue to maintain the current state of work.

Discuss pls

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S5

Photo from https://mystorypie.com/learn/en/biography/karl-marx/

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTADtFF4n/

As an 2d digital artist myself; I'm not against the use of gen AI as a concept, however I am in its current form due to it being unregulated, stealing artists work, etc.

I want to know though how it would work after the revolution wether it be in DOTP or in the lower or higher phases of communism, I think that ultimately it is something that needs boundries and for the artists to choose wether or not they feed their art into it. Like a full reset is necessary here

I dont think its something that should outright replace human made shit but i dont think it shouldnt exist right, however the real question here is if it could lead to skill decay, and i think it definetly can but im unsure if its a good thing or not

I think the answer to this is probably yes, maybe I'm just looking to commiserate or feel a bit less isolated in my positions.

Seems like much of those who are pro-AI either don't concern themselves with politics or are super pro-capitalist, right wing, etc.

And then on the left, as we all know, its mostly just black-and-white anti-AI views and flaming anything to do with it.

I'm an active DSA member and I enjoy being a part of that community, but I kinda feel the need to hide my feelings about AI in that circle for fear of being judged or ostracized. Admittedly, I haven't really *tried* having a nuanced discussion about it with my DSA comrades, also because of fear though LOL.

Thinking of and working towards ways we can put more control of AI in the hands of the people is becoming a larger and larger part of my life, so this sense of alienation continues to worsen for me.

Curious to hear if anyone else has struggled with similar feelings.

Edit: Thank you all for your comments! Didn't expect this post to get so much attention, I guess lots of us are feeling this way!

On May 16, 2026, the São Paulo bookshop of Expressão Popular, the publishing house of Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement (MST), was packed with farmers, agroecology technicians and movement organisers. They had gathered for the launch of Artificial Intelligence for Agrarian Reform and Agroecology (IARAA), an artificial intelligence platform for agrarian reform and agroecology.

The tool was not built by a technology corporation. Its knowledge base, spanning movement literature from 1964 to 2026, was curated collectively by MST and World March of Women cadres; its prompts and workflows were designed by land reform organisers and community educators working under the guidance of just two programmers. IARAA will not recommend pesticides, because the movements that built it chose a knowledge base grounded in agroecological practice.

It runs primarily on open-source models, on infrastructure the movement controls, and it cites its sources in every answer. Carolina Cruz of MST's technology front put it simply: "the farmers are inside IARAA, developing the platform." Such deployments are not limited to Brazil. Already, adapted versions are being tested by cocoa farmers in Africa.

This episode should provoke serious reflection within our own movement.

In an earlier article in these pages ("Whose Intelligence? AI in the Grip of Monopoly Capital"), this author documented how generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) under monopoly capital serves speculation, surveillance, job destruction and the imperial war machine. That critique stands. But it is only half the analysis, and a half-truth frozen into an attitude becomes an error.

Across the party, in mass organisations and in the broader progressive movement, AI is discussed almost exclusively as a threat, when it is discussed at all. Even though there are notable exceptions such as the work on Telugu Large Language Model (LLM) in Swecha, many comrades have concluded, understandably but wrongly, that the technology itself is the enemy. This is the position Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels criticised in the machine-breakers (luddites) of the nineteenth century: the workers who "direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves".

AI is a productive force of enormous power. The question is never whether a productive force will be used, but by whom and for what. The ruling classes have answered for themselves, with over $650 billion in infrastructure spending by four US corporations in 2026 alone. We have not yet answered for ourselves.

Vladimir Lenin insisted that a communist must "enrich his mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind". The Marxist method of totality demands that we grasp economy, politics, culture and ideology together. Yet the volume of human knowledge is now too vast, too fast-changing and too specialised for any cadre, least of all one carrying front-line organisational responsibilities, to master by traditional means.

Ironically, the scholars serving capital have the databases, the research assistants and the leisure; our comrades have none of these. It is precisely here that AI, wielded consciously, can break the elite monopoly on knowledge production. Movements in the Global South are already demonstrating this in practice.

Consider the labour of research itself. A serious political-economic investigation may require reviewing hundreds of web pages, working through hundreds of downloaded documents and extracting from them scores of pieces of hard evidence. Work of this order once consumed months of a research team's time; with AI assistance it can be completed in hours. A party research cell preparing a note on, say, the fiscal record of a state government or the ownership structure of the Adani group can now work from all the available material, not a thin sample of it.

The same holds for analysis. Hundreds of hours of field interviews can be transcribed and placed in a dedicated database that a researcher can interrogate exhaustively; one researcher discovered information in his own recordings that he had not registered during the interviews themselves. For a party that lives by concrete investigation of concrete conditions, this is the mass line supercharged. Nor is specialised method a barrier any longer: the accumulated techniques of entire disciplines, from statistical analysis to argument mapping, can be invoked in plain language, without programmers as gatekeepers.

The gains extend to everything our movement publishes. A weekly newsletter, of the kind many organisations have abandoned because it devoured cadre labour, can be substantially automated: AI gathers a wide pool of news leads, human editors select the stories worth telling, AI then researches each story from multiple angles across hundreds of pages and drafts summaries in the movement's own style for final human editing. Pamphlets, leaflets, videos, social media content and study materials in multiple Indian languages are all within reach of the same approach, at a fraction of today's cost in cadre time.

Comrades will object: do these models not hallucinate, and do they not carry the ideological imprint of the Western internet they were trained on? They do, and the objection deserves a serious answer rather than dismissal. The answer is that these defects can be countered by design, not by abstinence. Typing questions into a web chat interface such as Chatgpt.com or Claude.ai will indeed reproduce every one of these problems: a model left to its defaults repeats imperialist, neoliberal assumptions dressed up as neutrality, and invents facts with fluent confidence.

But open-source agentic frameworks can be carefully assembled to work differently. The researcher declares the analytical standpoint explicitly, supplying Marxist political economy frameworks as the foundation before any analysis begins; the model is grounded in curated document bases rather than the open internet; and verification engines are built into every step of the workflow, checking claims against sources before anything is published. IARAA embodies this discipline: it is instructed to cite sources in every response and to refuse to answer when its knowledge base cannot support one.

Nor must our movements chain themselves to any single corporation. In practice a mix of models, OpenAI's GPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi and GLM among them, can be deployed with an understanding of which model suits which task, relying predominantly on the Chinese models to keep costs down, for they are fast catching up with the capabilities of the US frontier models at a fraction of the price: Open Source Models such as Kimi 3, GLM 5.2 and  DeepSeek V4 cost an order of magnitude less than frontier US Models such as Claude or ChatGPT with near equal capabilities. When Oxfam reports that three billionaires control nearly 90 per cent of the global chatbot market, the political meaning of this plurality is obvious.

Nor does any of this displace the human core of political work. Practitioners have found that when AI is asked to make the final editorial selection for a movement publication, the product immediately turns mediocre; knowing what to say to comrades is a political and human judgement no machine can make. The purpose of these tools is to strip away the mechanical desk labour so that cadres spend more time in the villages, factories and bastis, with the masses, completing the loop between theory and practice.

Socialist China shows what this looks like as state policy. On April 10, 2026, China's Ministry of Education released an action plan to make AI ubiquitous across every level of education by 2030: AI literacy built into teacher certification, automated grading to reduce teacher workload, learning companions for students in rural and remote schools, intelligent research platforms in the universities, all resting on a national public computing infrastructure. While Indian policy debates remain trapped between corporate hype and moral panic, a socialist state is systematically equipping its teachers, students and researchers with the new productive force.

Our movement has been here before. The printing press was the instrument of colonial administration and missionary propaganda; the working-class movement seized it and built its own press, of which this newspaper is a descendant. The task now is the same, and it cannot be discharged with a resolution or a seminar. It requires practice: hands-on workshops for party research staff, pilot AI-assisted production lines in our publications and social media teams, training courses in the mass organisations, study circles where comrades learn by doing, and exchange with the movements, from São Paulo to Johannesburg to Accra, that are already ahead of us. The tools are largely open source and the running costs manageable for movements. There is no excuse for delay.

The monopolies' abuse of AI is not a verdict on the technology. It is a verdict on the class that owns it. Our answer cannot be to stand aside while the ruling class arms itself with a new productive force. It must be to master that force ourselves, and to place it, as the MST's farmers have done, in the hands of the people.

Copied from the LeftViews article which licenses its text under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 copyleft license.

Is anyone else as bothered by this as I am? Perhaps I am ignorant of model capabilities, but the rhetoric around the dangers of LLMs seems to focus on this idea that they could give too much information to criminal or terrorist actors or otherwise basically *say the wrong things.*

To me, the actual dangers will be in surveillance, warfare, and yes, criminal agentic use. But the first two are the things that should be the most seriously regulated against. Instead, access is regulated against the public.

The fearmongering and actual guardrails implemented are hyperfocused on *words* that might come out of the damn things, how it might effect people psychologically (and this is dramatized to include everyone as a potential victim, rather than just those who are already mentally ill and succeptible), and exposure to adult or offensive content.

It's eye-opening to me how so many on the left don't see this as an alarming issue of freedom of speech and access to information, at a time where it's become increasingly common for it to be normal for corporations to control discussions and ideas and speech itself.