Thank you for the essay it was very informative and to be honest it has changed my perspective on how I see AI.
I have been using AI in a personal level as it is a very convenient tool to check for another solution, general inquiries or just a way to approach a problem, I even have been using it for my work.
However I didn’t know what to think or how to feel towards AI in a large scale. As you said there are clearly positive things about it, helping people with disabilities or being able to provide workforce for small scale or personal projects.
But my issue was how AI is being use by big western corporations wherever they laid off their workforce or some business who have decide that human interaction is not necessary or just too “expensive”.
I believe the greatest part of the essay is that we as communist, should struggle to understand and to see how this tool can be used to the benefit of the worker as a person or for their workload.
I have to add, AI currently is an issue for social interaction, no only the “slop” that now fills YouTube that is the largest platform for social media, at least in the west, and the unbelievable amount of bots in any social media have deteriorated another social space between people. I believe this is important because is harder to find content that has real research on it, or content that goes against the narrative of the west, you know like hakim. It is also harder to discuss online when you cant even know if the other users is indeed a human being.
There is also the issue how this same bots can change the perspective of social issue or the public opinion, with the same goal as the news in the previous year but now is incredibly more difficult to determine if it is just bot or real groups/communities that are rallying behind an issue.
And how this can also be used by big companies like amazon or Google to benefit from it with advertisement or crushing ideas or projects that may be troublesome for them.
And there is also the issue with the telemetry that was already pretty invasive before AI now I don’t have an idea how this will be used, there are some soft examples like the traffic cameras in new York to charge drivers if the just go in certain parts in the city.
Overall I do really appreciate your point of view as a refreshing perspective on the matter.
Thanks for writing this. Refreshing and studied in-depth take on it.
I’ve long been disappointed in the reaction I saw on this subject, including from people who I thought were “on the same side.” It was a learning experience in a way because while I was reading people pop off with vague anti-AI talking points, I was trying to grapple with it through direct experience. It hadn’t really been my intention for it to be some communist investigation thing, but I had sort of stumbled into engaging with it and wanted to take it seriously as something to consider, even if informally in how I went about it.
Where I’m going with this is, it became a sort of hobby but with a communist worldview tint on consideration of it. I consider myself far from an expert on AI or communist theory, but even at where I was, it was painfully obvious that something was wrong with the anti-AI messaging. That kind of moment people talk about where you are familiar with a subject and others aren’t, and normally you might trust them and take them at their word because you are ignorant on the topic, but this time you know some things and you’re thinking, “Wait a minute, this sounds like ignorant bullshit. If it’s like that with this subject, what else are they bullshitting about in ignorance?”
So it’s nice to see some in-depth pushback. I know it’s not always the easiest thing for people to engage with as reading time and length goes, but we need this degree of depth, no matter the subject matter. Twitter-length kind of “hot takes” don’t suffice for dissecting what’s going on. We need to be more than reactive (which is what anti-AI messaging largely seems to be). The trope about “tankies” being right isn’t due to magic, but due to them analyzing systems and conditions with more accuracy than other modes of analysis do, and adjusting analysis if new information contradicts it. We have to get to a place where we can plan, as AES states do. Otherwise we’re stuck in survival mode and hoping that raging against the machine will be enough to stave off full barbarism.
Even if I might seem super pro-AI sometimes I really want there to be good arguments against it and especially of course how it’s being handled in capitalism, because this is how we solve contradictions and uncover dialectics at work.
I just feel that a lot of it has been settled, even as far back as artisanal intelligence which came out only 4 months after chatGPT and yet is still completely, totally relevant - a huge blemish imo, it should be outdated in some areas already, but the arguments against AI are still the same almost 3 years later.
I don’t even think everybody should necessarily learn AI in depth, it’s fine to be uninterested in it, but a lot of people seem to make it their life mission to tell the world that they should feel bad for using it when they could just not say anything, or at least like you said be a little bit curious about it. I’m all for explaining my methods with AI and sharing best practices because I think it’s important. Not speaking about people here specifically, I see a lot of these takes on Twitter usually. Actually I’ve just blocked the words AI now on that platform, I’m tired of seeing all the “discourse” lol. The twitter format of having only 280 characters when we are some of the biggest yappers is not conducive to expanding on ideas and promotes making gotchas and easy wins instead. Lol my essay is super long but it’s ultimately all of my points about AI condensed into one volume.
Great essay, read the entire thing.
But this won’t happen while we are still stuck in “you used AI? I instantly think less of you as a person.”
This part here, and the fact that people refuse to critically engage with it is what bothers me the most about the anti-AI crowd, most especially people who proaim to be communists. Most of the arguments against AI are either moralistic (you’re stealing) or subjective (it looks bad), and while environmental concerns are obviously something to be accounted for, the problem is once again capitalism. They think they need these huge resource draining data centers because they’re focused on computational power rather than efficiency, like how DeepSeek did with their r-1 model.
At the end of the day I can only hope that we can utilize this technology to our advantage as communists.
I think I had a bigger part on the environment in the drafts but either I never wrote it in or I removed it. I always urge caution in how we approach the climate… with AI it’s difficult to even tell just what kind of impact it’s actually having. There was a whole thing with an article about a texas county or something that urged people to take fewer showers bc it needed the water for a data center, and the source was a satirical newspaper that was putting out an anti-AI story. I probably didn’t include it in the essay because I didn’t know what to add to that.
and when you look at the gallons of water used (first of all they’re not taken out of the environment, they go back into it, but yes they can deplete) it turns out to be almost nothing compared to the entire area consumption. I’m pretty sure I meant to write more about the environment in the essay because I also remember writing about the colorado river and how the US dammed it to provide free water for water-intensive crop culture in arid Southern California, to the point that when the river reaches Mexico there’s almost no water left.
On top of which the meat industry is the biggest waster of water followed by the US army for biggest polluter, that was kind of my point with the linkedin moralizing… CEOs congratulating each other for cutting back on Youtube a little (or, I kid you not, emptying their inboxes once in a while). Like the average person in the US consumes as much water in a year as it takes to produce between 14 and 22 burgers period. But again, capitalism.
I kinda circle back to the climate in the second section when I address westerners… we want instantaneous solutions, without going through the development phase of these solutions. And if we don’t have them we don’t want anybody else to have them either.
The one thing I’d support against AI is banning it in the West so that China can overtake us lol. But even then, there’s a lot of research going on by computer scientists in the west using neural networks for very cool things.
This encapsulates my views pretty perfectly. Consumer AI (whether it’s LLMs, diffusion models, audio models etc) has been here for a while now, and is used by tens, if not hundreds of millions of people daily. Certainly, you could argue it’s overvalued or overhyped, but just as certainly it’s not valueless. And the open models coming out from China show there is a way to put control of AI in the people’s hands.
To just cede the entire field of consumer AI to liberal or right-wing groups would be a terrible strategic error, especially as Musk and co have gleefully weaponised AI to for their political purposes. At the very least, we must figure out how to counter this, and we cannot do so by shunning the technology entirely.
This is why I wanted to cooperatively write an ultimate guide on AI that would explain how the tech works and give concrete examples, but it’s a huge task even if you spread the workload.
Did you read that “AI is the aesthetic of fascism” article? https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/. This was so bad. I thought of it because you talked about ceding the field to liberal and right-wingers.
Honestly outside of some spaces I think people are either pretty positive about AI or just go along with the flow. I remember shortly after chatGPT came out I was in a group with a bunch of people from all walks of life - we pretty much had nothing in common, put together by pure randomness. Everyone was ecstatic about AI and didn’t feel like it would replace their job at all. I was actually at the time the only one who didn’t really like it lol. I tried using it back then but couldn’t get results esp. on the writing, which was frustrating and this is why I want to write the proletarian guide, so people don’t have to do trial and error.
AI is a cruel technology. It replaces workers, devours millions of gallons of water, vomits CO2 into the atmosphere, propagandises exclusively for the worst ideologies
Moreso even than cryptocurrency, AI is entirely nihilistic, with zero redeeming qualities. It is a blight upon the world, and it will take decades to clear up the mountains of slop it has generated in the past two or three years.
Bruh, what is the author talking about? How do they claim to take a material view of the world when they make completely unsubstantiated statements like these? First of, AI is a much broader category than LLMs or Diffusion models, and the fact that the author doesn’t seem to know that is genuinely concerning. Secondly, even for LLMs, I’ve been using it to summarise lectures and generate quizzes for me to study with. It is a genuinely valuable technology that is helping me and many other students to learn better.
Sweeping, unfounded statements like this only damages the credibility of socialists, especially when we pride ourselves on having a grounded, material worldview. I do hope this is an outlier among the community.
I found a lot of it to be the academic in his ivory tower bemoaning the fact that the unwashed masses now had access to his niche hobby lol. Lots of name dropping expecting the reader to be familiar with the person and their theory, it’s so duplicitous.
The whole part about Zuckerberg not “needing” a bodybuilder physique, and that he’s “allowed” to “ignore what looks good or not”. It’s completely backwards. First of all whether you need or don’t need something is irrelevant, and Zuckerberg does not have a bodybuilder physique by any stretch lol. In fact he looks natural.
This is a bodybuilder physique:
And this is Zuckerberg in 2025 (he doesn’t seem to have changed a lot in physique since 2023):
He wears oversized shirts and you can tell he has a big chest under it, but nothing too outrageous I would say. If you look at his forearms they’re not that well-defined, which means he also has some bodyfat % which would also make his chest look bigger.
Bodybuilders get this way by taking a myriad of products to cut down on body fat %, build muscles beyond their natural limit, dehydrate themselves, and show vascularity (judges like seeing some veins under the skin). Zuckerberg is doing none of that lol, and there are very real health benefits to being physically active and building muscle mass. Muscle moves bone moves things - there’s a pervasive myth about huge guys that can’t even scratch their back anymore because their muscles are too big to reach, but it’s actually the other way around. Building muscle mass naturally makes you better at physical things including dexterity and agility.
Anyway that was my long tangent. As for Zuckerberg not having to care about what looks good, this is just a 41 year old man trying to pass off as gen z down to the haircut. It’s the Boris Johnson method. This is why I say this article has it all backwards, it starts from the conclusion and then tries to find whatever will support its thesis even if it has to make nonsensical points for it. It feels like someone who’s sad the common people now get to enjoy his niche interests. it’s just gatekeeping.
Unfortunately the headline is catchy and people will just link it probably without even reading to the end and it continues to do damage. I would probably be nicer to that author if the website wasn’t called the new “Socialist” because I can’t even tell what current of socialism that’s even supposed to be. The one that says you know better than the masses and if they’re wrong they should just shut up and let the art elites decide for them? And then they wonder why people are so antagonistic towards what they perceive to be ‘proper art’ and are turning towards making their own with AI?
I will say, it’s very funny that despite the author knowing about all these obscure capitalists (let’s call Vivienne Westwood what she is lol), they can’t seem to actually offer a critique of ‘bad’ fashion beyond “it just looks stupid and ugly and it’s unnecessary 😡”
i hate zuckerbot9000 as any reasonably normal human does, but it is incredible that maintaining a moderate level of fitness is “bodybuilder physique” in mr watkins’ mind
Zuckerberg is deeply cynical, he’s only doing any of this because meta is in a bad shape (facebook is hemorrhaging users, the metaverse was a huge black hole for money, and they decided to go open source with their Llama model which is biting them in the ass now bc capitalism). And now of course with trump being president again he’s trying to court him like all the other capitalists - if you remember that picture from I think december last year, with musk, zuckerberg, bezos and some fash guy standing together at a Trump function. But it’s nothing new, I called it the Boris Johnson method because Johnson has this weird-ass haircut that he thinks it makes him look working class, which is a lot to unpack. Same with tommy robinson whose real name is the much more aristocratic Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Tommy Robinson is a nickname, it’s not his legal name or anything.
For a “New Socialist” publication it doesn’t do a lot of socialist critique and a lot of aesthetics critique 😵💫
That’s exactly my thinking here as well. The usefulness of LLMs is now a material fact, and their widespread adoption makes the question of the future direction of this tech a matter of strategic importance. I’d also argue that this precisely is where we see the fundamental divergence between liberal and communist mindsets.
The liberal tendency often defaults to a form of procedural opposition such as voting against, boycotting, or attempting to regulate a problem out of existence without seizing the means to effect meaningful change. Their idealist mindset mistakes symbolic resistance for material change. Many anarchists fall into the exact same cognitive trap as well incidentally.
On the other hand, communists understand that real change is a product of our collective labor which is what praxis is. If we do not want the future of AI to be dictated by corporate interests, then the only effective response is to do the work ourselves. We must build our own tools that work the way we want them to. Chinese companies have already done a lot of leg work for us by publishing high quality open source models we can built upon. We don’t even have to start from scratch here.
We actually just finished uploading all of ProleWiki FR, from prolewiki EN. Total time was 7 days. There’s a total of 3750 pages uploaded already, and we’ll bring the Library books soon too (they’re still translating).
Total LLM involvement was writing the scripts and handling the translation. And it’s a pretty nice script too, it cuts each page into chunks, sends them to the LLM with a system prompt, saves progress after each chunk, automatically retries if the API fails… if I’d learned python specifically for this I would still be trying to write that code.
“But could you have translated them yourself”, some might say, and yes but we’re 3 sleep-deprived tankies and this is a machine that runs 24/7 haha
It’s such a great real world example of how LLMs are a practical tool in the class struggle. What would have been a Herculean, if not impossible, task for a small team is now achievable in automated fashion within a week. By automating the grunt work of translation and content creation, these tools allow us to break the cultural hegemony of the ruling class and rapidly build our own ideological infrastructure. We are now able to contest the bourgeois narrative on a scale that was previously simply not possible.
Also because the yellow tint bothers me on GPT images:
I believe it’s intentional, because GPT is perfectly able to produce non-yellow tinted images, and it only happens with their model. It gives them an instant look.
To undo it I use photoshop, create a new layer, fill it with a yellow tone lifted from the image (use color picker tool), paint the entire layer 2 with this color, then set the layer to ‘Divide’ (or ‘division’, I’m not sure in english). Then use the layer opacity bar to remove more or less of the yellow. I find that when you remove 100% of it, it makes for a very harsh, bright picture and this is probably another reason they do the yellow tint, it looks warmer.
Almost certainly intentional, given that none of their Dall-e models nor their Sora models have a yellow tint like this. My guess is that it functions as a watermark equivalent or something.
Maybe, but it could also be a feedback loop from the studio ghibli generations. Those are quite yellow so I think that’s started to seep into the training data [I think…? At least that’s what I’ve heard]
I think openAI uses the any publicity is good publicity adage and while the data contamination makes sense on the surface, it’s perfectly able to produce non yellow images, and in fact even smaller local image gen models are also able to produce specific colors. When you send gpt a prompt for image creation it changes it into something the tool understands and I think they inject “yellow tint” or some similar keyword into the prompt. It would be very easy to auto add a negative prompt to remove it if they wanted, too.
