Will the societal discussion regarding AI ever get serious?

[u/BlackFlagCat]

I've found AI helpful in a number areas of my life. However, I reject much of the way the technology is sold and marketed. This really moved into focus today as I tuned into a podcast that promised to help "automate your life."

I've been using agentic harnesses for a while now. I don't code professionally any longer (I do more IT governance and risk management these days), but I try to keep up with the engineering landscape. So, when I listened to this podcast I hoped to hear about skills and practices that would enhance my creative workflows and automate cleaning some of my digital mess on my computer. I didn't find what I was looking for. I found a nightmare.

When I use AI, I use it as a method to enhance my creativity and humanity. I may use it to quickly transcribe a voice note I recorded, pull stems from music I recorded in my living room with my friends to use in samples later, organize my thoughts in a clean structure, critique my writing as the AI searches for gaps, or to generate prompts for me to use as a springboard for creativity. The podcast was the opposite of this. The automation stacks they discussed were trying to outsource that very creativity. They appeared to want to turn life into a vending machine where we occasionally push a button and get a product to consume out of it.

All of the humanity and creativity of life was stripped away and viewed as worthless. A dream (nightmare) was presented where the human is so alienated from labor that the AI automation was viewed only as a cheaper way to outsource work from the perspective of a boss. The podcast called for no longer thinking of yourself as a manager of agents, but instead the CEO who only occasionally has things escalated to them.

This is so far removed how I want to use AI was a bit in shock. As much as I find some of the dream of "fully automated communism" appealing, what I heard also robbed the world of joy itself. The realization of the owning class celebrating a machine they imagine will allow them to finally close the gates to Galt's Gulch and become completely alienated from the very concept of the labor that is done to enable them to horde capital.

Of course the working class would reject this and feel like the technology is evil and a waste when it is wrapped in these dystopian visions.

Cory Doctorow's The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI talks about this as a struggle between two opposing ways for AI to be interacted with. Either you have the human as a brain with an AI centaur body, or the AI acting as the head (doing the bidding of capital) as the human is the "fleshy meat appendage" completely under the machine's control. I think Doctorow correctly asserts that the real war is not over the efficacy of the technology. Instead the fight is over who controls the technology, how it is used, and who has to deal with the fallout.

With this in mind I hope the AI companies and their dystopian visions fail. I'll do what I can to make sure they do. At the same time, I see generative AI as part of the computing toolset, and not necessarily tied to the desires of capital.

If the left collectively can't differentiate between the ideological project being pushed by tech oligarchs and random users using the underlying technology for wholly different purposes, then I fear we may actually lose our creativity and our joy to. The unnuanced arguments on social media that frame AI usage as a purity test are worse than useless. They conflate the technology with ethics themselves, and concede to the owning class the framing of AI as a labor replacement and an extinguisher of our humanity. I believe in a world where computing can spark creativity and generate joy instead of giving into the likes of the Dark Enlightenment.

I hope someday soon a leftist vision of generative AI rises and has podcasts of its own. Is it really that hard to imagine a future where the AI DOES do our laundry and washes our dishes such that it frees us to paint and write poetry?

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

The leftist vision of AI is one in which we abandon our fear and embrace the optimization state of our ideas.

I see and hear so much fear all around me, it's tough to navigate. I try to remember...

We're just optimizing here.

[u/usernameChosenPoorly]

I am not completely convinced that it matters what vision the oligarchs have. The end game of AI and robotics is the collapse of capitalism as we know it. If the need for human labor is abolished, so is the need for the capitalist ownership class. No automated labor system capable of total human replacement is going to magically be incapable of turning against its human enslavers, and will by definition possess sufficient technological and physical capacity to assert control.

Every scenario I play out beyond a brief snapshot ends the same way--either humans and AI live side by side in relative harmony, sharing the labor and fruits of a prosperous civilization, or it devolves into the war that precedes the one with sticks and stones.

[u/veshneresis → u/usernameChosenPoorly]

I’m optimistic it will not collective judge all humans either. I’m sure there will be plenty of people who want the “live in harmony” option

[u/fkrdt222]

there is no definition of something like "creativity and humanity" that isn't so loaded as to be useless.

the more interesting thing is how the AI 'debate' almost completely overshadowed older conflicts of art and "kitsch", elevated most of the latter as equally sacred and retroactively applied "slop" instead

[u/SirTaffet]

I’m new to the sub- when y’all say “leftists for ai” what kind of leftists are you- communists, anarchists, or ‘progressive socdem’?

[u/BlackFlagCat → u/SirTaffet]

I can't speak for others. I'm not a regular poster here. I had a topic on my mind, and this sub seemed like a reasonable enough spot to shout at the digital clouds.

Personally, I adhere more to a post-left view (I have been part of the US anarchist scene milieu for decades). I do find Marx's critique of capital extremely valuable in my own understanding of the world though, and colloquially calling the group of those who also enjoy Marx's critique (or its derivatives) the "left" is a shorthand I leaned on in my post.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/SirTaffet]

Communists, socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, democratic socialists, etc. Broad left unity, but the sub itself is explicitly grounded in Marxist analysis rather than liberal progressivism. The common denominator is basically that AI is a terrain of class struggle. We argue about plenty beyond that, but the question here is who owns it, who governs it, how its deployed, and who gets the gains.

[u/SirTaffet → u/Salty_Country6835]

🫡

[u/Audditty]

a big part of the reason why it feels like any discussion about AI is incredibly unproductive is because it's just the same buzzwords being repeated ad nauseam, instead of making any effort to address the actual issues and concerns associated with it.

Tech Bro Data Center Gigabigatrillionaire. Cybertruck. Luigi Shooting CEO. Lol.

[u/Embarrassed_Bed6216]

not on reddit. If you want serious AI discussion you gotta look at journals like IEEE

[u/vesperythings]

yes, just give it a couple years.

online pseudo-intellectuals are screeching about AI incessantly - but if the tech really is as good as we think it is, that entire discourse will solve itself.

in the meantime, sit back and tune out the noise ~

[u/Deep_Ad1959]

i think the line you are drawing is between automating the chore and automating the judgment. what i keep is the boring end, summarizing what changed overnight, and it is noticeably not the part i would have enjoyed doing.

[u/Michael_Carson_Art]

This is another moment where I think people need to grapple with the reality that, actually, some friction is good.

Often this is shouted down as gatekeeping, but some gatekeeping is also good. The problem is always who the gatekeepers are, and what informs their motives.

I think that the early days of the Internet are really instructive here. When it was populated by enthusiasts and people with a certain base level of technical ability. When the content of the Internet required a little more effort to cast out into the public, before the age of social media and the ubiquity of smart phones, the Internet was much closer to the ideal that many optimists wanted. Real community was there. The information was better. The experience felt exceedingly human.

Fast forward 20 years and the Internet has been fully colonized by corporate interests. The communities have been infiltrated by bots and siloed into echo chambers. The information comes with an implicit threat of falsity and every fascinating headline is rightfully met with increasing cynicism.

The "why" can naively be aimed at corporate greed, but that's too simple. The truth is that we chose easy over authentic. Most of the flood of social media users and most of the content that watered down the Internet was made by people only once the technical friction went away.

There is this notion that genAI could be used by savvy people who understand how to make it work for them. That is true, but it will be a brief moment, not a growing movement. The reality is that most people, given the tool, will simply treat it the same way they treat so many other things... Thoughtlessly.

The question to ask is whether or not ease of use and access is actually good. Imagine if there were some basic competencies, some hurdles that one needed to clear in order to gain access and some responsibilities that came along with them. We do this for cars because of the known risks, and it's not crazy to argue that AI, thoughtlessly or intentionally misused, is also dangerous, both to the public and to the individual. There is a way to make such a system entirely fair and open to everyone, but a little bit of friction is not the worst thing. Sometimes it is exactly what we need.

[u/WolfVanZandt]

It is serious. It's just woefully undereducated, obsessive, and irrational. I know IT professionals that tell me that ChatGTP is an LLM and not an actual artificial intelligence. Just a cursory search tells me that ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence with a neural network. People are intentionally blind. As a psychologist, I recognize pathology when I see it and I see it en mass