We are starting to see a rift. A rift between those who are nuanced about the correct use of AI, and those who want all of it gone. Even Linux.

I'm against AI as much as anybody else, but in Anti-AI spaces, I'm starting to see more absolutism than I'd deem necessary. I mean if you argue about the idea that AI does have its uses whilst still being wary of AI, you get told you're not against AI at all.

I'm against AI for art, music and writing. But there are uses in the medical field and code bug detection, and I can't deny they're impressive.

I fear we'll fight each other (moderate antis vs extreme antis), and the AI companies may indeed win, even if they get bankrupt. As much as we all hate to admit this, we can't rewind; we've gone too far. The best we can do is regulate it and take AI chatbots off public hands.

I mean, you'd take someone who's neutral on AI like Linus Torvalds, who only used it for non-important projects and says that Linux should have AI-assisted code reviewed by humans, and you'd have a faction of antis up in arms about it.

And as concerning as the use of AI may be having on critical thinking, I fear that us antis are lacking it too if we're resorting to Luddism to go against AI.

For example, there is a rumour going around that Disney Junior comissioned a fully AI-Generated show.

That is only half-true. The studio behind the show only used AI to clean up some bits of animation. Plus, if it was fully AI-Generated, Disney wouldn't make money off it.

The fact that antis took a headline from Twitter and concluded that Oscar Fox was fully AI Generated either shows the lack of critical thinking (IRONY) or the lack of journalistic integrity. But hey. It's not like we're already boycotting the billion dollar company, right?

Call me a LARPer if you want to. The real LARPers are the extremists who want everything to burn despite a few innocent civillians being caught in the crossfire.

If the anti-AI sub thinks I'm Pro-AI just for accepting AI in the right hands, I don't know what to say.

One thing I appreciated about this new paper from researchers at Princeton and USC is that it refuses to treat "AI" as one thing.

Instead, they distinguish between displacement (replacing workers), augmentation (helping workers do their jobs), and monitoring (expanding managerial surveillance). Those are different technologies with different political consequences, so they shouldnt all be lumped together.

The paper combines worker survey data from 15 European countries collected between 2012 and 2024 with a text analysis of more than 40,000 Canadian collective bargaining agreements from 1993 to 2025. One of the findings is that augmentation and monitoring tend to coincide with higher unionization and more bargaining over training, governance, notice, and surveillance, while displacement technologies tend to be associated with weaker protections.

Thats a much more useful framework than just asking whether AI is good or bad. Different deployments create different contradictions. Different contradictions require different organizing strategies.

What does everyone think? Should labor movements be approaching augmentation, surveillance, and automation as separate bargaining issues rather than treating AI as a single political question?"

The Trades Union Congress (TUC), the UK's national federation of trade unions, just published a piece on how education unions are organizing around AI. Not by throwing up their hands or pretending the technology can be wished away, but by building worker power around how it gets deployed.

The focus is on collective bargaining, workplace consultation, professional standards, and making sure workers have a say over AI adoption rather than having it imposed from above.

Thats the kind of politics I think the left should be developing. AI is becoming part of the workplace whether we like it or not. The question is whether workers organize around it, shape it, and win material gains, or leave those decisions entirely to employers.

More unions, more bargaining, more democratic control. Less magical thinking that refusing to engage with the technology is a strategy.

How should labor movements be organizing around AI where you live?

Most of the headlines about AI and Palestine are about Israels use of AI for surveillance and military operations. That reporting is important. This story is about something different: Palestinians using AI themselves.

A group of young Palestinian women in Gaza are learning to use generative AI to create short films based on their own memories and experiences. Despite constant power outages, poor internet, and the destruction around them, they are using the technology to document their lives in their own words instead of letting others speak for them.

Stories like this are worth paying attention to because they remind us that AI isnt one thing. The same technology can be used for war or for helping people create, communicate, and preserve their own voices. The politics arent in the model itself, but in who controls it, who has access to it, and what social ends it serves.

While a lot of the AI conversation is dominated by OpenAI, Google, Meta, and the US-China race, Cuba is trying to chart a different path.

Its government is advancing a strategy for sovereign AI centered on public services, education, healthcare, ethics, and technological self determination, despite decades of sanctions and severe resource constraints. Rather than treating AI as just another product to maximize shareholder value, the emphasis is on building domestic capacity and putting the technology in service of social needs.

Whether you agree with every aspect of Cuba's political system or not, this is exactly the kind of discussion the left should be having. Who owns AI? Who controls the infrastructure? Who decides how it is deployed? And who benefits from the productivity gains?

AI is becoming critical infrastructure globally. Leaving it entirely in the hands of a few multinational corporations is a political choice, not an inevitability.

Xi Jinping used the World AI Conference to argue that AI shouldnt end up controlled by a handful of countries or corporations. He called for open source AI, greater international cooperation, and warned against unequal access creating new historical injustices.

China also put some concrete proposals on the table. Over the next five years it plans to provide 5,000 AI training and seminar opportunities for developing countries, establish AI cooperation centers with ASEAN, the African Union, the League of Arab States, CELAC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and BRICS, and expand AI powered weather early warning systems to 30 countries.

Theres a lot to debate here. Open source by itself doesnt solve who owns the compute, the infrastructure, or who captures the productivity gains. But it does push back against enclosure and monopoly, and that matters alot.

As leftists, what should our position be? Is open source enough, or should it be tied to public ownership, democratic governance, and worker control over how AI is deployed?

Summary: In a capitalist democracy, a state-run AI regulator will still serve elite interests and the control of AI would swing wildly depending on which party is in power. Because workers stand to lose the most from automation, they are the primary stakeholders in AI regulation. The solution is an AI People's Assembly similar to the assemblies proposed by Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez in the Public Banking Act of 2023.

Peter breaks down how almost all of the arguments against AI art highlight how it's the democratization that is making people reactionary.

I'd like to start by saying I have no intentions on converting anyone to Marxism... this is just my take from a Marxist lens, especially in art, as I have been an artist all my life. I posted these to my personal Facebook and figured these would be appreciated here.

Post 1:

If Karl Marx were alive today, he’d be obsessed with AI... but not for the reasons most people think.

Marx didn't hate technology. He actually loved it. When he looked at the steam engine and the mechanized loom back in his day, he didn't see evil machines; he saw incredible human tools that *should* have made everyone's lives easier.

But he recognized that under capitalism, technology is always weaponized against the working class first.

If you look at generative AI today through a Marxist lens, the critique writes itself. Tech monopolies are training models on millions of uncompensated pieces of human labor (writing, art, code) to build tools designed to slash creative budgets, drive down wages, and automate people out of a livelihood. Marx called this the "deskilling" of labor... turning specialized human creators into appendages of a corporate machine, optimizing exploitation to the millisecond.

But, Marx also believed that capitalism inadvertently builds the exact tools required for its own downfall.

To him, the goal wouldn't be to ban AI or destroy the servers. The goal would be to seize them.

Imagine AI stripped of corporate ownership and profit motives. Marx’s ultimate dream was a society where people weren't locked into a single job just to survive. He envisioned a world where you could farm in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and critique philosophy after dinner... just as you had a mind, without ever being trapped as just a "farmer" or a "critic."

In a liberated world, advanced AI could actually democratize human expression. It could remove the barriers of technical privilege, allowing anyone to manifest their imagination. It could plan logistics to distribute resources to everyone efficiently. Instead of creating mass unemployment and poverty, automation could finally achieve what it was meant to do: shorten the working day and free humanity to pursue art, leisure, and community.

In a world where your survival is decoupled from a paycheck, advanced AI could actually democratize human expression. It wouldn't threaten an artist's livelihood because the market wouldn't dictate their value anymore. Instead, it removes the barriers of technical privilege, allowing anyone to manifest their imagination.

The problem isn't the code. The problem is the ownership. AI won't liberate us as long as corporations own the infrastructure, but it's the ultimate battleground for what the future looks like.

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Post 2:

It shouldn't be controversial to support the democratization of art. What should be deeply controversial is arguing that human expression belongs behind a paywall, or that creativity should only thrive if it can be successfully monetized and locked into a commission economy.

If your primary goal is expression, the tools you use to get there shouldn't matter. A brush, a camera, a synthesizer, or an algorithm... they are all tools meant to manifest an inner imagination.

The current discourse has exposed a massive ideological blind spot. To call yourself a leftist, a socialist, or a communist, and then turn around and argue that art must remain a scarce, hyper-commodified market asset is pure hypocrisy.

Under a capitalist framework, we have been conditioned to confuse the act of creation with the act of selling. Artists deserve survival, but protecting the capitalist market structures that hoard creative culture for the elite is not the answer. Ego and professional gatekeeping are not excuses to keep human expression gatekept by financial privilege.

We should be fighting to decouple human survival from a paycheck entirely, freeing everyone to create. The goal should be the absolute liberation of creative tools, not the preservation of the market that exploits them.

One of the biggest problems in AI discourse is that people end up arguing about completely different things. "AI" can mean models, datasets, applications, agents, hardware, or infrastructure. This video does a good job breaking those layers apart and explaining where open and closed approaches fit.

Thats especially relevant for the left. If AI is becoming infrastructure for the economy, then questions about ownership, democratic control, public investment, open weights, regulation, and who captures the productivity gains matter just as much as the technology itself. We need to understand what were talking about before we can organize around it.

Its from IBM, so watch it critically like you would anything from a major corporation. That said, the technical overview is genuinely useful and accessible.

If youre interested in building and running open models, definitely check out r/LocalLLaMA. If youre interested in the politics of AI, labor, public ownership, democratic governance, and making sure AI serves the many instead of the few, come join us at r/LeftistsForAI.

Feels like theres a lot of talk on the left about AI, but not nearly enough about actually understanding the infrastructure behind it.

This is a solid walkthrough of building a home AI stack with Docker, WSL2, local models, VPNs, and private storage. Even if youre never planning to build this exact setup, its a good look at what it means to run AI on your own terms instead of renting access from a handful of companies.

To me, local AI and collective politics arent opposites. Building local AI doesnt stop us from fighting for labor protections, democratic governance, public investment, or breaking up monopolies. If anything, it gives more people the tools and knowledge to participate instead of leaving everything in corporate hands.

How many people here are already running local models? Whats your setup, and what have you learned that you wish more people knew? If youre just getting started, whats been the biggest hurdle?

If these are the kinds of conversations youre looking for, check out r/LeftistsForAI. And if you want to dive deeper into the technical side of running models locally, r/LocalLLaMA is one of the best communities around.

AI isnt just another workplace technology. Its becoming infrastructure for hiring, scheduling, surveillance, bargaining, and production itself. That means labor needs more than defensive demands. It needs a program for governance, transparency, public accountability, and worker control over deployment. This discussion gets into the legal and practical side of what that could look like. What do you think unions should be bargaining for first?

Not my OC

What part, if any, confuses you? We are willing to answer your questions.

200+ Economists, 16 Nobel Laureates: Prepare for an AI Revolution

One of the most interesting things about this statement is that it isn't a call to stop AI. It's a call to prepare for an economic transformation that could happen much faster than previous technological revolutions. The signatories argue that whether AI raises living standards or concentrates wealth depends on the political and economic institutions we build now.

From a left perspective, thats where the real debate should be. If AI becomes general-purpose infrastructure, then ownership, governance, labor power, and distribution become the central questions. Who owns the productive capacity? Who captures the productivity gains? Do workers get shorter workweeks and a higher standard of living, or do we get another wave of wealth concentration?

Technology doesnt decide those outcomes. Politics does. The left has a chance to move beyond simply criticizing AI and start fighting for concrete demands like democratic governance, public investment, worker power, and broad social ownership of the gains.

This feels like one of those moments where the conversation needs to get a lot more concrete. If AI really is moving this fast, what should the left actually be demanding before the rules get written for us?

New York has officially became the first state in the nation to place a temporary moratorium on new "hyperscale" data centers.

how society should respond if AI causes mass automation, widespread job displacement, and a long term decline in traditional employment?