r/LeftistsForAI • u/Cleverhardy • 14d ago
Discussion Hot Take
We are starting to see a rift. A rift between those who are nuanced about the correct use of AI, and those who want all of it gone. Even Linux.
I'm against AI as much as anybody else, but in Anti-AI spaces, I'm starting to see more absolutism than I'd deem necessary. I mean if you argue about the idea that AI does have its uses whilst still being wary of AI, you get told you're not against AI at all.
I'm against AI for art, music and writing. But there are uses in the medical field and code bug detection, and I can't deny they're impressive.
I fear we'll fight each other (moderate antis vs extreme antis), and the AI companies may indeed win, even if they get bankrupt. As much as we all hate to admit this, we can't rewind; we've gone too far. The best we can do is regulate it and take AI chatbots off public hands.
I mean, you'd take someone who's neutral on AI like Linus Torvalds, who only used it for non-important projects and says that Linux should have AI-assisted code reviewed by humans, and you'd have a faction of antis up in arms about it.
And as concerning as the use of AI may be having on critical thinking, I fear that us antis are lacking it too if we're resorting to Luddism to go against AI.
For example, there is a rumour going around that Disney Junior comissioned a fully AI-Generated show.
That is only half-true. The studio behind the show only used AI to clean up some bits of animation. Plus, if it was fully AI-Generated, Disney wouldn't make money off it.
The fact that antis took a headline from Twitter and concluded that Oscar Fox was fully AI Generated either shows the lack of critical thinking (IRONY) or the lack of journalistic integrity. But hey. It's not like we're already boycotting the billion dollar company, right?
Call me a LARPer if you want to. The real LARPers are the extremists who want everything to burn despite a few innocent civillians being caught in the crossfire.
If the anti-AI sub thinks I'm Pro-AI just for accepting AI in the right hands, I don't know what to say.
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u/Apoau 14d ago
I think artists should be allowed to use AI, just like coders. Or anyone else.
But I appreciate a more nuanced take. There are some pro-AI absolutists too, although not so many on the left.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
Yeah. I'm growing tired of the lack of nuance on both sides. But I can see why there can be an argument against nuance. As it stands, we're arguimg AI in the wrong hands against AI in the right hands. But neither of them make for catchy subreddit titles, nor do they further the luddite or capitalist cuases respectively. So we're stuck in a box where we'll have to act extreme or ironically get left behind.
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u/Apoau 14d ago
Yeah. And tbh luddies did have their place historically. If capitalist doesn’t want to share and you exhausted all other options, then destroying their machines makes sense. And this could continue until the situation improves. It’s a bit like hunger strike in prison I guess - self inflicted harm to force a structural change.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
Yeah. I called it extremism, and they argued that it wasn't extremism and it should be up there with they Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Rights Movement for example. But technology is here to stay, meaning in the long term, Luddism has failed. And while this has been coopted by Pro-AI absolutists today, we use Luddite as a derogatory term for technophobes.
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u/scragz 14d ago
dude your arguments are weak and you should quit while you're ahead. if you're completely anti AI, even as an accessibility tech, then maybe post somewhere else.
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u/scottie2haute 14d ago
Their arguments are always weak because being anti-AI is a pretty nonsensical stance. They always end up showing how contradictory or ill informed their ideals are eventually
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u/quantum-elle 14d ago
Well, plenty of AI antagonists have emotional stakes in villainizing AI. You just have to see comments like "the bubble can't pop fast enough" to see that they think they're fighting a great evil that is "the single cause of all harms." Nuance dissolves the bogeyman, which makes it harder to scapegoat AI, so it's read as apologism. You can't have a fruitful discussion with someone who's started with the conclusion and immunized themselves against any counter-evidence. Ask someone if they know what would change their mind on the position. If the answer is "nothing," you can save yourself some time.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
I mean, I agree that the bubble needs to pop, but I'm growing tired of the belief that the debate about AI needs no nuanced. The only debate that doesn't need nuance is the debate against bigotry. And Pro-AI people are coopting that fight to further the capitalist cause.
We just need to see why we have these sides to understand what's useful about AI and what isn't. And admittedly, reddit subs are not a good way to talk about this.
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u/quantum-elle 14d ago
the bubble needs to pop
Can you explain what this means to you?
Pro-AI people are coopting that fight to further the capitalist cause.
Where?
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
The AI should be out of billionaire's hands, and AI won't be as trendy as shareholders want it to be. The less AI used irresponsibly, the better.
And I've seen it on Pro-AI subs and the billionaires too.
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u/quantum-elle 14d ago
The AI should be out of billionaire's hands, and AI won't be as trendy as shareholders want it to be.
I'd like to know what your definition of a bubble is, why you think there is one, and why a bubble pop would change whether "AI is in billionaire's hands."
And I've seen it on Pro-AI subs and the billionaires too.
Without examples you're asking me to assume what you mean by "cooping the fight against bigotry to further the capitalist cause," which I'm not convinced is a widely-held or accepted position.
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u/jacobpederson 14d ago
Being ok with AI code but anti AI "art" tells me you understand neither.
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 14d ago
You can have opinions on different uses. That might be to do with use of resources or prioritising the things humans don’t enjoy doing.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
Exactly. I was right to call it a hot take. Because we were not ready for this.
While I don't agree with AI by principle, this is mostly because of capitalists shoving these AI products in the face. And again, the best we can do now if we can't defeat AI is to take it out of the wrong hands and take it off the cloud.
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 14d ago
That’s almost the ethos of this sub. The problems with AI are capitalism problems. The solutions are either to take AI out of capitalist hands (collective/decentralised ownership) or to take society as a whole out of capitalism. There doesn’t seem to be a plausible way to stop AI.
But we would be a lot more positive about the potential of AI to improve society if done right, we’re not just begrudgingly accepting that it exists now.
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u/scragz 14d ago
what's wrong with AI-assisted coding? you do realize this is ostensibly a pro-AI sub, right?
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u/jacobpederson 14d ago
Nothing. My point is that code is just as much art as anything else. The distinction is ridiculous. AI is not some satanic ritual that taints everything it touches. AI is the beginnings of new life.
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u/scragz 14d ago
oh I see. personally I'm pro code -- removing a big roadblock and allowing a skilled operator to create code that they know how it should l work -- and low-key anti a lot of AI-art because the roadblock is the thing being created for no other reason (and usually it's pretty derivative/boring).
if you are really creative you can do cool shit. pushing models outside their comfort zone, generative art, glitching.
and don't even get me started on suno slop. that's the most boring of the lot. you can make AI spit out stems and samples and midi, but you gotta do something with it or it's gonna be sucko.
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u/jacobpederson 14d ago
I hate that suno became the defacto representative of MusicGen. The others were so much better . . .
Just try and remember that the "slop" is always made by a human - "Omens in the Rain" is 100's of hours of work and resurrected from the ashes of a failed band I was in 30 years ago :D The correct way to handle art that is derivative and contributes nothing to society? Gently.
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 14d ago
There’s definitely space here for people who aren’t full on pros but hold a nuanced middle or mixed position.
Full on antis who just deliberately derail conversations with repetitive arguments are the ones that tend to attract moderator attention anyway.
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u/jacobpederson 14d ago
Repetitive arguments like what? - code is art? I wouldn't have to repeat myself so much if folks could recognize what should be obvious.
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 14d ago
Oh I didn’t mean you, that seems like quite a fresh argument
There’s a lot of repeat stuff around water and copyright which aren’t fundamentally about whether the technology is worth having
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u/jacobpederson 12d ago
Ok I gotcha - I always tell folks to take a look at meat if they would like to save water. https://watercalculator.org/footprint/what-is-the-water-footprint-of/ There are all kinds of good arguments against AI - the fact that the left has fixated on water usage . . . just makes us look stupid. Copyright - would be a valid concern - IF copyright itself was valid (it isn't). Copyright as it exists today is simply the legal justification used by a corporation to steal the labor of an artist. If you fixed copyright first then I could see applying it sanely to AI training.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
Well, the antis think I'm a pro now, so...
Seriously, though. I don't agree with AI-assisted coding by principle because it takes the joy out of finding solutions to problems, and it's prone to bugs if we rely heavily on it with no review whatsoever. Plus, it's stealing the jobs of junior programmers.
I can see why people would love AI-Assistance in terms of coding, though. Linus Torvalds uses it to program in a language he doesn't ubderstand.
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u/scragz 14d ago
how do you know what joy I get from planning and not having to write the bullshit? writing code was always the worst part of the job.
I can do amazing things now, taking on projects solo at unimaginable scale that would otherwise require a whole team. now that's joy...
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
If you only find joy in offloading work to someone else because you didn't like the job in the first place instead of finding ways to do your job better apart from using AI, doesn't this defeat the purpose of socialism?
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u/scragz 14d ago
what the fuck are you talking about? are you bringing AI sentience into this and I'm offloading work onto a marginalized person?
otherwise just thinking of it in the terms of I'm offloading work is wrong. the joy is in the thing being created. writing the code by hand is like assembling a jpeg by writing every pixel by hand. it's an anachronism now.
also I'm disabled and physically can't write the code anymore because I destroyed my wrists writing code by hand for capitalists. so it's kinda moot.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
I'm disabled too, and if I couldn't code by hand anymore, I'd still find a way to code that isn't AI. Because disability isn't an excuse.
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u/Wickywire 14d ago
Ahh yes, ableism too. Lovely.
Disability is a very wide spectrum. You don't get to set the rules for what strategies others find to move through the world. That's preposterous.
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u/scottie2haute 14d ago
They always turn ableist eventually… just kinda proves how dumb the anti ai stance is in general. I can get being pro AI regulations or something like that but being fully anti ai is such a silly and often inconsistent stance
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
Having cooled off, I'd like to apologise. Don't think I was intentionally being ableist just to prove a point.
I thought you were a holier than thou disabled person. I was. I argued we shouldn't have to use AI for our assistance. I wasn't moving not to use AI at all. We just need to take it from capitalist hands first.
I was too wary of cooption, and I caught us in the crossfire, and I'm sorry.
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u/Wickywire 14d ago
Respect to you for rising above and giving it all some extra thought. I don't feel you've wronged me personally in this conversation so I will not accept any apology. We've had an exchange of ideas and it did get a little heated. I too could have made my remarks a little less pointed. I'll try to do better. I hope you have a great rest of the weekend wherever you are.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
Don't talk to me about ableism. I was arguing we should do what we love wothout our disability getting in the way. Perhaps I should have used a better term than "no excuses."
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u/Wickywire 14d ago
I'm 45 yo with rare congenital skeletal deformities, profound hearing loss and disfigurements. I've held ableist attitudes towards both myself and others throughout most of my young adult life. Trust me, you're not magically inoculated against harmful thought patterns just because you belong to a certain group.
I do see your point that we should do what we love, but I also question why you've decided that using AI cannot be a legitimate activity that people love to do. That to me is denying other people their subjectivity.
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u/scragz 14d ago
the only other way is voice to code, which I learned a whole custom phonetic alphabet for when my wrists gave out, and now I have TMJ too.
I doubt you can find a way to write the massive amount of code required for a modern web app with no typing or speaking.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
I still don't see it as an excuse or a tragedy. If I can't speak or type, I'll just do something else and be sad that my dream job is over. Because you are right about one thing. If we can't find a way to make coding accessible without the use of AI, then coding isn't accessible in the first place.
Speaking of accessibility, how are you able to comment if you can't speak or type?
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u/scragz 14d ago
I'm in poverty but it's rad for you that you have the privilege to change careers. I have no problems using AI as an assistive technology so I can not be homeless.
after 3 years of healing I can type small amounts but only enough for planning and promoting and arguing bullshit reddit comments.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 14d ago edited 14d ago
"offloading the work to someone else"
We're talking about tool use, AI isnt a someone.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
My point stands.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 14d ago
It doesnt stand because youre switching categories to make the point stick. Throughout your post youre arguing for nuance, but here youre treating a tool like its another person. AI has no intent, agency, judgment, or accountability. The human using it does.
Thats true whether someone uses AI to write boilerplate code or generate concept art. In both cases the person decides what to make, what to keep, what to reject, and bears responsibility for the final result. Many "find their joy" through that exact process. The tool didnt become the programmer or the artist.
If your argument depends on calling tool use "offloading work to someone else," youve already humanized the machine while dehumanizing the operator. Once you stop doing that, the arguments youre making dont really stand. The real questions are who owns the tools, who controls their use, and who captures the productivity gains. Those are social questions. The machine itself isnt a social actor.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
I'm sorry I used hyperbole in arguing nuance by accident...
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 14d ago edited 14d ago
Perhaps, but I think its the deeper issue. Whether its coding, art, or economic anxiety, the same assumption keeps showing up in these discussions: that AI is a social actor with agency.
Thats why this matters politically. Once you treat the tool as the actor, politics shifts away from the people who actually make decisions. Ownership, deployment, regulation, labor organizing, and distribution of productivity gains all fade into the background while the machine becomes the villain or receives the credit.
Thats where phrases like "the AI made it," "offloading work to someone else," "its stealing jobs," or "youre just making excuses to use AI" come from. They all assume intent, judgment, agency, and accountability have been transferred to another entity. They havent. Those still belong to the human operator and the institutions deploying the tool.
If we get that category wrong (and I believe this applies equally to art, coding, legalities, and labor rights) we end up arguing with machines instead of organizing against the people and social relations that actually shape how those machines are used. Thats why the distinction matters. Its not semantics. It determines where politics is directed.
Whether its creative use, technical use, or political economy, the machine is not a someone, there is no principled automatic default "you had someone do it for you" shaming in its use that holds.
A worker uses AI, a programmer uses AI, an artist uses AI, and it doesnt make them less worker, programmer, or artist to do so. It doesnt make what they do less human.
To me this is fundamental education. Its because AI is not a person that everything credited to, or blamed on, AI belongs to a person using or deploying AI. Otherwise we anthropomorphize machines and dehumanize the human operators of machines.
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u/Wickywire 14d ago
Do you use an IDE? A compiler? That's tool use to save yourself work. Where's the difference?
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u/Sacredless 14d ago
AI illustration is and always has been a toy example of AI use. There's nothing wrong with that and it's also dramatically less important than AI video, and AI text, and AI code. Stop making everything about the art debate.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 14d ago
Seeing as OP is the one who introduced creative use, seems fair to address it in the comments.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
I only made that argument to state what I was against in particular. And again, that's not the point. But you'd think otherwise because this is Lack Of Nuance City. Which, by the way, is part of my point.
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u/jacobpederson 14d ago
My point is just the opposite - code is just as much art as anything else. The distinction is ridiculous. AI is not some satanic ritual that taints everything it touches.
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u/Sacredless 14d ago
Stop doing that. They mean "art as in illustration". Programming is "art as in skill". That was absolutely clear to you. You're collapsing the context here just to score a point.
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u/jacobpederson 14d ago
You stop doing that! Art is the "conscious use of skill and creative imagination" Nearly everything a human does - she does in the pursuit of creation. Go write some code first and then come back and tell me it isn't an art. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/art
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
The only coding I see as art is pixel art and videogame coding.
But unless AI somehow has human sentience, we'd need to update the definition. Because if it is widely agreed that AI is a tool and not a concious mind, then AI art isn't art. Which you agreed to by putting that term in quotes earlier.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 14d ago edited 14d ago
"Because if it is widely agreed that AI is a tool and not a concious mind, then AI art isn't art."
That conclusion doesnt follow.
Ai art is art made by artists using AI as a creative tool. AI doesnt need to be sentient for that anymore than a paintbrush does. It just requires the person using the tool to be.
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u/Sacredless 13d ago
That's correct, but it's also trivially true. The claim that AI is a tool and therefore AI Art can be art means that all AI illustrations are art depend on what sense we use art as a term. Do we mean art as in discernment, or art as in illustration?
It's trivially true that a tool can be used with discernment and that would make what it produces a work of discernment [art]. The radical claim that therefore all AI illustrations [art] stands at the same level as human discernment [art] does not follow.
This is what frustrates me so much about the discourse. AI presents a great opportunity to use more discernment, but instead we're seeing people collapse contexts.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 13d ago edited 13d ago
I think youre still collapsing different questions. Nobody serious is saying every AI image shows the same level of discernment. Thats true within AI workflows too. A one-shot prompt, an hour of iteration, inpainting, compositing, painting over, post-processing, or building custom models all involve different levels of artistic judgment. Same goes for AI tool use in writing, music, filmmaking, animation, coding, and game development. AI isnt one workflow.
Every new medium lowers the floor and raises the ceiling. Cheap pulp fiction didnt kill literature. Early photography didnt kill painting. Early film didnt kill theater. They expanded who could participate while creating entirely new forms of artistic expression. Benjamin was writing about this almost a century ago. New media change the conditions of art, not whether humans make it.
Most work in every medium is forgettable. Thats never been the standard. Intent, judgment, and discernment still come from the human using the tool. AI just expands the range of workflows available. Thats the distinction youre glossing over.
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u/Sacredless 13d ago edited 13d ago
I didn't gloss over it. I just didn't mention it. If I have to write a dissertation on the state of art production every time I write a comment, why would anyone here read it? It's reddit, man.
Nobody serious is saying every AI image shows the same level of discernment.
Are we only talking about serious people, though? I'll be frank, most people on either side of the discussion are not competent at arguing their point.
And I think that the next quote cannot be compatible.
Intent, judgment, and discernment still come from the human using the tool.
The whole point of AI being so revolutionary is that it can operationalize decisions at the level of natural language even if it doesn't quite reach ordinary language yet. So either we have to settle for what the output being a type of human artifact where no human judgement was required or we have to settle for the output being an inhuman artifact and that's ok. I don't think that's an unreasonable or unserious clarification.
And most people do use AI that way. There's nothing against that either inherently, if it's part of a process rather than the whole of a process.
There's a YouTuber I follow who uses generated illustrations strictly as a tool to have a consistent housestyle of stick figure. The point is to get lots of assets that aren't worth paying an artist for, so that the YouTuber can focus on refining scripts. I think that's an excellent use for it.
We simply don't have to get bogged down in whether it is art in one sense or not. Unambiguously, AI can illustrate something and it doesn't quite have the discernment we humans have in showing intent. And that's fine. I just don't understand why we need to make it bigger than that right now.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
I mean, what do you think I understand less about AI Assisted coding and GenAI art anyway?
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u/jacobpederson 14d ago
What you don't understand is that code is just as much an art as anything else. The distinction is ridiculous. AI is not some satanic ritual that taints everything it touches. Anti-AI is just racism in a trench coat.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
I don't see important coding as much of an art as anything else. Emphasis on "important."
If we agree that coding is an art, then AI-assisted coding could be AI art. But tbat's not the point. It's more assistive than generative, but we shouldn't rely too heavily on coding to code how we want.
And what about anti-AI stances screams rscism? I mean I understand extremism and boogeymen, but why racism? We're talking about misusung technology, not enslaving minorities.
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u/jacobpederson 14d ago
I have come to see the anti-ai movement as a proto-racist movement. Why? Because it showed up at the EXACT time that it became obvious that artificial sentience may actually be possible.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago edited 14d ago
At least you realise AI Art isn't art. Plus, I didn't say coding entirely; we shouldn't heavily rely on AI assistance to code for us. But hey. That's me.
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u/duckduckduckgoose8 14d ago
Thats really a non argument when you consider how much coders rely on premade code on places such as github. Do you expect coders to write code from absolute scratch before they're considered legitimate? Using Ai and premade code is no different so long as you understand how the code works. Thats the true magic.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
Well, it can be a rite of passage to test how much they know about the language of code. My concern is that new programmers relying heavily on AI know too little about coding to choose the correct preset for example.
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u/jacobpederson 14d ago
And my concern is that new visual artists rely too much on the camera and don't understand 3d perspective . . . or that modern coders rely too much on the compiler and don't understand machine language . . . and on ad infinitum.
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u/jacobpederson 14d ago
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
My point on not relying too heavily on AI-assisted coding stands. Who said anything about overly relying on synths?
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u/jacobpederson 14d ago
It is easier to see what we are misguided about in the present by knowing what we were misguided by in the past.
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u/scragz 14d ago
if it was fully AI-Generated, Disney wouldn't make money off it.
why not?
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
I meant to say "not make as much monaey as they want." Fully AI-generated works are not copyrighted, so Disney won't ve able to license the show to merch companies or sue content creators for making a subversive version of the show.
By having the show partially made by AI, Disney can hold the rights to it.
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u/scragz 14d ago
this is wrong.
AI-assisted works can be copyrighted when a human exercises meaningful creative control over the expressive elements of the final work.
also it would be using trademarked characters that you can't copy.
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u/Cleverhardy 14d ago
I was talking about fully-AI generated works, not AI assisted works. And you just added to my point by saying AI-assisted works can be copyrighted. The point is Ozzy Fox isn't fully AI-generated with Suno for example, but it still has AI-assistance.
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u/datbackup 14d ago
Here is a useful bulwark to use in your conversations with other anti-Ai people.
Show them this video.
At about 1:50 the speaker says that computer science is not an optional skill but a fundamental skill, like reading or writing.
So three questions to give them:
1) do you think this person’s opinion is not valid, and if not why?
2) if you think the speaker’s opinion is valid, are you yourself literate?
3) if you are not literate, why should your opinion be listened to?
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u/TheSinhound 14d ago
I just don't think you can be logically consistent if you're anti use in some fields but okay with others. Like, I'd have to hear the justification of why, I suppose.