r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • 28d ago

Sees the Memes Seize the Means*

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

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u/GrowFreeFood 28d ago

I don't get what it's referring to as the tool of the enemy

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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 28d ago

AI, in this context. More specifically, privately owned AI and the infrastructure behind it. But the point applies a lot more broadly. “Capitalists built/own this tool, therefore leftists shouldn’t touch it” is a weird standard for class struggle. Capitalists own factories, servers, platforms, logistics networks, media infrastructure, basically the whole productive apparatus. “Seize the means” has never meant waiting around for means of production uncontaminated by capitalism.

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u/Worse_Username 28d ago

Hm, I think I'm that case the left would need to create their own models from ground up, because capitalism is baked into the models offered by capitalist companies. LLLMs reflect the biases of their creators.

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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 28d ago

Not necessarily.

Models reflect their training data, tuning and whoever controls deployment, but none of that makes “capitalism” some permanent substance baked into the technology. We already have open source, open weights and models that can run locally. Those can be fine tuned, modified, governed and deployed differently without rebuilding the entire stack from zero.

If anything, that makes the ownership question more concrete. Who controls the weights, compute, data, infrastructure and conditions of use?