Regardless of one's feelings on the matter, we can clearly say that AI has been transformative because it never fails to provoke heated arguments. And not only that, but the arrival of commercial models, that is, models that can be run either in your browser (on a cloud service) or on your own machine (local) seems to have shifted perspectives entirely. What becomes bothersome is that self-proclaimed communists seem to have done a complete 180 on intellectual property, and this is what we want to focus on.
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.
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.
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.
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.