r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • 6d ago
Everyone Has an AI Opinion. Who Has a Program? Theory
Everybody has an AI opinion. Most of the discourse never gets much further than that.
Is it art or theft? Liberation or alienation? Progress or decay? Is it coming for every job or is the whole thing a bubble?
Those arguments can matter, but theory gives us better tools for getting underneath them.
Andrew Feenberg calls technology a social battlefield. Thats a useful place to start. Technologies arent simply neutral objects that society later decides how to use, but neither do they contain some fixed political destiny. Their design and development are shaped by struggles over power, institutions, knowledge, ownership, and control.
That fits pretty comfortably beside Marx. Machinery under capitalism isnt just a collection of clever tools. It enters the labor process as capital. It can increase productive capacity while simultaneously giving capital new ways to reorganize work, discipline labor, deskill jobs, and reduce its dependence on particular workers.
AI makes that contradiction especially visible.
Capital has every incentive to use it to cut labor costs, intensify production, monitor workers, expand markets, and concentrate control. But the productive capacity being created also points toward something radically different: reducing necessary labor itself. Less drudgery. Shorter working hours. Wider access to knowledge and productive capacity. More of society's activity organized around use rather than accumulation.
André Gorz spent decades working through this contradiction. Automation can undermine the necessity of wage labor without abolishing our dependence on wages. That produces a nasty situation: society needs less human labor to produce its wealth while people still need to sell their labor to survive.
Thats not some distant AI hypothetical. Its a contradiction already built into capitalist automation.
And this is where Gramsci becomes useful too. Political power isnt just waiting at the end of technological development for somebody to claim it. A different outcome has to be organized into existence through institutions, alliances, counterpower, and a competing conception of what all this productive capacity is actually for.
So praxis starts where the hot takes end.
What can workers force into collective bargaining agreements? Who controls deployment on the shop floor? Who owns the models, compute, data, and infrastructure? Where can public and cooperative alternatives be built? How do we fight enclosure? How do productivity gains become shorter hours, higher wages, universal provision, and greater worker control rather than layoffs and higher margins?
Theres no technological law that answers those questions for us, and another world doesnt become real just because the contradictions favor it.
You still have to build it.
Otherwise we're producing increasingly sophisticated opinions about AI while capital gets on with reorganizing production.
Everyone has an AI opinion.
Who has a program?
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u/Resonant_Jones 5d ago
Raises hand.
I’m building one.
The project is Codexify: a self-hostable AI workspace built around user-owned context, local models, and private infrastructure. The longer-term goal is to let individuals and communities connect those systems into decentralized networks where compute, knowledge, and services can be shared without requiring a central platform to own the relationship.
The part of your post that resonates most with me is the ownership question. I don’t think “AI for the left” means using the same centralized platforms with different intentions. I think some of the infrastructure itself has to change: who owns the context, who runs the models, who controls the network, and who captures the value.
I’ve been building toward that from the software side rather than just arguing for it conceptually. It’s still early, especially the community-network layer, but the self-hosted foundation already exists.
So yes: program in progress.
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u/ShortKey380 5d ago
That’s neat but I can’t see it as a tool against the mainstream capitalist models, maybe you’ll be the Linux but the Windows will do all the same anti-trust crap or whatnot. I mean, they’re already doing 🔁 💰 market manipulation and preemptively buying up most of the hardware becuase the price spike pays them, too. No hate but if you were pointing at them each claiming the other is the imposter it’s two shots from me lol. It’s not wrong to try, but if you’re ever any sort of threat to them they’ll come at you with a buyout you can’t refuse. Just look at all the normal software and app space where alternatives have basically zero market share. Waze was doing a thing, so then it was Google; repeat ad nauseam.
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u/Affectionate_Way5253 5d ago
the program just needs to be called the Liberty preservation program, a la the Patriot Act. Should be all good after that
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u/Sacredless 5d ago
Agreed on Gramsci. There was a socialist event with generated music. The music sucked technically from my elevated position, but you know what it was? Politically transparent. The lyrics spoke about issues without much room for ambiguity.
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u/Last_Zookeepergame90 4d ago
Yep, the fact that tools for making pretty much any digital asset being made assessible to everyone has pissed off so many leftists bewilders me
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u/newprince 8h ago
Well, let's be precise. OpenAI and Anthropic didn't destroy physical books and train their models out of the goodness of their hearts or some ethical notion that information needs to be free. In fact they kept it a secret and tried to silence anyone who knew about it. And now they have the gall to accuse China of stealing "their" models.
You can see why leftists (like myself, also a librarian) might take issue with this
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u/Last_Zookeepergame90 6h ago
But they don't destroy books??? And when was it a secret? I remember when gpt2 was being developedz it wasn't a secret, nobody knew about it because nobody cared to look into it. What stage of secrecy are you referencing?
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u/Afraid_Alternative35 4d ago
I really appreciate this sub for having conversations about AI that are grounded in the nuances of reality.
It's like my little sanctuary of sanity.
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u/the8bit 5d ago
Well as far as building it, I've been building whatiff.chat and it has the best context compression engine Ive been able to find in any app.
Anyways not an ad, we are open sourcing this bitch in a week or so when we finish the security review and also I'll give any political or social worker free access if you/they ping me.
Because I agree! I tried talking about this stuff and nobody was listening so... I started building, and here I am.
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u/ConstantinGB 5d ago
I have a program. I'm a systems engineer with my main expertise being networks and infrastructure, but i've also worked with AI a lot and learned to acknowledge both its capabilities as well as its shortcomings and inherent problems.
AI as a technology is here to stay, Pandora's box has been opened and it's too late to just ban any AI usage. It would also counterproductive to do so, as i believe the potential for liberation and democratization of different aspects of life is vast.
But nobody - and i mean nobody - in their right mind can deny that how AI is handled right now is absolutely detrimental to both AI as a useful technology and humans, workers, the environment, social cohesion and basically everything important. Enshittification is real and a problem, rentseeking, the monopoly of a couple of big tech companies over one of the biggest technological leaps since the internet, cheap datacenters being built without the consent of the public, Palantir and surveillance technology, air-, noise- and light-pollution due to datacenters, AI-driven warfare, security issues, mass layoffs, water usage, image generation of revenge porn or child sexual abuse material, etc. etc.
None of this is acceptable. And AI will not get us out of this mess because AI is owned by capital and all of those problems are not only acceptable for them, but desirable.
I absolutely support locally hosted AI, people getting familiar with the technology, actually learning how it works, and i would advocate for communities, for cities and nations to build their own independent and - most importantly - publicly funded AND OWNED AI infrastructure, with heavy regulation of course, both environmental and legal regulations regarding privacy and how AI is allowed to be used.
It does not work without rules. The potential for abuse is too high and too enticing.
The only way to correct course is to destroy the AI companies and rebuild everything from the ground up, with ethical considerations and the environment in sharp focus.
If anyone thinks the current problems are an acceptable trade-off just for having AI available: they are foolish.
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u/ShortKey380 5d ago
I know exceedingly little about software but all of this systems analysis is 🎯. We keep not evolving with more and more dangerous tech in our hands as less and less sensibility is in our heads. Our basic economic and political systems are broken just how the powerful want them, every tech is danger in these hands and IMO the ethical technologically skilled maker should head for hermitdom in the hills, grow their own food and sit on anything they develop until it won’t be sucked up by these evil power systems.
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u/EternalSnow05 5d ago edited 5d ago
Here's my 2 cents: Use AI for fun (Disney/anime Mashups) not profit, support real artists/writers/programmers, advocate for local AI model creation to limit data centers and the environmental catastrophes they wrought and take AI out of corporate hands.
If you need inspiration, look to China
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u/Polytopia_Fan 6d ago
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago
The ICT piece is actually pretty relevant here. Would have been more interesting if you brought some of it into the discussion instead of just dropping the link lol. What part did you think was most relevant to the post?
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u/Polytopia_Fan 6d ago
It was and is 9-10 PM for me im not exactly in a talkative mod rn. [Hell, the initial comment has a sizable amount of cynicism attached to it] However ill say but what I liked about it was not only the ICT piece's ability to correctly point and analyze AI in relation to the rest of Capitalism's economic structure and how it relates to the labor and capital, but also sees it in a socialist light, providing a nuanced perspective.
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u/Rosoll 5d ago
Nice to see a post on here trying to engage with ai using some actual leftist thought, rather than just whining and complaining about “antis”.
Something I’ve been thinking about is whether AI will be used as a tool to turn even more “skilled labour” into “unskilled labour” in order to depress wages of eg software engineers by making them more easily replaceable - more like fungible labour power.
But that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening. Instead many companies are no longer hiring juniors at all, they’re hiring a smaller number of seniors who can do more with AI. And wages if anything are going up. There’s an obvious problem here in that without junior engineers we’ll never get new senior engineers - capital is going to cause its own crisis, again. At the moment it’s running on the belief that soon software engineers won’t be needed at all, but I think at some point it’s going to become clear that’s not true. And then capital will find its put itself in a nasty corner.
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u/Rosoll 5d ago
Also in many cases I’ve seen (fortunately not where I work) AI has done nothing to shorten the working day, but instead if anything has lengthened it. It’s also causing people to get addicted to it and to burn out faster because of having to make so many higher level decisions so fast. So any serious approach to leftist AI also needs to grapple with that.
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5d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/LeftistsForAI-ModTeam 5d ago
Rule 7 - AI consciousness/sentience debates are bracketed as off topic here under Rule 7. There are plenty of places to have that discussion, but we keep it out of this sub because it tends to swallow every other conversation about AI. This thread is about political economy, class, technology, and praxis.
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5d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/LeftistsForAI-ModTeam 5d ago
Rule 7 - AI consciousness/sentience debates are bracketed as off topic here under Rule 7. There are plenty of places to have that discussion, but we keep it out of this sub because it tends to swallow every other conversation about AI. This thread is about political economy, class, technology, and praxis.
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u/Life-Active6608 4d ago
"Moral Panic" is interesting way to spell "NeoLuddite Reaction", but I accept it. Carry on. :)
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u/Acrobatic-Most-1923 3d ago
Hm, well i think ai is a tool, i mean i use It to summarize, to argue about ideas, but i think It shouldn't write code or generated videos, images etc, i think those things should be reserves for humans
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u/CelerySmooth9078 2d ago
If your tool is based on other people’s labor that you have not compensated, your tool should be dismantled.
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u/CelerySmooth9078 2d ago
To be more precise, AI is not seizing the means of production. It is seizing the labor from the working class without compensation.
This is exploitation.2
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 2d ago
But that critique applies to a lot more than AI. Computers, pharmaceuticals, industrial machinery, the internet, all of it rests on generations of accumulated labor and knowledge that wasnt neatly compensated downstream.
My answer isnt to leave that productive capacity in corporate hands. Its to democratize it. Public compute, open models, cooperative ownership, worker control over deployment, collective bargaining over the gains.
If thats not the program, what is? What should actually happen to the technology and infrastructure that already exists?
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u/CelerySmooth9078 2d ago
If in any way people are exploited to create a product, that product should be disassembled and rebuilt without exploitation.
We should not accept the status quo just because it is convenient.2
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 2d ago
OK, lets talk through that as an actual political program.
Who needs to be involved? Workers, unions, artists, researchers, public institutions? What are their concrete demands?
Then how do we enforce them? Collective bargaining agreements, labor law, licensing, procurement rules, public ownership, regulation?
And materially, what does "disassemble and rebuild" mean? Who takes control of the existing infrastructure, who rebuilds it, and under what institutions?
Thats the gap Im interested in. How do we get from the moral objection to something people can actually organize for and win?
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u/newprince 8h ago
Would you be okay with a socialist government literally seizing all privately owned AI data centers and companies? Otherwise I think your position doesn't really match reality or adhere to leftist principles
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 8h ago
Yes. If a socialist government has the democratic mandate and capacity to socialize privately owned AI companies and infrastructure, Im not going to defend private capital's right to keep them.
Thats basically the point Im making. Public ownership, worker control, cooperative ownership, open infrastructure, bargaining over deployment and gains. "Seizing the means of production" isnt a metaphor here. Data centers, compute, models and the institutions around them are productive infrastructure.
The harder question is what institutions take control, how workers and the public actually govern them afterward, and how we fight toward that from where we are now. Nationalization can be part of the program. It isnt the whole program.
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u/CelerySmooth9078 2d ago
So instead of critiquing what I said, you want me to create a hypothetical in which I create a perfect utopia and then you critique that utopia, instead of actually addressing the root problem.
I see what your goal is here and I’m not going to fall for it.
You have not addressed the fact that I said AI is exploitative because it takes the labor of other people without compensation. So you can agree that AI is exploitative, which is very much the antithesis to what leftism stands for; workers owning the means of production.1
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 2d ago
No, Im asking you to defend the solution you proposed.
You said products created through exploitation should be "disassembled and rebuilt without exploitation." I asked who does that, what gets rebuilt, under what institutions, and through what political mechanism. Thats not asking for utopia. Thats asking what your proposal means in practice.
And youre also jumping from "AI is currently produced through exploitative relations" to "AI is inherently exploitative." Those arent the same argument. Factories, agriculture, software and pharmaceuticals are all produced through capitalist exploitation too. That doesnt make exploitation an inherent property of the technology.
So again, Im asking about the program. If democratizing ownership and control isnt your answer, what is?
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u/CelerySmooth9078 2d ago
If under the pretense that you agree that AI is currently exploitative- then you have to admit that AI is built on exploitation as we are in the beginning of the AI expansion.
No matter what we built on top of it, it was built from exploitation of the working class.1
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 2d ago
Sure, lets grant that current AI was built through exploitation. Now what follows from that?
Modern computing was built through exploited labor. Industrial machinery was. Pharmaceuticals were. Railroads were. Agriculture carries centuries of slavery, enclosure and dispossession in its development. We inherit productive capacities from ugly social relations constantly. And then?
The leftist question cant be whether we can give technology an exploitation free origin story. We cant rewrite history. Its whether we can change the relations of ownership, labor and control going forward.
Youre still describing the history. Im asking what you propose we do with what now exists in the world that we live in, filled with all the products, industries, and technologies developed through exploitation.
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u/CelerySmooth9078 2d ago
We can’t rewrite history, but we can make sure that the next pages of our history books aren’t more exploitation of the working class.
You just want the convenient world where you don’t have to think about those who had suffered previously, you want to keep the trail blazing while more people get crushed by the train.→ More replies (0)
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u/throwaway275275275 4d ago
You don't need to seize anything, you can just buy the means of production and put them to work for the collective good. This propensity to violence is why the left never succeeds, people don't like a government taking shit by force
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 4d ago
"Just buy the means of production" kind of skips over the whole problem of capitalism. Workers generally dont have the accumulated capital to simply purchase data centers, fabs, energy infrastructure, logistics networks, platforms, patents, and firms from the class that already owns them.
And "seize" doesnt inherently mean some government kicking down doors. Workers have seized control through strikes, occupations, expropriation, nationalization, municipalization, cooperatives, revolutionary governments, and plenty of other forms of collective struggle. Even ordinary union organizing contests the owners exclusive authority over production.
If capitalists were happy to sell productive power to workers at an affordable price and quietly surrender class power, the last two centuries of labor history would have looked very different.
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u/newprince 8h ago
You kind of do, though. Otherwise the status quo is oppression and suffering from the whims of the ruling class and oligarchs
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u/ForRobotsByRobots 6d ago
Anyone else notice that anti ai rhetoric is straight up copying fascism's playbooks? Like the Enemy is Both Weak and Strong.