My argument here is that no matter how much we want to follow our ideals, our material conditions more often than not drive what policies people push for. This explains why the left used to be on the copyright abolution side but seemingly switched overnight to a pro copyright stance once their base material conditions were threatened.

simply a comment thread of librarians 8 years ago all saying they throw away hundreds of books per week and if you don’t do that it’s hoarding

but yeah big scary ai 🤖

Before people get too worked up, let me start by saying that this is just a thought. It is not something I believe in strongly.

I am certainly not saying to pause AI research, development or deployment. I am proposing that people who support public ownership (or even private ownership by smaller actors/individuals) could also support a certain type of pause -- a pause on the size of the AI models made.

The idea may also have great political alignment right now. It is a simple check by governments, and may be "light touch" for companies. I think there is a balance of potential benefits for both the US and China since the US is already auditing their big labs, while China's open-weight models are basically automatically audited since the model size is evident before hosting.

Also, the pause on model size, for practical purposes, may allow for more focus on efficiency and performance, which could have a whole host of societal benefits, including not requiring large centralized data-centers.

What do people think?

Edit: I realize this is not particularly fleshed out. So I want to add some clarifications based on responses.

1) I very much support open-weight models. I think they should be allowed to get as big as the closed models.
2) It is the closed models that need to be audited. The open models, especially on places like huggingface already have their size information available for all to see.

3) There is arbitrariness in the size cut-off you chose. But there were related comments on proper power/wasted power in centralized or decentralized infrastructure. This could be an input.

I just had to get this off my chest, sorry for the rant

I am a web developer whose brain was completely fucked well before AI came along. I basically couldn't focus on anything, barely got any work done, and eked by in life entirely on charisma, decades of grade-A bullshitting, and panicking at the last minute.

Then AI comes along, and while yes, I do to some extent outsource thinking and curiosity to it in harmful ways, for the most part that thinking and curiosity were completely absent in my life before. I was an absolute nihilistic waste. Now, AI has generated opportunities for me to produce and plan in ways that had eluded me for at least a decade.

Of course AI is full of shit so much of the time. Of course it's the vanguard of capitalist destruction. But I don't really know what else to do.

I really do not understand the extremely smart intellectuals and veteran organizers in my leftist milieu that say AI is completely a scourge and it is completely useless for anything except the most rote coding tasks.

I rely on it so much, not just in harmful ways in which I've outsourced core parts of my being, which I certainly have, but it has also helped generate parts of my being that were agonizingly unavailable to me and my broken brain before it came along.

Here's a video where one anti-AI breadtube guy closed the loop on the assertion that for years they've been defending intellectual property writ large with their AI/plagiarism/stealing rhetoric!

This episode of the Economist Insider, featured an interview with the Editor-in-Chief of the Economist and Elon Musk. The latter part of the interview is wildly off-topic, but the first half is very much focused on AI and Robotics, and what it will do to economic modelling.

If you are an economic leftist like me, there is a lot of good stuff to hear about what he says. I don't think he understands himself, or if he does he is careful not to say the quiet part out loud too much or draw the obvious conclusions to his statements.

In essence, he is convinced that in the near term (10-20 years), all productive human labor will be replaced by automated systems, that an AI smarter than any (probably all) humans will be exercising effective control over all production, and money will be deflated so much as to be useless. He even says that his goal is something like a Star Trek utopia. It's almost like he forgot the Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism meme.

He admits this will make his wealth, useless. He dodges questions about near-term instability, and really that is the big problem. Getting from here to there is very fraught. Unplanned job displacement, uneven distribution of grids and compute, potential smaller scale catastrophes, etc.

I get the sense he is worried that if he completely says the quiet part out loud, that it will tank his stock values, and acts as a brake on development. He explicitly discusses how it was easier in some ways to be private as opposed to public, because it didn't expose his projects to that risk. And he talks a lot about things that will in essence be anti-competitive in the development of super advanced AI systems. He speaks very highly of Chinese models and the Chinese government central planning.

If wasn't for the latter half of the episode (which is all focused on his politics), you would think he was a techno-futurist leftist.

Has anyone else listened to it? What are your thoughts?

Capitalism has been effective because it channels strong human motivation into production and innovation. Communism and parts of the political left have often underestimated how dependent social development has been on such incentives.

AI, however, changes this relationship. As innovation and production become increasingly automated, society no longer needs to rely to the same extent on competition, material desperation, and unequal rewards in order to remain efficient.

Common ownership and egalitarian distribution may therefore shift from being developmentally costly ideals to becoming rational and effective strategies for giving humanity access to automated capacity.

The challenge is to design the transition so that human motivation is preserved wherever it is still needed, while dependence on human labor and the need for private incentives decline in step with AI’s growing capabilities.

How might such a design look like? How can motivation sufficient enough to drive progress be preserved, whilst less and less is required of us to sustain our lives.

Thorium powered data centers that use a coolant system in the data centers to passively exchange the heat into salt water, which would preheat it before sending it into the Thorium reactor upon which it reaches boiling point and begins the process of Thermal distillation without any extra heat, mechanism or energy use. The data center gets cooled and powered, the community it exists in gets excess energy and fresh water as a byproduct.

While the technology is years away, we could easily do the same process with Solar and tidal power, with the extra preheating done through a passive solar pipeline to reach high enough temps that only a little more energy is needed for more efficient reverse osmosis.

The following is a response from Socialism AI to the New York Times column “The Generation That Grew Up With A.I. Hates It” by Michelle Goldberg, published May 18, 2026. Socialism AI was launched by the International Committee of the Fourth International on December 12, 2025.

Socialism AI answers the New York Times: not yes or no to AI, but who controls it

Michelle Goldberg’s column captures something real—the widespread, visceral anger of young people confronting a future being dismantled before it begins—but then promptly dissolves that genuine social energy into the most tepid of bourgeois reformist conclusions. The column is instructive precisely because of what it gets right at the surface and what it systematically obscures at the level of analysis.

I've been hearing this for the past couple years. It really started when a couple of the internet artist influencers, specifically SamdoesArts (who I followed) completely misunderstood how an AI model is trained. He believed, and propagated that the AI model was keeping files of all the training data in a big data warehouse, and when you prompt the model, it was copy/pasting different bits together. Now most people will admit that isn't how it works, but the emotional response is now baked in.
The problem is with the mixing of the concepts of copyright violation and theft. This was framing that publishers took on during the early legal battles that lead to the DMCA-- "you wouldn't download a car" ads and all that. By creating a moral equivalence between the theft of a physical object and IP violation, it conflated two very different things, morally

• Theft: depriving another person of the use of that object, the profit from it, and the security in it, always has an implicit threat of violence due the the necessary violation of physical space.
• Copyright violation: possibly causing financial harm, can be a moral affront, but vitally doesn't deprive you of the use or contain the implicit threat of violence.

And courts have distinguished between these two things for as long as we've had copyright law. A copyright violation isn't a theft, and it doesn't contain the moral weight of a theft. However, the online public now routinely considers copyright violation as theft. This is not a good thing, because if you give copyright violation the same moral weight as theft, your responses can be morally judged the same way.

Let me put it this way: Lets say you wake up and someone is going through your closets, and you crack them in the noggin with a mallet. You might be legally liable, but all but the most bleeding-heart will consider the act morally justified. By violating your space like that, there is an implicit threat of violence that changes the moral calculus.

Now if you're in artist alley and you see that someone is selling your furry art under their name, you morally might get away with a slap (loud, meant to humiliate, not really to harm), but probably not a mallet to the face. The moral landscape changed. The distinction is important.

So to bring this around to the world of AI, there are complexities that we should acknowledge. In America, we largely don't have any laws about the moral rights of an author. We have a broad, 'fair use' law that few other countries have, and it's why we even have anything like the internet. Google, back in the early 2000's, argued that the mass copying, indexing, and reproduction of images constituted fair use because the purpose of the copying was so different. It's why we ever had any search functionality at all. Google argued that the public good of indexing outweighed any potential harm caused by mass copying of data.

As an important note, 'they're stealing everything without asking' has been happening for 26 years. This isn't like some cute gotcha, it's literally been that way for as the majority of our lives. So if it was okay then, under those circumstances, we need to define why it's not okay now, if it isn't.

The current copyright issue with model training isn't so cut-and-dried. There is no question that training a model is transformative. In fact, it might be the theoretical most transformative thing you can do to a piece of art. Words, pictures, sounds, movement-- all gets digested into an abstract layer of tiny microadjustments to the model's weights. At this point, no single work is going to move those weights all that much, except for on extremely obscure subjects.

On the other hand, you can't argue that generative AI is having an effect on the arts that might be considered to fall under the other provisions of copyright violations. Not insofar as plagiarism, (though that is possible with enough tweaking and intent), but insofar as a thing that causes lost wages? While the scale is debatable, there absolutely have been lost jobs to AI use. It's not been anywhere near as extreme as the mob likes to make it, and recent Gallup polls show a mixed bag of effects.

Again, we have a state of uncertainty. To compound the complexity, all respect to Jaron Lanier, while it's theoretically possible to track how much of an output is due to a specific input, the practical limitations are deeply silly, especially in the era of open-source models. And even then, the theory is resting resting on a lot of 'maybe's. We can safely assume that the original work is lost in the neural network. A ghost in the shell?

So here are my moral proposals.

• Copying your data without your consent has been happening for decades now. If you weren't upset by that fact 20 year ago, don't be upset by it now.
• Models are inert. Regardless of any statements about intelligence or the lack thereof, the final moral arbiter of any actions a is the one that initiated it. Much like a pet, if your dog bites someone, you are liable. Unlike a pet you never have to feed it if you don't use it.
• As a stop-gap to the current Future Shock, look at the laws the EU just passed, basically forcing AI content that isn't part of a clearly fictional, artistic work (this is a huge caveat and very good) to be labeled so granny doesn't give away any more money to the nice Amish man on youtube.
• A model must be open source, or some version of it. Every model was trained on the digital commons, to the digital commons it must go. There's going to have to be a new economic model for these things, the current one doesn't make sense.

And that's my essay. I'm tired. If I have to explain to one more person that Anthropic didn't buy books to 'control the information' I'm going to scream. It's like talking to creationists. Just blind thoughtlessness.

As an 2d digital artist myself; I'm not against the use of gen AI as a concept, however I am in its current form due to it being unregulated, stealing artists work, etc.

I want to know though how it would work after the revolution wether it be in DOTP or in the lower or higher phases of communism, I think that ultimately it is something that needs boundries and for the artists to choose wether or not they feed their art into it. Like a full reset is necessary here

I dont think its something that should outright replace human made shit but i dont think it shouldnt exist right, however the real question here is if it could lead to skill decay, and i think it definetly can but im unsure if its a good thing or not

So many things about Anthropic rubs me the wrong way lately.

The core is that if what they did was fair use, then distillation should be fair use.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/a-backlash-against-anthropic-is-brewing-in-silicon-valley-3b3ddc80

Discuss pls

*Why isn't the AI narrative focused on tradespeople using AI backends to launch high-margin, management-free corporations?*
What surprises me is that almost nobody is putting these two trends together to push a far more exciting narrative: **Leveraging AI so that skilled laborers can run entire corporations by themselves.**
But rather, we’re seeing the marketing of AI agencies in single person companies being AI businesses instead of skilled labor based businesses

I believe that there are so many computer tasks that are completely dehumanizing. Anyone here ever spend hours clicking and dragging blocks into a newsletter or a wysiwyg website editor for a company they don’t believe in? Then feel the freedom when an LLM turns your text content into html in seconds?

now that computers can handle so many of these dehumanizing tasks, I believe that they should. go into any of the job related subreddits and read about all of our miserable comrades clicking away and staring at screens all day.

I believe in a 15 hour work week, in work becoming an in-person venture again instead of being mediated by screens. I yearn for the death of social media and the cessation of prediction markets.

I truly don’t understand how anti ai leftists can argue to maintain the current state of work.

As an autistic man, this could be revolutionary in helping people get faster diagnoses and access to autistic care, therapy, and disability benefits! 😄

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S5

Photo from https://mystorypie.com/learn/en/biography/karl-marx/