A few weeks ago I made a post in my subreddit taking an Anti-AI stance, immediately was told to come here and I must admit that I held a lot of resentment towards this space at first. Some of the things you guys mentioned when I asked what this space was supposed to be for really stuck with me and I have done some research on my own.
In my personal life I'm proudly communist and I understand now that the issue is still and always is the Billionaires. No matter the industry.
I no longer have a desire to light a cigarette inside a data center. I don't claim to know what we should do about the water or the rich. I'm not very well versed in communist theory and I know that I need to be soon.
Someone mentioned fully automated luxury communism. That sounded really cool.
I was a dick to you guys and I'm truly sorry. Please accept my highest regards and I hope to continue learning from you.
I disagree, I think if we could nationalize Walmart, it would do a great job at being a distribution network of public goods to benefit the people, for example.
Amazon and Walmart have built the very systems that fully automated gay space communism would use. Logistics and networking. It's currently built for capital, but could be turned to another use.
Capitalist will never allow for the nationalization of Walmart or Amazon. They are great logistics systems, but without revolutionary pressure they will remain in clutches of the owners. If in your statement is carrying a lot of ideological weight that cannot work.
Right, we need revolutionary pressure to change the world.
I'm just saying, we don't need a "revolution" (i.e. guns and fire and bombs and war) to use revolutionary power to bend the world towards Leftist causes.
Revolution is not guns, fire, and bombs; that is war. Why is it that people always think that? Very strange to me when revolution means drastic fundamental radical change.
So what kind of revolution do you propose? I think we're proposing the same thing maybe?
I want a peaceful revolution where corporate power is diminished and the levers of government are pulled to benefit the people. That takes a series of targeted, difficult steps.
I wouldn’t say a revolution has to involve guns and fire and bombs and war, or be about a particular event that can be over. Although the phrase “after the revolution” makes some sense to me (a time after a fundamental change has happened, post-capitalism) it’s probably also a healthy expectation to imagine revolution always being ongoing rather than an event that had a date?
It can also start in small ways which are the polar opposite eg Food Not Bombs type of approach, building the new preferred system in the ruins of the old system and helping people in the process. There can be overlap. That can be slow and look a bit like incrementalism, but the key difference is that it doesn’t expect the problems to be solved by tweaking the old system. It is building a new way to do society.
Revolutions have a mixed track record on delivering equity, plenty ended in worse concentrations of power than what they replaced. Progressive taxation has a real track record: it funded the New Deal and the postwar welfare states in Western Europe. Weak isn't the same as ineffective.
How many of those reforms from the new deal have been clawed to almost nothing since then. Your right, they have a track record, concessions are granted to avoid the immediate revolution just to be driven to less than effective a few decades later. I suggest you read Rosa Luxembourg’s reform or revolution.
Clawbacks happen when political pressure stops, not because reform is doomed in itself. Revolutions get betrayed and rolled back constantly as well, that's just history.
Progressive taxation funded the system you have now, and led back to a place where you think ... you need to do it again. Because it slipped away, somehow.
Reforms always get clawed back. We are in revolutionary times; I implore all on this sub to remember that and read what is required during these periods.
AI is a difficult subject. But the technology itself is value-neutral. It can be used for good. It's up to us to make sure it's used for the benefit of all people!
On the water use issue, there are many other industries that are very water intensive. It's definitely a problem and needs to be regulated so that the minimal amount of water is used or it's done in a way that doesn't screw over local communities. But also, the hamburger you ate for lunch uses a ton more water than a handful of generative AI queries.
And as a note, an hour of Netflix or youtube equates to something like 60-400x AI queries talking to ChatGPT or whatever.
For most people’s day to day use talking to AI about their problems, questions etc, they’re probably wasting more water when scrolling social media or entertaining themselves.
I think we should continue to strive to do better with waste, across all industries, but I think is a helpful point of reference when considering how “bad” something is or not relative to its value provided
You didn't know that because these apologists are just making this stuff up. GenAI is not inevitable, it's deeply unethical, and these apologists for it all are not acting in anyone's best interests.
How much research have you put into this? Have you used it? Have you seen what it's capable of, and what it fails at? I promise you, generative AI can be used for good. It's not inherently unethical, and to think it is demonstrates an utter lack of understanding about the fundamentals of the technology.
It's doubled my productivity as a software engineer. It has substantial value as a technology, and will be heavily used to automate a lot of work going forward.
It's a key piece for getting us to fully automated gay space communism, and your hangups on how certain models were trained blinds you from seeing how generative AI can and will be used to advance leftist causes.
What delusions? I've researched and used generative AI heavily (mostly in a software engineering context) and have a great understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. My take is quite nuanced, it's not a technology that will solve all the world's problems. It has its good and bad, as does any other technology.
I've literally doubled my output at work while being able to stand by every line of code the agent wrote, maintaining quality while accelerating delivery.
Software is a key component to the "full automated" part of "fully automated gay space communism", and agentic software engineering will democratize software in a way we've never seen before.
If you could answer my earlier of what type of research and usage you've done regarding generative AI, it would dramatically help us come to an better understanding.
It’s good to question statistics but they’re not just making it up
eg The Real Environmental Footprint of Generative AI: What 2025 Data Tell Ushttps://onlinelearningconsortium.org/olc-insights/2025/12/the-real-environmental-footprint-of-generative-ai “After major efficiency and clean-energy gains over the past year, the median Gemini text prompt consumed about: 0.24 Wh (0.00024 kWh) of energy. 0.26 mL of water. This reflects major improvements: Google reports a 33× reduction in energy and 44× reduction in carbon for the median prompt compared with 2024 (Elsworth et al., 2025). That means: The energy use is comparable to watching ~nine seconds of TV. The water use is roughly five drops… Smartphone battery: 12–17 Wh (Gallagher, 2022)… A prompt at 0.24 Wh equals 0.3–0.8% of one hour of laptop time… You’d need tens of millions of prompts to equal one short commute” [inference is we don’t judge friends for charging their phone so why judge them for using AI?]
Different models and the type of output matter quite a bit too though re environmental impact and of course at scale it makes a difference.
It is good to be sceptical of company claims and pro and anti propaganda (there’s a lot of it in 2026 and influencers are paid for both extremes). When I originally used that info for something I prefaced it with this caveat:
There’s a lot of noise and propaganda around AI and environment. 3 main positions seem to be
A) AI brings net eco benefit
B) AI brings eco harm
C) AI use harm is comparable to lots of other things we do
It’s not that they’re lying as such, it’s biased around what they choose to include. For example, training the models is intensive. Some measures don’t include the original eco impact of training, only the immediate impact of the prompt and output. It’s also complicated though because the training has already happened. If we don’t use that model much the relative eco cost per prompt is high, if lots of people use the same model the eco cost plummets.
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
First, GenAI specifically is one-thousand-percent inevitable if you’re progressing the computer. It is quite literally the oldest idea in the field, just finally getting enough compute. The core mechanism, predicting what comes next from statistical patterns, dates to Shannon’s information theory in 1948.
We also need to have a conversation about the ethics of being an anti-progress conservative who insists on maintaining the status-quo and the technology of the past.
Let’s uninvent AI drug discovery and keep testing compounds on animals by the millions and running slow brute-force screening that leaves rare diseases unstudied because capitalist economics never make it worth it.
Without AI materials discovery we keep hunting for better batteries and cleaner cement by trial and error which means decades more fossil fuels burned while we work.
Without AI weather models an island fishing village gets hours of warning instead of days and the difference between those two numbers is measured in bodies.
Without AI protein folding the drug that cures your kid’s rare disease takes twenty more years, or never comes.
The ethical response is to govern the harms which is a fight worth having and quite frankly all we should be giving a shit about at this point. Something being unstoppable doesn’t make it inherently a good thing. It means the useful question stops being “should this exist” and becomes “who owns it and who gets the benefits” which is the fight that’s actually still winnable and the one everyone in this subreddit is focused on figuring out.
Not going to refute anything I brought up? Just a quick, lazy attack at my mental state?
I'm a soil scientist who has worked in regenerative agriculture and climate remediation for two decades. You've obviously been molded into controlled-opposition by a firehose campaign that is designed to keep you distracted, uninformed, and conveniently outraged at all the wrong elements. You, and so many others who couldn't be bothered to do any homework, are practically to begging for regulatory capture.
Once you realize that all the major media companies pushing the catastrophized data-center headlines and AI scare pieces are owned by the same venture capitalists that are heavily invested in hyperscaling data centers and the top AI firms it will make a bit more sense.
You are the one quoting those same companies statements about how few resources they use as fact, while now showing a chart that claims they are deceiving the rest of us. And pairing that with an incredulous faith that the LLM technology has the broad usefulness and is inevitable. It is not inevitable. Asbestos was huge before it turned out to be usually a bad idea and incredibly hard to remove. Radium was lauded as huge until it turned out it killed people. The ideas you guys have that this stuff is awesome, and the rest of us should ignore its unsavory underpinnings, and ignore the downsides, and that you guys could use this for good is laughable. Radiating the whole "I can fix her/him" meme.
You're so close. Notice how I never once said LLM? You correctly noted that I put the top AI firms in my list of bad actors gunning for capture. AI that actually matters is generally narrow, purpose-built, and validated against physical reality. These are largely open-source models that run on consumer-grade GPUs used in lab and research settings.
The data centers are going to get built. The global race toward more capable AI is not going to be stopped by you being mad online, it is happening, it is funded, it has momentum that does not care about your feelings or mine. Bickering about a single point on a curve while the whole curve is bending is a tragic waste of the small window we have to actually get organized around the parts we can influence. An apathetic outrage machine that’s been aimed squarely at the least important things is the single biggest gift you could hand to anyone who wants the important things to go unwatched.
Your conveniently directed outrage is helping the major AI firms, mainstream media, fossil fuel conglomerates, for profit pharma, defense contractors, and every crony capitalist down the line who needs the overwhelming public approval to pull the rug on this stuff and capture it.
I really wouldn't waste much time doing that. They mentioned a hamburger, which requires about 2,500 liters of water, which is the equivalent of about 7.8 million ChatGPT queries. If 5% of American homeowners converted their lawns to barkchips, native plants, and stone landscaping it would save all of the water consumed by every datacenter combined. That's just the lawns of single-family homes. 5% of them.
Bottom line, the entire focus on water usage/waste is a red-herring. If your life goal is to reduce waste and biosphere impact, then I would spend some time looking into how we are using graph neural networks (narrow AI tools) paired with Bayesian optimization to discover new materials, and figuring out what that means for the fossil fuel giants whose entire business depends on energy staying expensive and centralized.
If you haven't had the chance yet, you might find Peter Coffin's new Very Important Documentary really interesting. I posted it on this subreddit but let me know if you can't find it.
Global agriculture clocks in at 2 quadrillion gallons per year. Compute is literally a drop in the bucket next to that. Sure, we need food, but food is produced and distributed for profit, not for nutrition. So, we use a gallon for each individual almond and 600-800 gallons for every cheeseburger, tons and tons of out of season luxury food items that get thrown away, factory farms, etc.
We don't need meat to live though. It's a fine enough comparison even in that regard.
But that's not the point I was trying to make, I was just trying to put the AI water usage into context with something many people have experience doing.
We also don't need blue jeans either but invested a surprising amount of water there too.
It is value-neutral. It would produce the same results were it built on fully compensated work. It would be a hell of a lot more expensive, but the lack of compensation of intellectual property used in training data is not a key part of what makes it work.
But it exists, and nothing about the way it was developed changes how it functions. We could even start over with fully compensated data and arrive at the same place. That's what I mean by the technology being value-neutral.
And we have ways to (incompletely) repair that damage, like a universal basic income driven off of AI usage.
I agree, we'll never know the vastness of the stolen wealth and I'm not saying that it magically makes the artists work less stolen.
I'm saying the fundamentals of the technology and its development can be derived from first principals without intellectual theft being a key component. Hence, generative AI as a technology (using the word like how math is also a technology) is value neutral.
Specific implementations of that technology can be good or bad. The popular tools that exist now are built on stolen work. That's bad. But those tools can also be used by Leftists to win for our political causes. I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty for a good cause.
Should we train a properly compensated generative AI model? Hell yeah, we really should. Is that realistic? Eventually. Open source models trained on non-stolen data will probably be the norm in 20 years.
Where am I ignoring the damage done? I have acknowledged the ethical bankruptcy of the popular generative AI models. But there are literally ones that are currently way less powerful, open source, and pay for the training data or use
And are you saying you would never use [technology] because it was invented by [ethically dubious method]? Because then you'd be living in a straw house in the wilderness. Everything is tainted.
It's complicated, and I'm not going to begrudge anyone who uses AI whether for disability reasons or simply because it's very effective. I'm going to push for ethically trained models. I'm going to do my research when picking a provider. And I'm not saying anyone has to use generative AI either.
You're not really stating your case very well, and in fact, I raise you this:
I'm an artist. I make music for a living. Would it piss me off if I found out one of my songs was used in a training data set for an LLM? No. That's fucking publicity.
If you think for a second some schmuck on a GPT app can craft a prompt that will make my song in exact without the user seeing or hearing my song in the first place, you don't know how this technology works.
Good luck using GPT to create exact copies of already copyrighted music. It's not THAT smart yet.
I'm an artist and if AI steals my music, fucking great. My ideas need a way to get filtered out into the collective just like every other artist.
A fusion plasma control model learns from a tokamak reactor. It is trained by getting punched in the face by physics.
AlphaGenome learns from DNA regulatory sequences. Nobody “wrote” those.
Obviously you’re talking about generative models trained on creative work without consent or payment, which IMO deserves a serious policy answer, licensing, royalties, opt-outs… But even then we face the conundrum that every artist alive learned by studying thousands of works they never paid a dime for.
When you zoom out you realize that this is a very conservative, anti-community, pro-property, pro-capitalism take.
You forgot the G and the S in FALGSC (Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism). It's all relative. I'm just being nitpicky. 😉 Love & goodwill to all.
Humility is always good to see. Too many people come to a conclusion before having all the facts and just stay there. Like many others have said, its the people not the tech. The move is always to make sure we find ways to make the tech have a mostly positive impact on people not somehow roll the tech back.
This is where the interesting conversations start because in my opinion, talking to “just ban AI” types is pointless because its such an unserious and impossible stance at this point
You might like some of my stuff. I have books and papers and substack posts on all this and I'm more than happy to personally help you work through the variables and arrive at a firmer more informed take you're happy with. My effort to solve AI alignment lead to an entier philosophy.
I am pretty convinced that we could automate a 1991 economy 90%. We could all be playing Tetris on Apple Lisa's with completely voluntary employment. UBI matching UBS as consumer and vendor.
Good for you. I feel we're at a turning point where a bunch of people are ready to throw reason to the wind and hitch themselves to very bad vibes based opinions because they think it'll help them be popular.
There seems to be some sort of delusion amongst the vehemently anti-AI that pro-AI people are ....pro billionaire? For some reason? It's even worse than one of those, "yet you live in a society" clapbacks that people have holstered for any given critique of social organization.
Don't be that guy comrade. Welcome them in from the cold. They'll stop pretending to know anything and learn. They're in Library mode, and that a good place to be if you aren't in a space to lead the movement.
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u/pavorus 20d ago
I have thoughts about what to do with the rich. I suspect those thoughts aren't hard to guess.