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.
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.
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.