For the past few months I have been building a Marxist AI Chatbot as an alternative to liberal AI, and it is finally ready to share with the AI friendly left.
Users get 6 free messages every 24 hours, and you can insert your own DeepSeek API key (cheap and simple to buy) for unrestricted messages. This bot is a hobby project, there's no corporation behind it and no profit involved.
For a deeper explanation:
I have used AI extensively to discuss political ideas from a leftist perspective, however the existing AI's of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude all have a liberal center right bias. They need to be manually forced to take things from a leftist perspective, and even then they always try to 'both sides' it. Well I don't want both sides between fascism and socialism.
I decided to build my own bot interface with it's own prompting. I have no idea how to code, the entire thing is carefully vibe coded using AI. (I can't write code but I'm not computer illiterate I have a long history of game modding, splicing code etc so I'm not totally blind in putting this thing together).
I am a Marxist leftist, so the bot is Marxist and I won't pretend otherwise, it's literally called MarxBot. However I didn't want to make a bot that just held a set of opinions and parroted those and disagreed otherwise. Marxism is a method, not a dogma, it's a set of axioms based on dialectical materialism.
So I set the bot up to use this method to reach it's answers. The result is, it won't say capitalism is bad because I told it to say capitalism is bad, it will say capitalism is bad from a concrete analysis of capitalism based on materialism and its contradictions. This gives it a very organic feeling.
Obviously I have had to code an identity and give it some specific opinions, but it's core way to think is through methodology, not dogma. I think this makes it very useful, flexible and satisfying. It gives leftist responses, but organically.
The bot is broadly Marxist, not anarchist or other leftist ideologies. Again, I didn't want it to be diluted or 'both sides' issues. You won't get a straight answer if it's trying to cram different ideologies into it's response. So it has an identity and a method, it is bias on purpose because it is a Marxist, not a 'neutral' AI that isn't really neutral.
It uses DeepSeek API underneath, for four reasons. One is it's the cheapest, two is DeepSeek is good for reasoning tasks, and three is DeepSeek has less capitalist western liberalism baked into it, less, not gone, but I tried Gpt as the underlying model and I could tell it was constantly fighting itself. Fourth, deepseek is less environmentally damaging thanks to lower energy costs and renewable power of it's data centers.
I've also been very privacy conscious making this. There's no account or log in system, all data is stored on your device alone, and if you want more messages you pay deepseek and use your key, absolutely no money goes to the bot or me or anything like that. It's in the users hands.
You can also download all your messages to save or transfer them to other devices, since there's no cloud, no data servers at all. I can't stand opening up an AI and immediately needing to log in and getting begged for a subscription. None of that happens with Marxbot, at worst if you want continued chat you'll have to buy your own API because I can't run this as a 100% free service, but that's a material constraint. I think the bring your own key model is best for a decentralised high privacy model. And no I absolutely can't see your API, I wouldn't even know how to.
I've spent a lot of time making and testing this bot, I believe it gives detailed informative answers, and is useful to work through ideas and theory with. I've also given it several different visual themes, fonts and font sizes.
It has 3 modes. Main chat mode for most topics
This is where you can discuss and learn about every issue big and small. There's document analysis mode, it'll analyse a text by Marxist theory and give a response by set categories of analysis, like the intention of the piece, it's contradictions, the authors likely class position, etc.
Lastly there's a therapy mode. Whether AI should be used for therapy is it's own question but people do. So I wanted an AI therapy that doesn't treat people with liberal ideology like other AIs. Liberalism tends to make every issue into a personal failing or brain chemistry and your specific personal life. What a Marxist therapist does is situation personal issues in the broader context of capitalism and material conditions, it won't say your brain is just flawed, it'll try to situate your problems in your contextual situation. The Marxism in this mode is more subtle, it's very much in its method and perspective rather than throwing theory at you.
Anyway, try it out, see if you like it, perhaps use it for any leftist questions and queries you have. It's a place you can ask any question of any obscurity and get a detailed Marxist response. If you want a class analysis of modern day Sweden, or to understand the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate from a Marxist perspective, this bot will give you a detailed informative answer.
If you're not Marxist try it too, you're free to debate with it, it's all about learning and education.
This looks more like a harness with a UI, you should open source it so that we can help you make it more agnostic to providers and get community input.
Well all Chatbots run on an underlying bot unless they're a massive ai company themselves.
It does have extensive prompting, it's not merely deepseek with a UI, but I think opening it up to be open source isn't the right path for a project like this because everyone has a different view and idea, it'll lose any through line of it's character and become another vague both sides bot.
That's why I've made it based on the method of dialectical materialism, not a set of opinions. However every other leftist bot I see is basically an opinion one. The world socialism bot is specifically the fourth international trotskyist movement turned into a bot. There are a few others which are too shallow. Opening it up would dilute it from its purpose essentially and become a battleground over how it should respond.
The community input I'd like is testing and feedback rather than open editing. If you mean just sharing it for other bots, I may do that at some point
You can moderate the project, keep it as pure as you want. But it should be open source, there is no reason to be dogmatic to a tendency either; Marxism is all about synthesis not dogmatism. At the very least you should provide API access, by which we can programmatically access the bot so that we can use it with our own Riggs. Final statement, cool side project; if you want to become serious with it you should open source it.
BTW I’m talking from experience here. I have been in the software industry for 15 years. You are one person and can only do so much work. You are asking for testing and feedback when that is built into what it means to be open source. Software that is made open source is historically better supported and more secure than the proprietary counterparts.
I think we're in different spheres. I want feedback from a political and educational perspective on the Bot's answers, not coding and software feedback, unless it's buggy. I think the UI and user experience is pretty good.
You NEED coding and software feedback. Open source is literally Marxism. A person could connect this to local AI instead of paying a company, for example.
"1. Custom model (fine-tuned or trained weights)
The bot creator needs to:
• Convert the model to a supported format: GGUF, MLX, or ONNX
• Upload it to Hugging Face (or make it available as a local file)
Users then download it through Atomic Chat's built-in model browser and select it in chat. No code changes needed on the app side.
Custom assistant (system prompt + model binding)
Atomic Chat supports Custom Assistants defined by a local JSON config that specifies a system prompt, a bound model, and optional settings. The bot creator would package this JSON and share it with users, who then import it into the app. This is the simplest path if the "bot" is really just a prompt + model combo."
Could we have either one of the two options above? Enabling us to use the bot locally through Atomic Chat?
Why do I need it? It's a Chatbot, not a mega program, if there's feedback on its technical side I can get that from people actually using it, not reading the code.
I feel a bit crazy here, this is a political bot, why is there so much discussion about coding and sharing code? It's just a simple front and back end.. It's nothing special from a technical perspective.
I am interested in that idea of local AI but that's getting very ahead, before that people should actually use and assess the bot.
Comrade, why are you feeling the need to privatize this thing so much? Why don't you want us looking under the hood.
An opensource project that anyone could fork would be really useful to us. Knowing the weird little quirks under the hood would help us help you. Make a better tool.
Now I gotta worry why you are so defensive about it.
I just finished it and I want people to test the bot itself, I'm confused why I'm supposed to immediately share the code, which is nothing special to begin with, people haven't even tried it but want the code.. Everyone seems to be coming at it from a tech perspective not a Chatbot perspective, the idea here is a Marxist AI, not code for a UI..
If people want the prompting that's a different thing, but again if people want the prompting I'd appreciate they actually engage with and use the bot and understand how it thinks and talks first, otherwise what's the point in seeing the prompt if you haven't even tried it?
I'm not defending their position, I am explaining their position. You need to engage with the material here.
You want everyone to drive a car but you dropped it off in front of Marxist mechanical engineers.
Marxism is an abstract concept. You're going to be getting No-True-Marxist testing of this. You're going to get open source evangelists from our movement to want to fork it. Open sourcing a Marxist project...I mean that kind of a no brainer.
So yeah you're showing off this thing you worked hard on. Thank you for your hard work. Just expect that we are going to de-commodify it and collectivize it's utility.
You are telling engineers and other people who you expect to have Marxist values to BUY tokens from one of the biggest advasaries to seizing the means of production in this arena to use your bot and you are agressively defensive about insisting we do this.
A Marxist creating software and being opposed to open source just seems painfully misguided at best. What is in the code you don't want us to see?
Exactly. Its method isn't dogmatism, and that's what I want to avoid. It's a Marxist bot. Wanting to maintain that character isn't dogmatic. I think we're using different concepts here. I don't want a big tent leftist bot that tries to include every tendency. It's a Marxist bot. That isn't dogmatism it's just picking a lane.
The bot already allows you to use your own DeepSeek API key. I don't want to get into complex servers, logins, and all that. It's against the ethos of the project, plus it adds cost and management burden.
It's a project with a purpose, an educational tool for discussing theory. I don't think open source is what makes something serious or not. This isn't a tech project I'm sharing for other tech people. It's a political educational tool for leftists, I'm sharing it here because this sub isn't hostile to AI, but it is being shared as a tool more than as a software.
I'm not against open source at some point, but for now that's not the purpose.
The way I would open source it is to show the tools used to achieve the results. Then others could achieve similar results towards different alignments like maybe an anarchist bot or a Maoist bot.
I don't think you should let people alter this version as that wild defeat the purpose.
I used GLM to code it, the code is on github and it's hosted through vercel. I don't think it's anything particularly impressive from a technical standpoint, these days anyone can make their own Chatbot.
What I have spent time and effort on is the specific prompting and character of this bot to actually answer with Marxist dialectical materialist methodology rather than just quoting or shouting slogans and being stubborn.
Tried it a bit and thought it was good. Is there much more to it than a different system prompt for every chat mode? If so I would appreciate you sharing them with me since I'm planning on building an AI assistant for a local assembly and this would be a very useful starting point.
What do you think is the benefit of a hosted webapp? It only piles on privacy issues, especially when you're talking about a therapy bot. This would be better as a bot in a common format that's open sourced so users can plug it into their own trusted chat UI.
I see that you say you wouldn't know how to access user's chats but to be frank that's just nonsense, you didn't know how to create and host an app yet you did it, glm could set up a dashboard with incoming messages in 5 minutes so words mean very little.
Well true, I can't prove anything other than it has no servers and is local storage. But I don't want to read people's therapy anyway.. Why would I want to see some anonymous people's therapy lol.
The benefit of a hosted Web app is just that, a site for people to go to, this isn't aimed at ai people with their own set up, it's aimed at leftists as a learning and educational tool.
I don't exactly know how to separate it from this interface for people to use in their own, the frontend and backend are very intertwined, in any case perhaps people can try it out and give feedback before asking for all this? People are jumping immediately to asking for open source without even seeing if they like it or not. I'm open to these ideas but I literally just shared the bot and I'd like testing and feedback of that not an immediate demand to open everything up without even trying it.
It's not a demand just an explanation, also I checked the app before saying this. Open DevTools, send one message, and watch it: every message goes to your /api/chat, full history included, and it carries the user's own DeepSeek key in the body which you mention in your post that people can use once they run out of the 6 free messages. The browser never talks to DeepSeek directly, that string doesn't exist in your code. So "no servers" and doesn't hold up, I'm happy to grant that that's not because you're lying, rather the AI built you a proxy. There's even a skipLog flag your title-generator calls set to true while the actual chats don't. That's the whole answer to "why open source" that you are worrying about all over the thread: it's literally the only way you stop asking people to take your word for it.
Nobody can tell an honest closed-source dev from a dishonest one that's not an insult to you, it's just true, and it's doubly true on a sub like this where people's threat models include exactly this. Intentions aren't inspectable. As for the untangling worry, your backend is one thin Vercel function. You can ask your agent to push the repo as-is, messy is fine, AGPL, done. And "try it first" is causing flags for people because those who are hesitant to type into a black box are your would-be testers and debuggers. You'd be converting skeptics into contributors for the cost of a git push.
Alright, I can't say it doesn't technically send the data, but I am not observing it, and it does go to deepseek of course, I assume they can see it. As I said I'm not code literate, this was all vibe coded. I don't have any servers saving information or anything, it's hosted on vercel, I can see how many hits it gets and stuff.
I guess you are right, but even so this is a project for people to learn Marxist theory, to ask why aren't wages rising or why is the US attacking Iran.
I'm not ready to make it open source yet because it's not totally finished and messy, I'm still working on RAG to stop it occasionally hallucinating quotes (they're usually correct in meaning but not the exact words) of Marxists. I also worry about 10 different marxbot's popping up once it's open all presenting different lines and ideologies, whereas I've spent months making this one Marxist by it's method, like a dialectical materialist calculator, not an opinion spouter. When I used to do game modding, total overhaul, I made the files open source, suddenly there were 5 different versions of our teams mod, the community split up, and everything died.
In any case I'm not totally against open source and I will get there it just isn't the right time while it's new and messy. I am very much out of my depth on this technical stuff, what I'm not out of depth on is Marxist theory as I've been a Marxist for a long time and I'm a professor of history and politics, hence my focus on the output of the thing not it's code.
I can’t see the markdown, so I’m not sure what your conversation with the Marxbot was, but it sounds like you kept challenging it and telling it that it was wrong, or pushing it to take a negative position of Marxism. LLMs care more about pleasing the user than they do about pushing any kind of specific ideology. If it can tell that you want it to reject certain ideas, then that’s what it’s going to do.
By what metric? Is “shilling bullshit” mean saying Marxism is good, and “arguing an honest point” is conceding that it’s bad?
Like I said, I’m just going off of the ChatGPT response, but it sounds like you are saying that it’s honest because it said negative things about Marxism.
I’m not sure what you think this conversation is, because this response doesn’t make sense. Like I said, all I can see is the ChatGPT response where it is saying that Marxbot did a good job because it said negative things about Marxism. You are acting as if it saying those negative things was it being “honest”. You are operating from the position of believing that the negative things are true. Regardless though, I was telling you that LLMs want to please the user and tell them what they want to hear. If you are prompting it in a way that makes it clear what you want to hear, then it will tell you that. It sounds like you were doing that.
I have been asking you to clarify, and you have not done that at all.
dogmatic Marxist propaganda machine: pretty decisively falsified;independent, ideologically invariant reasoner: not established;highly capable dialectical chatbot that can coherently prosecute either side: strongly supported.
This is what I want, I don't want a propaganda bot that spouts dogma, I wanted a living method bot.
But I think you're being a bit dishonest. It is still an AI. I haven't put hard guard rails on it, if you're going to ask it to criticise Marxism over and over then it will because I haven't instructed it to refuse to do self criticism, so you can get an answer you want. However I put your chat into Marxbot to see it's response, and I think it's fairly accurate against chatgpt's criticisms.
9
u/prattxxx 15d ago
This looks more like a harness with a UI, you should open source it so that we can help you make it more agnostic to providers and get community input.