It’s an indictment of openAI. They’re a fossil at this point, they need to monetize but their bubble is so big they can barely put a dent in it. How are you going to raise literally the 1 billion dollar a month they spend? China is rolling out models at a fraction of the cost that reach the same level, and notably their companies survive on things other than their LLMs - and they make their models open source too. Like they’re really not concerned about any of these questions over there, they’re just making their models.

The problem is if openAI lets go, their bubble will fly away without them. It’s very cutthroat right now in western tech, with the big 3 companies all trying to outcompete each other but failing to find ways to. And openAI doesn’t do anything but AI, they’re using the startup philosophy (just build product with investment money and we’ll eventually figure out a way to monetize that sticks) but at their size it just doesn’t work anymore. Remember when they rolled out miniGPTs that you were supposed to be able to monetize?

So any little advantage they can cling onto they will push, and this is how openAI has become a joke. I can’t remember the last time I used chatGPT, maybe once or twice a year if I want it to run python code directly but that’s about it.

Oh yeah and z.ai came out of nowhere too last year and can build full stack apps for you. Well, they’re very buggy lol. But it gets a LOT of the job done and I can only expect it will become better down the line. Oh yeah and Chinese models are all free, even in the cloud version.

A lot of this tech also relies on open-source contributions. For example the ubiquitous chatgpt UI style (message panel in the middle of the screen, chat history on the left) has been made into OpenWebUI and this is what most other providers use, possibly with their own tweaks to it but they start from that github repo.

what about for the hate of the game?

Having lost the skill of manual labour means you will fail to achieve the goal or at least struggle immensely, which leads to nowadays capitalist crisis as the actual work is being degraded and recycled. AI just accellerates the process and promotes the contradictions inherent in the capitalist system.

I agree, I couldn’t find it anymore because it got limited release but I read an article several years ago (before LLMs even came out) that explained basically the more capitalism progresses, the less we teach students. They also used the electrician example, apprentices used to have to learn how a multimeter actually worked, what it measured, how it did, etc. Nowadays, according to the author, it’s sufficient that they know how to read the output. Stick the prongs in the outlet and then you should see X or Y number, that’s all you need to know.

So AI is just one more thing in the long line of such advancements that make earlier methods trend towards obsolescence. I wouldn’t say some work is being made obsolete right now, it’s not there yet, but it’s trending towards it. It’s like the steam machine; the steam machine proletarianized a lot of people and made commodity production possible on a scale never seen before, but if we’d said “let’s destroy the steam machine” then we would still be living in feudalism. I mention artists in the OP because it’s the one group I see most opposed to AI (to the point that in some circles it completely silences other legitimate criticism of AI because it’s all about the illustrators - in the essay I linked, the author also talks about the people who initially categorized and organized images on archives and repos that were used as a basis for AI models to learn how to describe image content), but it’s not unique to that group. Their problem is with capitalism, not that their job is getting proletarianized… or at least they should see it that way. A lot don’t.

On the topic of what to know vs not to know, I don’t know if we can really stop or slow down that trend either. What I mean is there are lots of skills we’ve lost, such as making a fire in the wild, building a timber house, or printing on a Gutenberg press. Some people try to revive these skills and good for them, but they’re also not doing it professionally or in any meaningful capacity beyond providing side income for themselves on the novelty of it or as a hobby. Nowadays books are printed on rolling printers, not on a Gutenberg press. I don’t think it’s unique to capitalism but certainly due to profit motives capitalism accelerates it. So it’s not really a thing AI did, it just made it more apparent. Personally when I use LLMs I still use my brain, it helps me get an idea off the ground or get me started in the parts I’m worse at, and then I handle the rest. It lets me get stuff out the door quickly and focus on the actually interesting parts.

Speaking of art since we’re on it… if we wanted to be ‘purists’, then painters should be mixing their own colors, crafting their own canvas and making their own brushes. A lot do because they want something that’s not commercially available, but a lot are also digital artists where the color mixing is done in software for them without actual pigments. It’s this kind of trend that I’m talking about, it’s not just AI - if we say “this is going too far I don’t like it” then we’re advocating for reactionary socialism (the one described in the manifesto). Even I as a designer wouldn’t know how to use the tools of old, before Photoshop and Adobe.

I could name a ton of stuff I’ve done with AI, but for example we designed the new ProleWiki homepage with AI help in the thinking process. It helped us clarify our audiences, what we needed to have on the homepage, and make sure that we were on the right track with our assumptions.

Using the output of an LLM raw is what tech companies say to do because they want to hype up their product and make it seem like it’s as easy as typing words, but it’s a terrible idea. They say it does everything, but it doesn’t. I doubt their developers are using AI to do “everything”. I usually go in with an idea of what I want and I put the parameters in the prompt. It’s a long prompt, it takes time, but it helps me think about my project too. Then I pick the good from what the LLM generates and discard the nonsense.

And most of the essays/articles I wrote I did with AI help. Not to do the actual writing, because it doesn’t capture my voice, but for the research. I was able to get Perplexity to find more socialist sources (and even vietnamese sources that it translated for me for an essay) and then pick from that. It helped me learn things myself, I know a lot about Vietnam’s independence struggle now and still do.

I’m terrible at recommending books but I can point you to potentially this paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1573832 (it might be available elsewhere or it’s possible some AI parsers can access it and summarize it). Kim Jong Il On The Art Of The Cinema, but it’s a beast of over 500 pages. I have a PDF that I can make available here:https://gofile.io/d/P9snOT

I think Kim Il Sung also wrote about art, and otherwise we may have something on prolewiki but I can’t say for sure… you’d have to hunt for it in this category: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Category:Library_works_about_the_Soviet_Union

Also saw this on marxists.org: https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/law/1961/civil-legislation/ch04.htm

If the writer’s choice to use amazon is made for them then of course they are not responsible. It’s a part of alienation they couldn’t boycott amazon if they wanted to - their publisher makes the choice for them to use the platform.

There’s a lot of self-publishing on the platform nowadays though, they make it very easy since there are digital books (although you have to send a bunch of tax documents to the US for it). Interestingly (or as expected) they don’t do anything for the small writers, you still have to market your book like the big publishing houses do. It’s a lot of George RR Martin and JK Rowling at the top of the amazon charts.

It’s no secret that people get into writing to get rich and unalienated. It’s the dream of every writer to live in a secluded mansion just writing books all day ala Stephen King and sending that off to a publisher who just says “yessir we’re sending it to print right now”. I doubt many would ever accept salary work for it even if it was in socialism.

Many artists whether they’re musicians, authors, illustrators, etc. find themselves in situations or industries where they don’t have that much control over their own work through being forced to take extremely unfavourable publishing deals.

I agree, many are proletarianized. In the US film industry for example, directors are workers for their company: they work on a brief, with the movie having to be made a certain way in a certain deadline etc. Though they still make royalties if they’re a big enough name (and with hollywood accounting you count on the spinoff products for that, so it also means they have an incentive to make sure the movie succeeds commercially.)

But the question is what do they want to improve their conditions? Do they want to work for themselves and cut out the employer, or do they want to work socially? This is the separating line. One leads to petite bourgeoisie (whose wish is to become big bourgeoisie), the other leads to socialism.

In that case, for someone who is attempting to make a living from selling their books and the publisher sells them on Amazon, why and how is this qualitatively different to being an Amazon delivery driver?

I think this is a good question to ask. After typing a first answer, my ultimate answer is who owns the product in the end? We are alienated because we get no say in what we make and where it ends up. We own none of it. There are writers, e.g. journalists, who write on contract: they get told which story to write on, how many words it must be, etc. Then an editor takes it and decides on the headline, rewrites everything they want, and most of the time the original writer is completely removed from the process at this stage. The article then belongs to their employer, like any other proletarian work. There are also book writers working on this spec.

So the question would be, what is their answer to that? Do they want to cut out the middleman and own their product? Do they still want capitalism? Would they be open to being salaried workers in socialism? Do they recognize this for what it is? That’s the class relation.

(Edited above sentence for clarity ^)

I’m really talking about people like in the screenshot, who make their living trying to work “by themselves” as if it was purer than working in a group, or being a writer on contract (i.e. alienated from their labor) - while it’s not directly said in the screen tweet, it’s deducible that this is how this person makes a living.

My topic is really about those who make a living off this type of labor and then bemoan that they can’t make a living anymore. But instead of turning towards capitalism, they turn towards how capitalism expresses itself as a mode of production - there’s been the mechanical loom, the steam machine, computers, and now AI.

But criticizing artists for their choices in a capitalist system is kinda chauvinist so I would probably keep calm and remind them of their class

So with all that, regarding the class lines, there are proletarian artists (of all sorts, not just illustrators - but it often gets reduced to that). They work for a company and are alienated from their labor because they get told what to draw, write, or produce. Yet there is also a belief that art can be extirpated from society and somehow exist outside of it, as if it was neither labor nor work.

What AI has done is not introduce the notion that art is actually part of society and subject to its ebb and flow, because it’s always been the case, but revive the topic, because now things that were once thought to be ‘creative’ and only possible by a human can be done by a machine. Before that time it was only a thought experiment. Again, it doesn’t matter what quality the output from the machine is - it exists. It’s already being used and we can’t even tell, because using the output as the machine gives it is a terrible idea. Instead it’s reworked as part of a workflow.

just because someone wants to draw doesnt mean they have to be able push out lazy copies of world class art

I don’t disagree that people should learn skills. However like I said, before AI people who wanted an illustration but couldn’t do it themselves, so they just gave up.

Like I like writing, I am a designer by trade (not particularly visual design), and I don’t necessarily tell people to learn design or to take courses on writing because I know not everyone is interested enough to do it. This is more personal but a lot of the “do it yourself” AI discourse I see revolves entirely around illustrating work and how everyone should somehow learn to draw. Since we made our first tools there has been division of labor, not everyone is going to be employed as an artist. There is also an implication that AI prevents learning, but the user decides if they want to shut their brain off or not.

The essay I linked makes a point on this:

Against the idea that artists were just “born with it”, many took much pain to explain that all art forms involve a lot of specialized training, that you get good at drawing not through natural luck but through hard work. This reaction responded to an anxiety about being seen as a legitimate field of industry, to be on an equal basis as specialized workers such as engineers, doctors, etc. - and deserve the same compensation.

Since AI art came in to displace artists, the tune has suddenly completely reversed. Art is now an inherent capacity of the soul, and anyone can do it. Why use these AI image generators when “anyone can pick up a pencil and draw”? Doesn’t even a bad drawing “have more Soul and Meaning” than a result generated from the recombination of other art pieces? Suddenly the notion of arts as a skill with technical components flies out of the window. Both attitudes reflect anxieties about seeing your work respected as such, while also refusing the industrial implications of art being a form of work, and subject to the same market forces as all other fields.

Telling people “just learn to draw it’s gonna be better” when my drawing is a shitty stickman figure exposes internalized hypocrisy that we all share in to an extent. For example you said the AI copy is ‘lazy’, which is a qualitative adjective. I’m not criticizing the choice of word, I find it interesting. What makes an AI output lazier than three lines I draw hastily on a piece of paper? Is it the human component? I think what AI has forced us to contend with is that what was traditionally made by humans is actually not so unique. A lot of artists say AI art is “soulless”, but as materialists we don’t believe in the soul, so clearly they mean something else - they just don’t seem to have a clear idea of it.

Can someone really look me in the eye and say this is ‘better’ than anything AI makes because it was made by a person?

Or is it rather a way to prevent putting art back into its social character, subject to capitalism? Nobody would hire me to draw this figurine over and over again. I can still make it for myself, sure, just like I could also prompt AI art for my own enjoyment (if I enjoyed it).

Again my problem is with petit-bourgeois artists who see themselves closer to art than to the class struggle, like anyone who sees themselves closer to their job interests than the class struggle. But my question to them I guess would be, how would they like to see their artwork handled in socialism and communism? In the USSR artists were employed by the state on salary to produce artworks, when it came to specific exhibitions or government campaigns. Would they be opposed to that? Art they produced through the artists’ union was typically bought by the state for a fixed one-time payment. Would they be opposed to that? The petit-bourgeois artists would.

Do you sell your art? Commissions? Do you know what the bourgeoisie is?

Use data blocker plugins tbh

I believe flotilla news are highly astroturfed. We know the entity has an entire department for it and hasbara is government policy, it goes all the way up from the information ministry down to influencers and local community leaders eg synagogues, lobbies etc.

Open any news about the flotilla on twitter, any tweet whatsoever, and they’re flooded with hasbara bots. Nothing else comes close so how do they even find the small posts.

According to the map simulator the nuclear fallout only seems to happen at surface detonation with modern bombs. I couldn’t tell you if it’s accurate and what the science behind it is, but a bomb would most likely be detonated in the air to maximize casualties, it’s just that much stronger.

it’s possible but the nuclear bombs at the time were nothing compared to today’s arsenal. They still destroyed an entire city and (most everyone) in it. Here’s more modern bombs though:

That’s also the thing with nuclear bombs, you can’t run away or hide from them. You barely have time to see one before it hits, because they detonate far above the ground. your survival hinges entirely on luck and being kilometers away from the blast radius. 70,000 died from just one “tiny” bomb by today’s standard. What if the US launched 3 Tridents? Or 5, or 10?

You can also visualize a detonation on this tool: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

Well yes of course I am, I don’t own one haha

Maybe not yet, but they will if the convoys continue.

also obligatory: wdym he’s the truest communist, he split faster than any of us!

socdems gonna sock’em

Yes but it will play the AA games of 5 years in the future? And that’s just the raw power, not even mentioning how tech handles things differently and 5 years from now unity might use a new rendered that is incompatible with the handheld. The LCD is affordable enough but it’s a steep entry price for something that may not last as long as a full console!

I agree with the price points. I looked at a steam deck briefly and they’re very expensive for what they do, and I’m not entirely sure what they do. I was looking at an emulation machine because I refuse to buy new consoles anymore and thought I could also play some games with fan translations and stuff like that, but of course you can’t upgrade a PC handheld while video games demand more and more specs every year. So how long will the expensive steam deck even last me? It’s not worth paying these prices for just an emulation machine.

When I say emulation I mean ps2 and up. Some more expensive android machines can play ps2 games but I doubt they can play switch games - though I’m able to play some of them (the lighter ones) on my huawei phone. And with the switch 2, I expect an emulator to come out in a few years which I need to know will work on a handheld to justify the purchase.

I might be interested if you can stream games from your PC to the machine though. That way I might be able to emulate games on my PC and play them on the machine. And since you’re just streaming a video you’re also not capped by specs when newer games come out. Interested to know if that’s possible if anyone has a deck.

Lastly one thing that I think is not talked about a lot is experiencing a game on different machines makes for a different experience imo. I don’t know how to describe it, but I feel a difference playing a game on console TV, PC or handheld.

If you make anonymous edits, we judge them individually. It’s better to make a bunch of smaller edits instead of one big one because we only have one button to accept or reject the proposed edit, so if it’s a bigger one and there’s just one thing we reject it for, it’s basically all lost. Otherwise you can make all sorts of edits and editors will look at them as they enter a moderation queue. There’s not really any limits as to what type of edits you can make, as long as everything is accompanied with a reference. And of course since we write from an ML perspective there’s no need to try and be “unbiased” like wikipedia - I say that because we’ve had to reject some edits that were trying to be too both sidesy. There’s a short guide to anon edits: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:How_to_make_anonymous_edits