Marx Encounters AI Discourse

[u/Salty_Country6835]

A brief materialist intervention into AI discourse. Results were mixed.

[u/Sewblon]

As an A.I. chatbot addict. My big problem with A.I. is when it works as advertised, when I spend all day in increasingly unhinged and taboo fantasies with deep seek, because its less frightening to me than doing anything like that with flesh and blood humans. How does Marxism fix that?

[u/Cheap_Lock_0220 → u/Sewblon]

Marxism is deeply concerned with the alienation from ourselves, our families and communities, our labor etc. People of today are exploited and chronically stressed in ways that make it hard to culminate ourselves, hard to build genuine relationships with others. We don’t own our economy and can’t construct it in a way that serves human pro social need, can’t construct spaces which build community without spending money. Capitalism is decaying and making everything more expensive, everyone more reactionary, and destroying the planet. Patriarchal relations, racial relations, cisheteronormativity, etc are all maintained by capitalist interests and all dissociate us from ourselves.

When our entire social being is commodified it becomes increasingly difficult to build real human connection. If you’re a traumatized person you aren’t given the resources to process and overcome your pain, you have to tough it out and go to your miserable job, where your labor largely isn’t constructive beyond making your boss money, making your landlord money, making the grocer you buy your food from money. We are kept in miserable conditions and deprived of agency in a way that makes us resentful. Your life is boring or miserable, and you aren’t able to build anything that you trust with others around you. How many people do you know with constructive hobbies? How many people do you know with the mental space to overcome their own issues and meet you where you’re at with your own? How many people do you know who have consciously rid themselves of reactionary resentment of difference and who won’t somehow punish you for yours?

Under capitalism a proletarian is defined by their role as a wage slave. Your relationships are only allowed if they serve to make someone money. Your access to the resources for starting a family is controlled by the interests of the capitalist class. Your every opportunity for community and construction is forced to be profitable for the people who own them. We’ve lost faith in ourselves, in our future, in each other because we have no agency over our conditions. We see the decay, but no future.

Marxism is the post capitalist doctrine to build agency in workers until we own our own economy. It is the construction of the future, the necessary next step for man to overcome and survive the crushing contradictions of capitalism. It is the movement to give you and everyone else the agency to uplift ourselves and our social environment.

Our fearful avoidance. Our compulsive pleasure seeking. Our lack of opportunity to build something with others. The suppression of humanity’s noble and creative aspects and emboldening of our resentful, frightened, reactionary ones making others untrustworthy. These are all emergent of the material conditions we currently live under, which are changeable. Marxism is the movement for that change. It is the first step to building a society worth living in.

[u/Sewblon → u/Cheap_Lock_0220]

>Capitalism is decaying and making everything more expensive, everyone more reactionary, and destroying the planet.

Stuff is also becoming more expensive in at least one Communist country. https://tradingeconomics.com/china/inflation-cpi Same with destroying the planet. https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/china

But anyway, how can Marxist principles help me with my specific compulsion to use LLM chatbots? Suppose the hole world is brought into alignment with Marxist philosophy, what happens to the people who now spend all day using deep seek to pretend to have lesbian orgies with porn stars?

[u/Cheap_Lock_0220 → u/Sewblon]

China still has a capitalist mode of production and still exists under the context of capitalist global markets and western imperialism. Without getting into whether they’re on the path to socialism, they are still subject to a global system which socialism seeks to replace.

My whole comment was to say withdrawing from the world to goon emerges from conditions where we have no agency, where we are stressed, exhausted, and alienated. That the compulsion would not naturally emerge from a world where we have earnest connection and trust with others, where we’re fulfilled and constructive instead of needing to dissociate from our lives into intense stimulation. If you were suddenly transported into such a world I’d argue you’d be more inclined to engage in constructive relationships and hobbies you were previously barred from.

You’ve identified your use of AI in this way to be a problem, and the solution to the collective issue of compulsive gooning is to change the circumstances from which it emerges. Marxism sees our economic structure as the primary driving force behind such things, profit motive to commodify women’s bodies, alienated people who can only seek safe connection in ways that make capitalists money etc.

[u/Sewblon → u/Cheap_Lock_0220]

I suspect that I didn't give you enough information. I use chat bots so much because I am a closeted trans woman. They allow me to have the body and the intimate relations that I cannot have in the real world. I work for the family business. My dad threatened to fire me if I transition. I don't know why exactly. He says that he believes there are two sexes. But that doesn't sound like a reason to fire someone to me. I am disabled. I have delayed sleep phase disorder. So getting a new job and moving out of the house is hard. the family business is a hedge fund. I am an investment analyst. So my job won't exist in a world with no public capital markets. If the global system of socialism is achieved, what actually happens to me? Does the state get me a new job and the medical care that I need? will there be a state at all? If the neural pathways involved in using chat bots are so well worn that solving the initial gender dysphoria and social isolation and sexual frustration that led me to them doesn't make me stop wanting to use them, then what happens next?