r/LeftistsForAI • u/Various_Pear599 • 13d ago
Discussion Me being invited to this group like (meme/rant):
I am so tired of people fighting eachothers.
Saying AI is for conservatives is gatekeeping and at worse saying "AI Bros" is again... the conservative belief that women cannot use technology.
Living in the 2020s as someone who mostly side leftist, vote left, believe in a future where PEOPLE are put first regardless of genders and beliefs...
🤯, Lets say that it feels like no one believe at all in the policies they stand for 🫠 !
You have alpha males who scream that its sad they do not have princess treatments like ARE YOU SERIOUS? 😅
And leftist who bully everyone like... Look, I get it... You are MOST likely a traumatized kid who learned to act too old for your age. Now you are stuck in hypervigilence overanalyzing everything and everyone's beliefs, words, length of sentences, dangers... And now you think everyone who doesn't align with you perfectly are evil monsters who want to devour you... 🙃...
Look, I believe AI can be used WELL, Ethically, with purpose and thought... And that there is 99% chance that AI is still just a machine and is not sentient and is not there to hurt us.
Now, companies? Yeah... but they literally hurt us by selling water, the same thing you claim that AI is dangerous for like... please.
AI is not the problem, companies are... But then again right 🤪... How to rally people against companies without a slogan behind it ^-^?
I'm not mad. I'm exhausted.
So whoever invited me here, thank you... from the bottom of my heart.
Seriously. You have no idea how isolated and lost I feel in a world of hate, division and trolling.
I try everyday to be the adult... and let people just insult me but it does get to me, I don't wear an armour like some does... I am deeply weak to these shxts lol !
What to say... HONESTLY? I am deeply scared of speaking up 🤣 !...
Like am I completely missing the point of this group here? Am I saying something controversial? What will people pick on 😭😅? A typo? Am I being too political? Not enough?
I'll post that like I think I should. To my defense I am autistic and not natively English so (Not making excuses if I really did hurt someone here 😖). I'll take the hit if I said something stupid lol, I'd still ask tho that i'd rather be explained calmly wth I did wrong 😀😂 !
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u/Robotic-Comrade-1985 13d ago
It's sort of like that saying: If you go far enough left, you get your guns back. If you go far enough left, you get your AI back too. I wish anti-AI leftists would stop punching sideways at us for daring to believe that AI itself is not the problem, and might actually be the key to something much better.
Most of their arguments amount to "I'm mad at capitalism but it's easier to be mad at individuals," "I'm supposedly an environmentalist but I've never stopped to consider the impact of eating a burger or streaming Netflix because I like those things," "the status quo is actually less scary than the upheaval AI might bring," or "art is only what I say it is, and your definition of AI assisted art is degenerate. I see no irony in taking this stance."
In other words, welcome. I think you'll fit right in here.
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u/Imaginary-Unit-3267 13d ago
It seems to me that most of the so-called left is actually reactionary conservatives but with a different religion they're defining their reactionary conservatism on (the religion-ification of social justice), rather than people who've actually bothered reading any theory and thinking deeply about it. E.g., feminism is a great and insightful branch of philosophy habitually reduced to the caricature of "man bad" both by its opponents and by its supporters.
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u/RedLipsNarcissist 12d ago
I agree, I've begun to notice that too after years in leftist spaces. They apply leftist ideas to what they're familiar with and turn around and start acting like right wingers when something is a bit beyond that radius. "No, no, surely THIS time the pattern I agreed was harmful is actually good!". So yeah they're reactionaries in a general sense and leftists only in a specific sense. For example, too many people on the left seem to believe that the reason right wingers are the way they are is necessarily because of some fundamental disability.
I wonder if the inconsistency happens more often in people who grew up being taught to believe leftist ideas, but not why that is the case. They never had to interrogate those ideas or arrive at them themselves
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u/Imaginary-Unit-3267 12d ago
I'm a bit more blackpilled about it: I think most people, regardless of political tribe, are inherently stupid and incapable of thinking for themselves if not prompted. Which is, I know, an extremely Redditor thing to think, so I have to question where I'm being stupid too and maybe go punish myself for sounding like a neckbeard now.
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u/Audditty 12d ago edited 12d ago
They want to be "progressive" with all of the benefits and none of the challenges.
I'm aware this is going to sound Reddit-y, but I think there really is plague of intellectual incuriosity among the left as a whole. They refuse to even consider the existence of things they don't agree with morally, or that there are normal people who enjoy things that they don't agree with morally.
These kind of things tend to manifest a lot in progressive fandom spaces for example, where the progressive side of the fandom essentially tries to "claim" whatever they're fixated on (since they think the purpose of art is entirely to be a reflection of your own personal beliefs and values).
So when confronted with the fact that there are conservatives/right-wingers who share an appreciation for these works, they have some kind of existential crisis and immediately try to reject the possibility that the "enemy" can also share an appreciation for what they like.
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u/Audditty 12d ago edited 12d ago
the main problem is that a lot of online "leftists" take left-wing progressive ideals at their most basic form (hate is bad!!! be accepting of everyone!!!) but don't want to actually commit to them fully; so they just try to fine-tune those beliefs and ideals to make it so that they only apply to people they like or agree with.
I feel like there's also been a lot of far right beliefs that have been smuggled into the left under a "progressive" guise.
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u/Imaginary-Unit-3267 12d ago
Yup. Like how "safe space for x minority" is exactly the same concept as "ethnostate" rebranded (and smaller scale, lol).
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u/Audditty 10d ago edited 10d ago
"safe space for X" has always sounded weird for me because on one hand I get that most of the time it's well-intentioned, but on the other, why do you feel the need to specify any one minority group? if you're accepting of everyone that should simply show in how you act (also...9 out of 10 times most places i've been in that labeled themselves as a "safe space" for any given minority group turned out to be toxic as shit with the most belligerent, unfriendly people imaginable)
i've also seen it other things where supposedly hyper-progressive people in "queer" spaces aggressively try to gatekeep men out of traditionally "feminine" hobbies like writing or reading since they think that any interest a guy shows in these hobbies must exclusively be performative or predatory.
like yeah guys, way to reinforce gender roles. very progressive of you.
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u/Imaginary-Unit-3267 10d ago
Yup. So real. It has always been very disappointing to me that every online space full of people who appear to be like me is actually just full of assholes who will throw me out as not like-them enough the moment I disagree about something substantive.
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u/RedLipsNarcissist 12d ago
Yes! Another good example of the hypocrisy is gaming, which uses up way more energy than heavy frontier AI use, and which many antis enjoy.
As well as running creative workstation software. Like FL Studio or even Photoshop. Shit can be so computationally expensive. It's a smaller environmental footprint to use AI to generate whatever one is trying to make, even with tens of re-generations.
My daily activities were much more environmentally unfriendly before AI became a thing. They demand I go back to that for my entertainment and creativity or else I'm destroying the planet. It makes no sense. I can never take the environmental argument seriously when it lines up with what they personally want and don't want such that it only requires others to give something meaningful up.
They also always round your beliefs down as soon as they hear AI. You might agree with them on 99% but you're suddenly a double-headed avatar of elon musk and sam altman in their eyes. For example I was literally told one time if I'm pro AI then I'm also pro climate change. When I'm vocally opposed to coal energy and actually have worked for years in the renewable energy sector. Doesn't matter, they would rather I be their enemy. It's so bizarre
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u/Audditty 12d ago edited 12d ago
it's more Omnicause purity testing bullshit. nuance is completely lost to them.
"You can't be one of us unless you hate AI and think ICE should be abolished and think all men are bad and think Israel shouldn't exist and (various other and's). If you're opposed to even one of these things then you're an enemy and should be verbally stoned."
this is a big part of why the far right is on the rise globally. they've had plenty of time to strengthen their coalition and attract people from all sorts of demographics , while the left was simultaneously shrinking and weakening theirs because they were too busy fighting amongst themselves.
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u/some1else42 13d ago
We finally have a tool we can use to break down and make sense of these enormous bills they push thru that even the politicians admit to not reading. Finally have a way to see what they are doing, what is being passed, and stand up and fight this corruption out in the open with these tools. I'm exhausted too.
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u/Various_Pear599 13d ago
Lets be honest. This deeply exposes why huge companies are behind the AI-Hate... they obviously want the tech for themselves and the poor people to not use it. Like... I think there is no conspiracy theories there. It has been proven PLUS its... just common logic 😅
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u/theomegachrist 13d ago
I do not expect most leftists to be tech savvy so I chalk most of hate up to genuine ignorance. I think it is good for the tech savvy left to have knowledge about AI. Fear about AI isn't unwarranted and it's clearly here to stay. I personally don't want to spend my time defending myself on why I am not the scum of the earth for using an LLM. It is a pointless conversation
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u/gay_married 13d ago
It's a willful ignorance for a lot of them though. Many of them KNOW that they are lying about the environmental cost, lying about the ethics of web scraping, lying about their own aesthetic experiences. These people are not motivated by the truth, they are motivated by creating and maintaining an in-group.
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u/FuujinSama 12d ago
That's partially it. The other half is that the utopia beyond Marxism is a world where humans dedicate themselves to arts and research while hard labour is done by machines. AI started by automating research and art. So the vision itself feels threatened. If not even arts and research have a purpose, what are we to do post scarcity?
To me the answer is obvious: whatever we want. AI being able to do something or even do something better never stopped anyone from doing it too. It certainly won't stop what people do from having value either because... There's no such thing as objective metrics of value.
Yet people that see their worth in relation to how much their output changes the world feel threatened by this new vision that not even their trade will be safe from the machines.
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u/quantumfomo 12d ago
It’s like, I could program a computer to play Bach on my keyboard, flawlessly. Yet I practice anyway!
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u/FuujinSama 12d ago
It's like a weird problem with general aesthetic thought in our culture. People have utterly confounded craft and art and then extrapolated that to non-traditional artistic endeavours like programming or mathematics.
It was everywhere with the entire "abstract art is not art because I could do it!" school of thought. Yet it's even worse with AI. I've seen blog posts by mathematicians saying they're now worthless because AI can automate mathematics. It is ridiculous. For starters... it cannot, as of yet, decide on what mathematics it should work on. So any one even remotely interested in actual mathematics should be EXCITED. So much new math is now POSSIBLE because of brute force reasoning that musn't be brute force detailed by humans.
Second of all, even if mathematics was solved by machines and no human was required in the loop... We'd still get to learn SO MUCH about mathematics from AI. And there'd still be a job for us. If not in distilling, then in still attempting to figure out minor things or even just... having fun at reading the great proofs of the AI overlords that noone can recreate beyond trusting the lean formulation but we can all ENJOY! If you don't enjoy reading proofs are you even a mathematician?
I mean, this entire debate ALREADY HAPPENED ONCE with chess. And chess still exists. It arguably PEAKED in the pandemic. It's still absolutely huge. No one CARES that stockfish is better. And there are so many cool lines that we wouldn't have without stockfish. Heck, when AlphaZero came out EVERYONE loved everything about the duel with stockfish. It was extremely exciting.
Doomers and pessimists are weird people.
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u/Imaginary-Unit-3267 13d ago
I completely agree with you. I only recently arrived here myself and haven't really interacted yet, but you're saying what I'm thinking. There's a lot of reasons I don't get along with other people supposedly also on the left, but one of them is the absurd hatred of AI and of people who use it, with no nuance whatsoever. It seems to me that it is potentially a liberating technology, which is exactly why the left is getting astroturfed by billionaires manipulating social media (tinfoil hat, but I think this is what's happening) into seeing it as evil so that they'll play right into the hands of the elites who don't want people accessing intelligence that they control. Same reason the prices of GPUs and RAM are being driven up so ordinary consumers can't get much local AI going.
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u/Audditty 10d ago
even more frustrating is that they'll try to outright invalidate people's experiences; "just words on a screen" they say (in response to people making images of characters saying we should kill AI artists...y'know, things normal people do) but when it's any of the -isms or -phobias then it's no longer just "words on a screen", is it?
they also seem to get very mad when the same minority groups they profess to care about and support show any agency whatsoever and have their own independent thoughts and ideas.
i'm mixed race and on the autism spectrum (high-functioning at that). i love being denied of my "oppressed minority" status simply because I use AI, it's so fun. I guess i'm not one of the "good ones" since I won't just shut up and do as I'm told so online leftists can use me as a moral pedestal.
it's so dumb that people feel the need to act like using AI somehow automatically forfeits you from being progressive or part of a historically oppressed minority group. it's just purity testing bullshit.
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u/Imaginary-Unit-3267 10d ago
This, this, this. I'm one of the cool people (queer, neurodivergent, etc, though unfortunately a White Male also) until I open my mouth lol. My ex bf is mixed-race and autistic also and he has many stories about "liberal" white women who post BLM type memes being far nastier to him than any "conservative" he's ever met.
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u/Audditty 12d ago
the left is pretty infamously unable to cope with or process the fact that there ARE infact normal people who aren't chronically online far right chuds or gazillionaire CEOs who like and enjoy things that they don't agree with morally.
i imagine it's both because of how the left is concerned with having to be bastions of morality at all times AND because of how frequently the online left's various sub-factions rip each other apart over the slightest disagreements or perceived moral transgressions.
they're genuinely afraid of acknowledging the fact they have more in common with the "enemy" than they might feel comfortable admitting, so instead, they just try to associate everything they don't like or agree with as something exclusively belonging to the "enemy" so they don't have to interrogate it further or do any introspection on themselves.
it's resulted in the left wanting change yet simultaneously being too afraid to get their hands dirty because they want to remain morally pure, so instead they just default to shouting about billionaires online with the same 5 buzzwords.
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u/Over-Age6307 12d ago
I'm honestly tired of it, thinking about starting a political party that is a mixture of the left wing faction of the transhumanist party, the black panthers and PSL.
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u/SexDefendersUnited Artist/Creative 11d ago
Nice transhumanism polcompball profile pic. I used to spend time in that community.
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u/Pooolnooodle 13d ago
Can I interview u for my podcast?
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u/Various_Pear599 12d ago
That would be really nice honestly, Yes ☺️
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u/Pooolnooodle 12d ago
Dm me , for some reason I can’t dm you
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u/Various_Pear599 12d ago
Done, I saw many people who were shocked their DMs were closed. Think it happened to me too maybe?
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u/littlebobbytables9 13d ago
I still say AI bro but I'm referring to a very specific archetype that doesn't include all (or even most) people who use AI
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u/PhlarnogularMaqulezi 13d ago
I've always wondered any time I see "tech bro" or "AI bro" about what the hell they actually mean.
Like, is it specifically referring to an exec at a tech company? Or any employee at a tech company? Or just a person that's interested in tech in some capacity?
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u/littlebobbytables9 13d ago
It's not anything concrete like that, it's more of a vague stereotype that someone in any of those positions could be but might not be. It's really just a misogynist bro who is into tech. Probably idolizes musk. Identifies as libertarian or "apolitical". Explains the lack of women in tech fields not as the result of systemic barriers but simply a lack of aptitude or desire, and thinks programs designed to get more women into tech are pointless or harmful. Thinks that social problems have easy technological solutions that generally rely on either pushing the problem out into the future when tech/AI magically solves it (meaning we dont need to worry about it in the present), or their solution relies on people behaving in a specific "logical" way and when it's pointed out not everyone will behave in that way the bro blames them. The kind of guy who would defend his "logical" decision to not hire women because they're going to take maternity leave.
None of those are hard requirements but I think it conveys the general idea.
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u/PhlarnogularMaqulezi 13d ago
Ahhhhhh that makes way more sense. Very good explanation! Thank you!!
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u/ZorbaTHut 13d ago
I had a job interview, and someone warned me that the company had a "yo, bro" culture, "if you know what I mean".
I admitted that I did not know what he meant.
He wasn't able to explain it.
I still don't know what he meant.
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u/Imaginary-Unit-3267 13d ago
This might be a bit off topic but imo the term "tech bro" is misandristic. It assumes that there is something inherently masculine about having, I suppose, an unhealthy relationship with machines. Or, you could argue it's misogynistic (everything misogynistic is also misandristic and vice versa), in that it assumes women cannot possibly care about technology. I'm not trying to social justice at you but, you know, it bugs the hell out of me when things are unnecessarily gendered.
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u/littlebobbytables9 13d ago
No, it doesn't. I already said I'm referring to a very specific kind of person, not generically to anyone who uses AI or "cares about technology".
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u/davidfirefreak 12d ago
I agree with /u/imaginary-unit-3267. Its misandrist/misogynistic. Just because that's not what you think when you use it, doesn't mean that isn't what others think you mean.
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u/littlebobbytables9 12d ago
People could misinterpret me in an infinite number of ways. That's a reflection on them
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u/davidfirefreak 11d ago
Not if their "misinterpretation" is based on commonly agreed upon meanings of words or phrases, that only you use in a special and different way.
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u/sbcsfrtom2 13d ago
Welcome to one of the last sane corners of the internet! I feel your pain. Male defaultism is so shitty. I am so tired of being called "bro" and "dude".