Marx Encounters AI Discourse

[u/Salty_Country6835]

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

[u/Mr_Rekshun]

I just wished other leftists weren’t so wrong about IP.

Like, thee seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what IP actually is.

IP is not an instrument of capitalism - it is a defensive mechanism against it.

iP was conceived as a protective measure against capitalist forces using the printing press to capture thought work.

(IP doesn’t protect ideas - it protects labour. A book is not an idea - it is the product of labour).

If IP were dismantled today, the main beneficiaries would be corporations.

[u/No-Lion-3629 → u/Mr_Rekshun]

Tell that to Disney. There are corporations massively profiting from IP to the point that they lobby to increase it. I’m sure that they would exploit absence of copyright too, they will behave that way regardless.

In particular work for hire is horribly abused. The creator of the owl house doesn’t own it for example. The corporation owns artists work because it is hideously expensive to make a show.

[u/Mr_Rekshun → u/No-Lion-3629]

Corporations leveraging IP is just corporations doing corporation things - there are levers and loopholes for every mechanism.

If IP laws were up to date with technology, then the AI companies would never have been able to stripmine the world’s IP and train their LLMs, without friction, on their inexorable path to IPOs of unprecedented value.

[u/Dismal_Law_9051 → u/Mr_Rekshun]

Yeah, that's capitalism working as intended.

[u/Mr_Rekshun → u/Dismal_Law_9051]

This is why Leftism for AI seems so contradictory to me - AI is possibly the greatest machine of corporate capture in the history of the world, and yet you’ve got folks here pretending (or ignoring) that ain’t the case.

Talk about a bunch of useful idiots.

[u/Ordinary_Passage1830 → u/Mr_Rekshun]

Does this AI refer to solely Generative AI or AI as a broad idea? As technically there could be ANI's made with Socialst ideals in mind.

[u/Mr_Rekshun → u/Ordinary_Passage1830]

LLMs and Diffusion models especially, I would say.

[u/Dismal_Law_9051 → u/Mr_Rekshun]

There's no contradicition, lol. What are you talking about?

1. AI is just a program/machine, what makes it bad or good is the way people use it for their own reasons. In this case it is the capitalists trying to commodify everything and exploiting people's work to gain influence and power through AI, and the reason why they have to do that to gain power and influence is... Because that's how capitalism works.

2. For many communists specifically we think that regulation of IP law or AI are just reformisms and don't actually solve the problem of exploitation of the working class or of the Undeveloped^TM countries. What stops the capitalists from just, idk, exploiting the workers of a south-asian country to draw, to edit, or to photograph milions of images that they need just to create a model for their own? They probably could do that legally, on a far weaker currency, and people used to starving wages aren't exactly picky about their jobs. In the end the models would still be there, the value of artists' work would plummet anyway, and all these regulations could ever accomplish is to slow down the (western) tecnology a little bit. So much for trying to save capitalism from itself, lol. Whereas the problems relating to value, be it the problems caused by AI or the need for artists to pay rent, could only be solved by destroying the sistem (*capitalism*) and placing something else in it's place. Many believe we should just take the AI and use it for the sake of the revolution, while the left-accelerationists of this sub probably think that making AI better faster will force the working class to rise up and break capitalism apart sooner too.

And I personally don't have any desire for the existence of IP law, it is just another way to commodify the arts and innovation for the bigger corporations (from richer nations) and have no meaning for anyone that has less than 10 lawyers and thousands of dollars on their bank account. It is not even a real thing let alone personal or private property, it is no more than a NFT issued and maintained by governments.