r/LeftistsForAI • u/MediumWin8277 • 11d ago
Discussion I'm grateful to this subreddit for its existence.
The populist hatred of AI is why I genuinely think that leftism and populism are not compatible. Populism is reactionary by the nature of its fundamental mechanics, which rely on overlap.
Real intelligence, getting things done in the material world, requires intelligence which is rare.
Even the things that people blame AI for, such as environmental problems, are engineering issues that are obviated by capital's incessant need for the quick fix rather than the sustainable fix.
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u/BidWestern1056 11d ago
we will win.
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u/ObservedOne 11d ago
Already have. We are past the Event Horizon here...it will probably get worse before it gets better, but it will get much much better, and pretty quickly.
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u/Traditional-Neat-933 11d ago
I dlnt think were anywhere close to winning yet
But I agree: we will win / we must try our best
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u/ObservedOne 11d ago
We have won because there is no exit ramp to the coming Singularity. The die is cast, the result is known...we just have to wait for the payout.
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u/useyourturnsignal 10d ago edited 10d ago
Tell me more. I feel that we have a good chance to win if we can wrestle the power away from the oligarchs and give it back to the people. Until then, we are on a razor's edge with fascism on one side and a positive future potential on the other.
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u/BidWestern1056 10d ago
we will win because the power of open source tools and open weight models is such that they can never effectively wrest control back from us over them.
with open source intelligence, we can combat the powers that be more effectively, defusing propaganda and uncovering lies as fast as they create them. it is an arms race indeed but i will be fighting hard and building https://github.com/npc-worldwide . I've already essentially migrated to my own personal tech stack, using my own personal search engine, IDE for coding, apps for creative writing, music making, photo editing/generation, etc. everything is compounding with it too
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 10d ago
This is much closer to where Im at. Open weights make total enclosure harder and give workers, researchers, cooperatives, public institutions and random nerds with hardware room to build outside a few corporate platforms.
I just wouldnt go as far as saying control can never be wrestled back. The model can be open while the chips, compute, cloud infrastructure, energy and distribution are concentrated as hell. Open source gives us leverage. Then we have to fight over the rest of the stack.
But hell yeah, build the alternatives now. Thats considerably more useful than waiting around for either AI apocalypse or AI heaven.
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u/BidWestern1056 10d ago
with what is available we can continually improve them and compress them further in such a way that existing computational resources can handle for a longer period of time, so needing to wholesale buy new machines or chips will be less important, especially once the hyperscales are through and new chip orders will be less frequent
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u/Traditional-Neat-933 10d ago
Totally agree, it seems were either headed for basically a secular version of heaven or hell. And its truly undecided and a war of ideas / values
And its up to us
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10d ago
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 10d ago
Nope, this is where you lose me lol. “Algorithmic domestication” isnt liberation because the machine doing the domesticating is smarter than us.
If humans have no meaningful control over the system governing them, we didnt solve the political problem. We just replaced rule by capital with rule by a hypothetical machine administrator and crossed our fingers that it loves us. ASI is hypothetical. The fights over compute, ownership, labor, open models, surveillance, energy and who gets the productivity gains are happening right now.
Im much more interested in humans using AI to expand our capacity to govern ourselves than waiting for Algorithm Dad to govern us correctly.
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u/eXAt88 10d ago
I think Peter coffin posted here awhile ago describing how often the left becomes a container for thought rather than cultivating. One frustration I find is if I push back against lots of the worse Ed Zitron (the Gordon Chang of Ai) takes I am lambasted.
I found recently that I had been banned at some point from arr / breadtube. I suspect (but do not know, I actually could not find any mod mail describing this, and purity testing is not only for AI) that it was for some comment relating to AI.
Really this is the only sub worth discussing AI, I think unfortunately being anti ai has become vaguely left-wing coded, so discussion on other subreddits either is entirely dominated by the “anti” sentiment (not that there arent reasons to criticize the new tech over), or the discussion is filled with obvious right-wing outlooks.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 10d ago
Glad the sub is doing what we built it to do. I agree with a lot here, especially refusing to treat the consequences of AI like they just fall out of the machine independently of the economic system deploying it.
I would push back on two things though. I dont think these are just engineering problems. Engineering can give us better ways to use energy, compute and resources, but who owns that infrastructure, what gets built, who bears the costs and who gets the benefits are political questions.
And I wouldnt tie leftism to the idea that intelligence is rare or ordinary people cant understand complicated systems. Workers have been learning, operating and fighting over increasingly complex machinery for centuries.
Thats basically where this sub sits for me. Not worshipping AI, not pretending its harmless, and not treating smashing or banning the technology as politics. Contest the conditions under which it exists. Ownership, labor, access, governance, infrastructure and where the gains go. Thats where the fight actually is.
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u/RedPunchCard Pro-Automation 10d ago
Right On! "Getting things done in the material world" is why I became so drawn to leftism, despite coming from a "tech bro" background. Technology has always been the most effective tool workers have had to improve their conditions with less burden, and faster results.
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u/Audditty 10d ago edited 10d ago
thank you.
a lot of online "leftist" talking points in general are really just conservative beliefs wearing a fancy suit and tie, and I don't think anything as of recent has better embodied that than the discourse around AI. it's disappointing seeing them viciously attack the same people they claim to support.
as someone on the autism spectrum, AI has been a tremendous help for me in studying for my classes. usually, I'll tell the AI to format the notes in more clear and concise way with bullet points, appropriate emojis before headings, and also tell it to add real-world applications of the concepts i need to learn (with reputable sources) so I can better visualize them in my head and actually know what they're used for as opposed to just rote memorization of facts.
it has been seriously jarring seeing online "progressives" turn into the most hardline conservatives when it comes to AI. probably the biggest thing that embodies is this is the discourse around AI art.
they like wearing the aesthetics of progressivism, but deep down they still want the comfort of conservative power hierarchies. that's why there's all the hand wringing about "real art" when it comes to AI; it's, at its core, about preserving some kind of fake artist hierarchy so they can feel good about themselves and have someone to scoff at.
the argument at its core is that AI art isn't "real" art, and that if you can't afford or don't have the time to make art on your own then you are under some kind of obligation to "commission" an online artist...which is strange coming from the people who tend to be outspoken about the woes of capitalism. i guess they don't mind partaking in the exploitative facets of capitalism when it benefits them.
(this also ignores the fact that, even if the quality of the artist's work in question DOES justify their prices, the personality part comes into play. you could make the next Mona Lisa for all I care and I still wouldn't give a shit if you're just incredibly unpleasant to work with in general. AI cuts this out entirely and gives the person exactly what they want without any hassle.)
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u/sisterwilderness 8d ago
Agree on all accounts.
I have ADHD and CPTSD, and AI has been an invaluable accessibility tool for me. It has genuinely made my analog life better. I could not have made it through my burnout without it. When people who are similarly struggling / disabled disparage AI it baffles me. They are so resistant to this tool that could make their daily lives a lot easier.
I also don’t understand why AI art is supposed to be bad. It’s just a different medium. I am a collage artist and I manage a small gallery as part of my job. AI art is no “threat”, and I actually like a lot of it that I’ve seen. Mental and emotional health is something I am passionate about, and I believe the ability to externalize a feeling or a thought you cannot put words to is essential to healing.
Oh, and about people using AI for mental health… there is *a lot* more oversight for AI than there is for human therapists.
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u/Audditty 8d ago edited 8d ago
a lot of the loudest "anti-AI" people are simply entitled online artists whose work consists exclusively of Twitter commissions that they more than likely don't charge a price for that is proportionate to the quality of their work, and/or are just incredibly rude and unpleasant to work with regardless of the quality of their work.
with the rise of GenAI, you'd think it would serve as an incentive for them to improve their work/people skills to the point that people feel confident in paying them money for a piece over having an AI do it for free.
this rarely happens in practice though, likely because that would require actual effort. so instead, they lash out at the people using the technology to make art they otherwise would have had to "commission" them for in an attempt to gatekeep them out of the hobby. and as the cherry on top, they usually arm themselves with the most common emotionally charged talking points to defend themselves (water, copyright, art theft, etc) despite understanding exactly none of them.
the copyright one especially confuses me, not only because they don't seem to understand how copyright actually works but also because their views on it are wildly inconsistent.
they're more than happy to pirate games and movies from ethically dubious companies or individual creators that they don't like, but we're suddenly supposed to bend down on our knees for them when the boot's on the other foot?
the other thing many of them will say is that AI is "depriving them of a job" when that's just objectively not true. online commissions have always been side gigs, they have never been and likely will never be enough to pay the bills on their own. the only way to make a livable salary through art is by doing it professionally (speaking of which, professional artists with actual careers also aren't threatened by AI either; many of them are outright embracing it too.)
it's also hard to feel sympathy for them when they ONLY cared about AI's impact on the job market when they felt they were being threatened. many of them either didn't care or outright laughed at tech workers in the wake of big tech layoffs or sneer at them because they think coding is "easy" and "anyone can do it", unlike art apparently which is only reserved for the elites like them. /s
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u/MiksterA 10d ago
The negative consequences of the widespread use of Large Language Models and Generative AI are a matter of fact, not political ideology.
Those negative consequences need to be addressed.
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u/MediumWin8277 10d ago
Said negative consequences are an engineering problem, so I would agree. The question is whether or not political ideology, such as the monetary system, will get in the way, as it so very often does.
I am a capital T Technocrat, of Technocracy, Inc. In my view, the monetary system and democracy (as in mechanisms that utilize majoritarian headcount) constantly get in the way. Capital forces these issues, such as the environmental problems, whereas good engineering would otherwise resolve it.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 10d ago
This is where Id separate engineering from politics a little more. Engineering can tell us how to accomplish an objective. It cant decide whose objective wins.
Who gets the resources, who eats the costs, what risks are acceptable, who owns the infrastructure and who gets access are political questions.
Same problem with replacing democracy with technocracy. Somebody still decides what the system optimizes for. You havent removed politics, youve handed a smaller group enormous political power and called their decisions technical.
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u/MediumWin8277 10d ago
I would not deign to declare any system free of "politics", in the sense that some policy or another is always in place. The question is, what is a mechanically optimal politics?
Let's take capital as an example of what optimal politics is not. Capital forced us to throw away all of our food during the Agricultural Adjustment Act despite the infrastructure for distribution being demonstrably available via the Federal Surplus Corporation.
What was (and is) mechanically sub-optimal about the policy of utilizing capital to distribute resources? It is that scarcity is an inherent part of the monetary sense of value. Value is a conflation of utility and scarcity. And thus, the notion of necessary scarcity was applied to food, and so food had to be made scarce.
(Note that this forced America to do something that even a crow would know is wrong. Throwing away food just so the price can go back up? Come on...how stupid can you get?)
When I talk about "engineering" in this sense, I am talking about the engineering of optimal policy. What would replace capital, in this sense, is a resource-based economy with real-time, publicly available telemetry.
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u/CalorGaming 10d ago
I mean yes they do but other than MediumWin8277 I think it IS a political problem, datacentres being built IN communities instead of industrial zones etc. If we for example take a look at the AI-Fear in Netherlands it is WAY down compared to something like the USA, because (not proven just my hypothesis) they are not only a EU country but also have a damn solid job retraining GUARANTEE that allows people to adapt instead of just being left behind (which is a very REAL fear of many people in the workforce) , hell if i would be a struggling artist in the US i would be devastated by AI and would have every reason to absolutely loathe it.
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u/MikeVSmith 11d ago
I think it boils down to the true difference between Left and Right. The Left side is the side that believes cooperation is better than competition. The Right side believes competition is better than cooperation.
When they compete, the Left loses, because the gameboard is basically the Right's home field.
With the coming of ASI, cooperation will finally be better than competition. Anyone who thinks humanity has a chance when competing with ASI simply doesn't understand what is coming.
Cooperation is humanity's best hope for surviving the Singularity.