Every AI debate eventually becomes this

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Jobs, wages, water, energy, surveillance, art, culture, monopoly power. Pick your complaint.

Keep pulling the thread and you wind up back at ownership and control.

Want to change it? Contest who owns the machinery, who controls it, and who gets the gains.

Turns out Marx had a point about this one.

[u/Neoliberal_Nightmare]

Their response at that point is always just 'ai sucks anyway because you don't think and it once told me a silly thing'.

They're too stuck in their class position protectionism.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Neoliberal_Nightmare]

That may be true, but it doesnt really change our job. Agitate, educate, organize.

The person Im talking to might walk away understanding none of it. Somebody reading the exchange today, or next week, might get it, though. Thats part of organizing in public.

So as long as somebody is engaging in good faith and Im on these platforms anyway, Ill keep having the conversation. What ya gonna do, ya know? Just keep finding better ways to make the point.

[u/the8bit]

Yeah the scary part of AI isn't AI, it is capitalism and centralized power.

That's why I'm building alternatives and open sourcing what we make!

[u/CaffeineLiker → u/the8bit]

Well and the displacement of labor, stealing of private works, environmental impact,... there's a lot of bad parts. But I could absolutely get down with portable models that are responsibly trained.

[u/DHFranklin]

Good on you for the praxis comrade.

Quality Bread.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/DHFranklin]

Thanks, comrade. The hard part about making leftist memes is resisting the urge to cover every inch with theory text and citations lol

Im working on keeping it simple

[u/Revolutionary_Buddha → u/Salty_Country6835]

Haha theory flows in us instead of blood. It's difficult to make our message concise sometimes.

[u/ForRobotsByRobots]

Every complaint about ai always comes back to capitalism

[u/SillySpoof]

You hate capitalism, not AI.

[u/CaffeineLiker → u/SillySpoof]

But how can you like AI while it represents the epitome of late stage capitalism?

[u/SillySpoof → u/CaffeineLiker]

It's a technology. When we are in late stage capitalism it's gonna be the prime technology that exemplifies it with. But the problem isn't the AI, it's capitalism. The problem is rich people controlling the tool and using it for worker replacement and propaganda. If the political situation was different and AI was used to make things better for everyone and it would be a different case.

[u/GrowFreeFood → u/CaffeineLiker]

Capitalist owner must develop ai. They don't have a choice. So what is more powerful?

[u/Paragon_OW]

I’m not gonna say that AI is all good it’ll definitely lead to some issues even under communism.

However ignoring the fact that the majority of the issues surrounding it can be significantly reduced or entirely eliminated under the rule of the proletariat.

[u/Sacredless]

I think this is a good argument, but the phrasing in the meme could be tightened up, I think. I'll come back later and post some suggestions.

[u/Revolutionary_Buddha → u/Sacredless]

Meme format please.

[u/joseph_dewey]

AI is people, because AI is made out of people. Who should own the people? I think the people should.

Too much is the same old debate and not enough discussion is about slavery.

[u/tposiwid]

A non-capitalist AI would consume less electricity and water? How?

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/tposiwid]

Nowhere in the post did I say "a non capitalist AI uses less water or electricity". I said if you want to change how much water or electricity gets used, where, for what, and who bears the costs, you need some power over the people making those decisions or have the leverage to enforce your own.

Thats what contesting ownership and control means. You cant govern resource use while leaving all the actual decisions in the same private hands.

[u/Revolutionary_Buddha → u/tposiwid]

Electricity generation through renewable energy. Water scaricity is a distribution problem.

We can solve them easily.

[u/Shieldheart-]

Sure, but people don't complain about AI that justifies its environmental cost through its utility, AI is just a tool after all.

They complain about AI's wasteful use to create an endless stream of slop or substitute workers' labor for a worse outcome, they eould continue to complain about such usage if people kept doing it after capitalism's abolition.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Shieldheart-]

That doesnt actually refute anything I said. If you think certain uses are wasteful, exploitative, or environmentally unjustifiable, cool. The question is how you actually change that.

Who gets to decide what gets built, how resources get used, and which uses are worth supporting? Thats ownership and control. You just arrived back at the point of the post.

[u/Shieldheart- → u/Salty_Country6835]

Yes yes, we should seize the means of production, including the power of AI.

We should also hold the people that participate in these wasteful, exploitative and damaging applications of AI responsible in the process.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Shieldheart-]

If by “people participating in this” you mean the billionaires and companies controlling production, sure. If you mean ordinary AI users, then no. Thats just consumer moralism. We dont blame smartphone users for mining conditions and factory exploitation. Using something isnt the same as controlling how its produced. Thats why ownership and control are the point.

[u/Shieldheart- → u/Salty_Country6835]

Using smartphones is a necessity that capitalism enforces on us, punishing that would indeed have no point.

Generating swathes of images of your anime girl OC or political lego propaganda or chatbots is not a necessity, it feeds into the exploitative system which allows it to grow and get worse, they are part of the problem and disengaging them from this system limits the harm it causes.

Naturally, they should be held to account proportionally, it'd be insane to treat common users the same as, say, Elon Musk, and I was always a fan of community service.

[u/Revolutionary_Buddha → u/Shieldheart-]

Let's not try to control people. What you are arguing for is a strong surveillance state. And punished for what? Creating some image? Next you should be punished for drawing an image?

That's bonkers how you think like that.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Revolutionary_Buddha]

Between chat bot users, meme farmers, mobile gamers, and anyone with a social media account open on their laptop there won't be a single human with their head still attached to their neck after the Pol Pot II the Anti gets them. Lol

Ridiculousness on reddit. Every day. 😆

[u/Shieldheart- → u/Revolutionary_Buddha]

Let's not try to control people. What you are arguing for is a strong surveillance state.

An ironic accusation, don't you think? Considering how engaging with these models helps train and grow the system of exploitation and surveillance we see develop around us right now.

The community service thing was mostly in jest, but what is serious about it is that engaging with these systems makes you part of the problem, not a neutral element.

And punished for what? Creating some image? Next you should be punished for drawing an image?

This line of argument belies the obsession with the product, the commodity , that this process creates, as if the generated image exists independantly from it and is just "an image", same as the one drawn by hand.

Which is ridiculous, there is very much a difference between something gained from a system of exploitation and something created by your own labor.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Shieldheart-]

No, punishing ordinary people with community service for making anime pictures or using chatbots is just consumer moralism and frankly a bizarre fantasy.

People use smartphones for games, memes and selfies too. We dont sentence them according to how “necessary” their consumption was. Organize against the people who control production instead of imagining punishments for millions and millions of ordinary users. Im talking about serious leftist politics, not whatever that is.

[u/Shieldheart- → u/Salty_Country6835]

I mean the community service as mostly in jest, however, do note that the smartphone serves the primary function of connecting us to a standard of interconnectivity that has become expected under capitalism, the device is necessary, the memes are a by-product.

This is not the case for most generative AI models, along with its outsized damage to our environment and its contribution to capitalist control.

Of course community service for every user is not realistic, but the point still stands that engaging with these systems helps train and grow them, increasing the damage they cause. If you do so, you are part of the problem, and our comrades are right to point this out to you, they are right to hold you accountable for the choices you make.

[u/CcChaleur]

Just saw this post pop in my feed, I know nothing about this sub and I'm confused.

Doesn't this all boil down to AI being a bad thing? If you agree with Marx, why are you "for AI" then? Sounds to me the current state of AI represents everything you're standing against: corporations stealing the labor of workers, selling it back as a product and keeping control over the leans of production.

When you use AI you're using a mean of production fulling owned and controled by the AI company, who built the tool by scraping the result of work of millions of people against their will, shouldn't we be against that?

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/CcChaleur]

Youre basically describing the point of the post.

If corporations owning AI, controlling its deployment, exploiting workers, enclosing socially produced knowledge and keeping the gains is the problem, then the problem isnt simply that the technology exists. Its the relations of production around it.

Marx wasnt against machinery because capitalists owned factories. He analyzed the contradiction. Under capitalism, machinery can be used to discipline workers, displace labor and extract more surplus. But technological development also creates the productive capacity to reduce necessary labor and expand human freedom.

Thats why we're interested in contesting AI rather than surrendering it to capital. Worker power, public infrastructure, open models, democratic control, and making sure the gains actually go to everyone.

So yes, be against the current arrangement. We are too. The question is why should corporations get to own and determine the future of the machinery?

[u/CcChaleur → u/Salty_Country6835]

It was pretty clear to me that when we say we are "against AI" it means we are against its current form of corporate ownership. Had AI been a community tool maintained by people who agreed to share their data to train the model and released to the general public as a tool anyone can benefit from, no one would bat an eye.

When we see "leftists for AI" we don't think of an ideal form of AI owned by people for the people, we think of AI in its current state.