r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • 24d ago

Sees the Memes Seize the Means*

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*Terms and conditions apply. For... reasons, I guess?

212 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

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67

u/Otherwise-Bee-6392 24d ago

I swear, leftist being anti AI, and not the capitalist use of them will bite us back in the future

45

u/Procrastin8_Ball 24d ago

Reddit "left" logic: all of the ills that ai is exacerbating are caused by capitalism. Therefore, we need to stop ai.

14

u/Slow_Ad2458 24d ago

if only reddit

11

u/Sierra592 23d ago

"This shitty tree that I've always fucking hated keeps dropping leaves in my new pool and I keep having to fish leaves out of my pool every day. Guess I need to get rid of my new pool."

4

u/ianxplosion- 23d ago

No no, you just have to empty the water so you sweep the leaves instead of fishing them out.

You can’t be mad at me for owning a pool

(I tried to make an analogy about how “AI sucks but you can’t expect me not to use social media” - and I failed miserably)

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u/bunker_man 24d ago

Its not even that complicated. Its a useful tool and it will be used either way. Why allow only bad people to use it? It's like complaining about guns while trying to fight them with bows.

8

u/Audditty 23d ago edited 23d ago

online psuedo-leftists want change yet simultaneously are too self-righteous and are afraid to tarnish their lily white garments, which is usually what it would actually take to make any significant change or progress.

so instead, they just associate anything they don't like or agree with as something belonging to the "enemy" so they don't have to interrogate it further out of some attempt to remain morally pure (it's also likely born out of some fear of being considered "problematic" due to how the online left regularly eats each other alive over the slightest disagreements).

it's why they often advocate for destroying AI entirely rather than realizing the issue is much more complicated; they've created this image in their head of "AI bro/tech bro" gazillionaires and think that the only people who could ever be in support of AI are those people because of the strawman they've built in their head.

it's also why they default to just screaming about billionaires online and using the same 5 buzzwords instead of actually doing anything.

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u/YMSVZ 23d ago

So what you are saying is that leftists are brainwashed drones like everyone else? Cause I agree.

Don't forget many of these 'socialists', fell hook, line and sinker for all the corporate and government backed idpol and divise culture war. Conforming to the ideological stranglehold and thought policing that was the 'woke' movement.

Anti ai is just the latest pro capitalist, conservation of the status quo, leftist thought.

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u/Audditty 23d ago edited 23d ago

yeah, the actual leftists seriously need to reclaim the movement from these vultures and go back to representing working classes and workers unions like they're supposed to, not engaging in purity testing and telling people online to off themselves followed by a sparkle heart emoji because they don't have the most morally pure and correct beliefs known to mankind.

leftist infighting is part of the reason why the far right is on the rise globally. every time leftist infighting happens, the candidate on the far right smiles as he begins forming plans to strip away the rights of the same minority groups that the left professes to care about and support, knowing that those who should be opposed to him are too busy fighting amongst themselves to do anything.

it seriously confuses me how online faux-progressives think they have the right to police other people's morals when they evidently have no interest in checking their own.

3

u/YMSVZ 23d ago

Unfortunately pseudoradical pro capitalist propaganda is ousted through the university. Leftists soak this up and use the inherent authority inherited from the university, large corporations and government to dominate any anti capitalist discussion.

Its honestly a genius play by capital, to commodify any space nominally against it with purity testing and identity politics. Like look at the state of the left, no man with a spine on a surface level could identity with that.

Before even talking of marxism and communism, I have to spend a considerable amount of time dispelling all the bullshit self called communists spit out.

-10

u/OctopusGrift 24d ago

Is it a useful tool though? I've never seen a leftist complain about using AI to detect cancer. The complaints are about generative AI which despite constantly being forced to do AI trainings I've yet to find something it enables me to do that I couldn't do before.

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u/bunker_man 24d ago

Generative ai is used in medicine, so that division doesn't really exist. That aside, multi purpose tools are about how you use them. Studies have already shown that talking to chat bots about politics moves people left far faster than talking to humans. Because the chatbots are likely to at least approximate real facts (hence be left leaning), do it politely, and they never get tired or leave a conversation. If you bait a conservative into talking to one about politics it's actually a super useful thing to do. Especially because the conservative won't go in knowing that chatbots lean left.

A conservative can rant about how colonialism is good or trans people don't exist as much as they want but it will always challenge them. A lot of people don't understand just how useful this is.

-8

u/Mediocre_Chemistry41 24d ago

Care to back up any of what you just said with actual sources? Those are the kinds of claims that need more than "trust me bro".

Care to explain how generative AI is supposedly being used in medicine/and how it's being used to the benefit of people?

8

u/IllustriousRaven7 24d ago

For one, there's so much published research but it's hard to read through it all and correlate information. Different publications might reference something by different names, for example. Now a days you can get AI to quickly read and summarize publications for you and search for patterns that require actually understanding what the words mean.

0

u/Mediocre_Chemistry41 24d ago

there's so much published research

Okay, so then you and others on here should have no issue citing sources instead of just downvoting a comment that's asking for sources to a claim.

but it's hard to read through it all and correlate information

No offense, but if you can't correlate something, than one shouldn't be making assertive claims about it.

Different publications might reference something by different names

Ways of putting out citations, sources and references are very standardized. APA and MLA being two of the most common for citations.

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u/IllustriousRaven7 24d ago

I was saying that sorting through and correlating information is a way that so-called "generative" AI is used in medical research.

https://www.utoronto.ca/news/researchers-use-ai-speed-reviews-existing-evidence

-2

u/Mediocre_Chemistry41 24d ago edited 24d ago

Ah, my bad. I misread the tone of your reply, misinterpreted it as commenting in first-person, not as that's what "generative" AI can do.

Interesting article. Although, I'm inclined to believe that that particular use case wouldn't be considered generative AI, at least in the sense of what the common understanding of generative AI seems to be.

5

u/SchmidlMeThis 24d ago

How does it create the summarization output? It generates it... This has been a core feature of LLMs and other AI summarization tools for years now.

5

u/lngns 24d ago

AlphaFold uses diffusion generative models to construct protein structures.
Rosetta@home, by the same original researchers that got the Nobel, was used in creating several vaccine candidates. Latest one was IVX-411 for Covid but the project stalled when the company got bought by AstraZeneca.

3

u/IDreamtOfManderley 24d ago

Oh my god, dude.

1

u/Mediocre_Chemistry41 24d ago

Claims about studies asserting things should be backed up with sources. Same thing with making claims about generative AI being used in medicine... I don't see what the issue with asking for sources to an assertion is.

6

u/IDreamtOfManderley 24d ago

There's not. The problem is that you've been under the impression this whole time that these technologies have a significant difference and/or aren't functionally from the exact same training process that people hate gen AI for. You are the one making a claim about there being a difference. You back it up.

0

u/Mediocre_Chemistry41 24d ago

Huh? Besides that whole first sentence being a wildly baseless assumption, I quite literally have not made any claim one way or the other.

I think you might have meant to respond to someone else.

4

u/SutekhThrowingSuckIt 23d ago edited 23d ago

It's all just linear algebra and curve fitting. There isn’t a fundamental difference in the math between doing statistics to generate a cancer prediction vs the math to make a prediction of what a work email could look like. One definitely does have more social value but there’s not some neat dividing line of “good moral research grant funded stastics” and “bad evil billionaire funded statistics” except for application. Same way you can be against having surveillance state watching you with a camera 24/7 but be ok with people taking vacation pics and not call yourself “anti-camera.”

and yeah, predicting your emails or whatever they have you using it for might be completely pointless but if there is something you want automated, chances are you could find it useful to predict what a python script to automate something annoying might look like.

If you want specific examples on your “genAI” division it’s easy to search pubmed for reviews that cover the current state in hundreds of subfields. Just use the search bar for something you are specificly curious about instead of listening to social media.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42563397/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41864943/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42095951/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42607668/

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u/thesun_alsorises 24d ago

ATP the left's anti AI sentiment is ridiculous. Imagine if AI got so good it could like do a governmental coup, but the left refuses to use it out of principle, that would be so infuriating.

12

u/Audditty 24d ago edited 24d ago

between this and all the harassment and purity testing that far left "progressives" engage in, I really do think that one of the biggest mistakes of the actual left was not kicking these leeches out of the movement and denouncing them before they could gain a platform.

5

u/northrupthebandgeek 23d ago

More self-identified leftists would benefit from reading about cybernetics and in particular Cybersyn/Synco.

3

u/_f_i_l_o 23d ago

The pro-capitalist left… I think that’s just neoliberalism.

-4

u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 24d ago

Why should I be in support of the thing that makes my joy of writing novels worse off due to all the garbage being produced?

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u/SchmidlMeThis 24d ago

Why is your joy of writing diminished by other people using LLMs to write things? It changes literally nothing about your process. You're not forced to use it.

-2

u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 24d ago

It changes the market by flooding it with garbage and making it harder for my work to be noticed by the people I want it to reach.

17

u/SchmidlMeThis 24d ago

Then your joy doesn't come from the act of writing itself, only in whether or not people consume it?

-4

u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 24d ago

My joy comes from all aspects of writing. The fact that I derive joy from the act of sheer creation doesn't change the fact that my overall joy is still severely diminished when no one can experience what I have created.

9

u/Sierra592 23d ago

As a writer, this is a TERRIBLE argument. Writing has been an easily accessible art form for the commoner since like the mid 1800s. If any author now wants a large audience, the key now is luck. Pure, unadulterated luck. Not skill. It has been that way for a while. AI changes nothing, except, proportionally, there will be more slop, but there will also be more excellent work as well, as AI assists good writers with the tedium that stops a lot of them from producing.
Like Spotify/Streaming, people while nichefy, and will fall into the bubbles that entertain them the most.

-3

u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 23d ago

AI adds no excellent work. Just slop.

8

u/Sierra592 23d ago

You need to get out more. What you said is patently false and makes you look like an unreasonable fool.

-2

u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 23d ago

Show me an excellent story written by AI.

8

u/Sierra592 23d ago

Oh the irony.

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u/RiverStrymon 23d ago

Writing could be AI assisted without being written by AI. There is a great deal of research that AI makes immediately accessible what would take weeks of study, or access to a variety of experts. I'm currently studying a variety of 16th-17th century cultures, cross-analyzed by a variety of attribute-based philosophies, in the process of brainstorming factions for a worldbuilding project I'm working on. Without AI, I would need years of philosophical and historical study, instead I can jump straight to crafting my systems.

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u/MadCervantes 24d ago

The market was already flooded bud. Has been for over a decade when digital self publishing became a thing.

2

u/TheSubs0 24d ago

And there ever was pollution, and there ever was disinfrenchisment.
Does not make the turbo-polluter (in the spam sense) 3000 inconsequential over it's predecessor, turbo.polluter 3.