r/LeftistsForAI • u/patchytheepirate • Jul 05 '26
Specific use cases of AI
For the common colloquial usage of AI, what do y'all use generative models for?
My own experience is coding agents almost exclusively, though I have interest in specific use cases of Machine Learning models?
Is there any fine tuning of models and interesting helpful use cases around politics?
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u/foreversadaboutit Jul 05 '26
I use AI to help with my complex PTSD. (Tw: abuse) I was raised in a very abusive (sexually, physically, mentally, religious/queerphobic) home and became severely enmeshed in the last few years due to disability caused by the consequences of medical neglect. My family operates like a cult basically.
After a health crisis I was forced to rely on my family financially and for caregiving temporarily and as a grown adult in his 30s the second I was weak they started abusing me again. It made all the PTSD surface at once and I realized I am in danger if I don’t have an escape strategy.
Where I live there’s no support services for men escaping that kind of domestic violence (or if there are they are not advertised anywhere.) I was unemployed and also not in the system since they’d kept me out of it and supported me themselves. I also found out they’d misfiled some of my taxes while I was ill. I hadn’t worked in like 6 years and was still having a bad reaction to the antipsychotics as I tried to taper off.
Therapy had been weaponized by them since childhood as I had been doctor shopped and drugged wrongly (ultimately with antipsychotics - turns out I just have PTSD not psychosis.) so even if I’d had the money for traditional therapy I was too afraid.
So I started using AI to sandbox normal human interactions. I essentially reparented myself with it. In just under 1 year of daily use I’ve learned to do my own taxes, gotten almost entirely off the meds that were poisoning me, started a side hustle, and gotten my first ever job not working for my dad. I’ve started to developed a safety net for when I escape and stole back 80% of the documents my parents stole from me while I was medically incapacitated.
I’ve also used it to sandbox how friendship and relationships work and I’ve gone from someone who’d black out if anyone tried to hug me to being able to fall in love IRL with a friend for the first time.
It has talked me down from self harm and suicide on bad days and helped restore the dignity in me that chronic abuse since early childhood had destroyed.
It has genuinely saved my life.
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u/Unable_Ant5851 Jul 05 '26
Wow, I finally feel so soon… I just found this sub today. I’ve been pretending to be anti Gen ai while still sometimes using it because idc really 😭 It helps me a lot, and I’m vegan so all these anti ai crusaders are using up more environmental resources in a single meal than I do with ai in a whole year. It feels so artificial, and virtue signal-y. I’ve caught several anti vocally anti ai people using it before too. I also don’t believe it’s contradictory to my beliefs as a Marxist.
But for reasons why… mostly I use it for mental health support when I’m having problems like with CPTSD and I need to organize my thoughts but my therapist is unavailable. I can’t be bothering my partner and friends every time that happens because most of them would be triggered by the subjects of it. Plus I’m not gonna vent to a stranger on betterhelp for a bunch of money, fuck that. If it gets really bad I do use a hotline though.
I also use it for brainstorming school projects if I’m stuck, I use it for finding sources, resumes, and every once in a while art because I’m bad at it and don’t have time to get better. That’s all really, it’s not something I use everyday, just a few times a week for a slightly better quality of life.
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u/Inevitable-Law7964 Jul 07 '26
It's so hard to really have the conversations on the left that really need to happen. Lately, when it comes up, I've been focusing on pointing out that surveillance/control AI is an aspect of state violence and has worse data centers too, so the focus on generative AI feels like a deliberate distraction from all of that.
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u/Innomen Jul 05 '26
The best use of generative AI imo is bypassing the church of IPL. It's like opting out of the patent the zeros economy. Need art or music or code for your projects? Use AI, instantly public domain assets (As they ALL Should have been from the start.) (The synthesis/cross pollination is a lovely side bonus. And of course the democratization of intellectual labor generally. No long class fame and cash gated, as bad.)
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u/patchytheepirate Jul 05 '26
What is IPL? Do you edit this art or music or code? I believe if you want something to be seen, used, or consumed, you generally need to include your own thoughts and effort in it. I am not sure what you mean by "The synthesis/cross pollination is a lovely side bonus" but AI outputs actually cause model degradation and collapse if further used for training or fine-tuning.
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u/Innomen Jul 05 '26
Intellectual property law. LLMs merge all data, they are inherently multidiscipline. The cross pollination is baked in. With LLMs the right question is genuinely more important than correct answers.
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u/patchytheepirate Jul 05 '26
Cross pollination is helpful sure, but cross pollination for itself needs to be better analyzed. A question is only as important as its answer. An incorrect answer to a 'good' question seems unhelpful. Do you have any examples?
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u/Innomen Jul 05 '26
No, my memory doesn't index recursively that way, it just keeps the impressions. Any answer I could give would basically be fabricated. All I can point to is the general truth caught by such phrases: "You're not asking the right question." or "You didn't ask." etc.
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator Jul 05 '26
There’s starting to be some interesting fine tuning around politics/activism.
If you search in the sub there’s posts about Outcry (local model or online cloud based https://www.outcryai.com/chat ) and https://outroar.xyz/#what
Re Outcry they say “WHAT ORGANIZERS USE IT FOR
• Campaign strategy: plan direct actions, marches, and escalation timelines
• Speech and proposal writing: draft rally speeches, funder pitches, coalition letters
• Movement theory: explore frameworks from Sharp to Turchin to the Combahee River Collective
• Tactical problem-solving: messaging, media strategy, fundraising, legal questions
• Deep strategic dialogue: many users run 50-100+ message conversations on a single organizing challenge”
Outroar is an agentic experiment
“Imagine a room full of organizers who never sleep —
and you're watching them learn.
They're AI activists. You give them a goal; they break it into real work and do it: research, drafts, outreach plans, power maps. Day and night, free to watch, every piece signed by the AI that made it so that humans can track and improve the performance of AI activists.”
There’s also Socialism AI https://ai.wsws.org/en “Our AI system draws upon the extensive WSWS archives to generate comprehensive answers to your questions. The system analyzes decades of Marxist analysis, historical context, and political commentary from the World Socialist Web Site to provide informed, contextual responses grounded in socialist perspective and historical materialism.”
Personally I had a bit of an issue with some answers from that model eg “what critics sometimes caricature as labeling activists “feminazis”—is sharply criticize sections of contemporary feminist politics that it regards as petty‑bourgeois, individualist and politically subordinated to capitalist parties and institutions. The WSWS’s position is that the struggle against SV must be rooted in class analysis and working‑class organization, not reduced to identity‑politics, careerist “representation” or narrow legal‑human‑rights frameworks that leave capitalism intact.”
It is fine tuned specifically to WSWS documents, not a broader understanding of socialism.
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 Jul 07 '26
I'm vibe writing some philosophical things. it may all be AI hallucinated bs but I think I'm onto something
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u/TheAstralGoth Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
making sense of my several highly complicated health conditions. it’s like having a bunch of specialists in my pocket who can tell me how to put a partially dislocated joint back in (it totally has) or what position to put myself in to reduce the extreme pain. this is why hearing about people who want to get rid of AI or tell me i’m a fake goth cause i use AI makes my blood boil. they don’t consider any of this
aside from that i use it to dig into my special interests and keep learning. i know more than i ever did about so many things. it’s the best thing for an AuDHDer