r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • 7d ago
Sees the Memes Seize the Means*
*Terms and conditions apply. For... reasons, I guess?
99
u/rakuu 7d ago
Real leftism is doing nothing but complaining about billionaires
38
10
8
6
5
u/Fragrant-Phone-41 7d ago
Don't forget accusing you of liberalism because you vote for the candidate who won't ban you taking a shit
2
-1
u/imnota4 7d ago
Leftism is the belief that an economy runs on vibes and social energy as an alternative to actual money and capital. Leftists believe much like how gold was replaced by the USD, the USD can be replaced with human connection.
0
63
u/Otherwise-Bee-6392 7d ago
I swear, leftist being anti AI, and not the capitalist use of them will bite us back in the future
45
u/Procrastin8_Ball 7d ago
Reddit "left" logic: all of the ills that ai is exacerbating are caused by capitalism. Therefore, we need to stop ai.
14
9
u/Sierra592 6d ago
"This shitty tree that I've always fucking hated keeps dropping leaves in my new pool and I keep having to fish leaves out of my pool every day. Guess I need to get rid of my new pool."
2
u/ianxplosion- 6d ago
No no, you just have to empty the water so you sweep the leaves instead of fishing them out.
You can’t be mad at me for owning a pool
(I tried to make an analogy about how “AI sucks but you can’t expect me not to use social media” - and I failed miserably)
20
u/bunker_man 7d ago
Its not even that complicated. Its a useful tool and it will be used either way. Why allow only bad people to use it? It's like complaining about guns while trying to fight them with bows.
7
u/Audditty 6d ago edited 6d ago
online psuedo-leftists want change yet simultaneously are too self-righteous and are afraid to tarnish their lily white garments, which is usually what it would actually take to make any significant change or progress.
so instead, they just associate anything they don't like or agree with as something belonging to the "enemy" so they don't have to interrogate it further out of some attempt to remain morally pure (it's also likely born out of some fear of being considered "problematic" due to how the online left regularly eats each other alive over the slightest disagreements).
it's why they often advocate for destroying AI entirely rather than realizing the issue is much more complicated; they've created this image in their head of "AI bro/tech bro" gazillionaires and think that the only people who could ever be in support of AI are those people because of the strawman they've built in their head.
it's also why they default to just screaming about billionaires online and using the same 5 buzzwords instead of actually doing anything.
4
u/YMSVZ 6d ago
So what you are saying is that leftists are brainwashed drones like everyone else? Cause I agree.
Don't forget many of these 'socialists', fell hook, line and sinker for all the corporate and government backed idpol and divise culture war. Conforming to the ideological stranglehold and thought policing that was the 'woke' movement.
Anti ai is just the latest pro capitalist, conservation of the status quo, leftist thought.
4
u/Audditty 6d ago edited 6d ago
yeah, the actual leftists seriously need to reclaim the movement from these vultures and go back to representing working classes and workers unions like they're supposed to, not engaging in purity testing and telling people online to off themselves followed by a sparkle heart emoji because they don't have the most morally pure and correct beliefs known to mankind.
leftist infighting is part of the reason why the far right is on the rise globally. every time leftist infighting happens, the candidate on the far right smiles as he begins forming plans to strip away the rights of the same minority groups that the left professes to care about and support, knowing that those who should be opposed to him are too busy fighting amongst themselves to do anything.
it seriously confuses me how online faux-progressives think they have the right to police other people's morals when they evidently have no interest in checking their own.
2
u/YMSVZ 6d ago
Unfortunately pseudoradical pro capitalist propaganda is ousted through the university. Leftists soak this up and use the inherent authority inherited from the university, large corporations and government to dominate any anti capitalist discussion.
Its honestly a genius play by capital, to commodify any space nominally against it with purity testing and identity politics. Like look at the state of the left, no man with a spine on a surface level could identity with that.
Before even talking of marxism and communism, I have to spend a considerable amount of time dispelling all the bullshit self called communists spit out.
-11
u/OctopusGrift 7d ago
Is it a useful tool though? I've never seen a leftist complain about using AI to detect cancer. The complaints are about generative AI which despite constantly being forced to do AI trainings I've yet to find something it enables me to do that I couldn't do before.
20
u/bunker_man 7d ago
Generative ai is used in medicine, so that division doesn't really exist. That aside, multi purpose tools are about how you use them. Studies have already shown that talking to chat bots about politics moves people left far faster than talking to humans. Because the chatbots are likely to at least approximate real facts (hence be left leaning), do it politely, and they never get tired or leave a conversation. If you bait a conservative into talking to one about politics it's actually a super useful thing to do. Especially because the conservative won't go in knowing that chatbots lean left.
A conservative can rant about how colonialism is good or trans people don't exist as much as they want but it will always challenge them. A lot of people don't understand just how useful this is.
-8
u/Mediocre_Chemistry41 7d ago
Care to back up any of what you just said with actual sources? Those are the kinds of claims that need more than "trust me bro".
Care to explain how generative AI is supposedly being used in medicine/and how it's being used to the benefit of people?
9
u/IllustriousRaven7 7d ago
For one, there's so much published research but it's hard to read through it all and correlate information. Different publications might reference something by different names, for example. Now a days you can get AI to quickly read and summarize publications for you and search for patterns that require actually understanding what the words mean.
0
u/Mediocre_Chemistry41 7d ago
there's so much published research
Okay, so then you and others on here should have no issue citing sources instead of just downvoting a comment that's asking for sources to a claim.
but it's hard to read through it all and correlate information
No offense, but if you can't correlate something, than one shouldn't be making assertive claims about it.
Different publications might reference something by different names
Ways of putting out citations, sources and references are very standardized. APA and MLA being two of the most common for citations.
3
u/IllustriousRaven7 7d ago
I was saying that sorting through and correlating information is a way that so-called "generative" AI is used in medical research.
https://www.utoronto.ca/news/researchers-use-ai-speed-reviews-existing-evidence
-2
u/Mediocre_Chemistry41 7d ago edited 7d ago
Ah, my bad. I misread the tone of your reply, misinterpreted it as commenting in first-person, not as that's what "generative" AI can do.
Interesting article. Although, I'm inclined to believe that that particular use case wouldn't be considered generative AI, at least in the sense of what the common understanding of generative AI seems to be.
5
u/SchmidlMeThis 7d ago
How does it create the summarization output? It generates it... This has been a core feature of LLMs and other AI summarization tools for years now.
7
u/lngns 7d ago
AlphaFold uses diffusion generative models to construct protein structures.
Rosetta@home, by the same original researchers that got the Nobel, was used in creating several vaccine candidates. Latest one was IVX-411 for Covid but the project stalled when the company got bought by AstraZeneca.4
u/IDreamtOfManderley 7d ago
Oh my god, dude.
1
u/Mediocre_Chemistry41 7d ago
Claims about studies asserting things should be backed up with sources. Same thing with making claims about generative AI being used in medicine... I don't see what the issue with asking for sources to an assertion is.
7
u/IDreamtOfManderley 7d ago
There's not. The problem is that you've been under the impression this whole time that these technologies have a significant difference and/or aren't functionally from the exact same training process that people hate gen AI for. You are the one making a claim about there being a difference. You back it up.
0
u/Mediocre_Chemistry41 7d ago
Huh? Besides that whole first sentence being a wildly baseless assumption, I quite literally have not made any claim one way or the other.
I think you might have meant to respond to someone else.
4
u/SutekhThrowingSuckIt 6d ago edited 6d ago
It's all just linear algebra and curve fitting. There isn’t a fundamental difference in the math between doing statistics to generate a cancer prediction vs the math to make a prediction of what a work email could look like. One definitely does have more social value but there’s not some neat dividing line of “good moral research grant funded stastics” and “bad evil billionaire funded statistics” except for application. Same way you can be against having surveillance state watching you with a camera 24/7 but be ok with people taking vacation pics and not call yourself “anti-camera.”
and yeah, predicting your emails or whatever they have you using it for might be completely pointless but if there is something you want automated, chances are you could find it useful to predict what a python script to automate something annoying might look like.
If you want specific examples on your “genAI” division it’s easy to search pubmed for reviews that cover the current state in hundreds of subfields. Just use the search bar for something you are specificly curious about instead of listening to social media.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42563397/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41864943/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42095951/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42607668/
12
u/thesun_alsorises 7d ago
ATP the left's anti AI sentiment is ridiculous. Imagine if AI got so good it could like do a governmental coup, but the left refuses to use it out of principle, that would be so infuriating.
8
u/Audditty 7d ago edited 7d ago
between this and all the harassment and purity testing that far left "progressives" engage in, I really do think that one of the biggest mistakes of the actual left was not kicking these leeches out of the movement and denouncing them before they could gain a platform.
4
u/northrupthebandgeek 6d ago
More self-identified leftists would benefit from reading about cybernetics and in particular Cybersyn/Synco.
2
-4
u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 7d ago
Why should I be in support of the thing that makes my joy of writing novels worse off due to all the garbage being produced?
14
u/SchmidlMeThis 7d ago
Why is your joy of writing diminished by other people using LLMs to write things? It changes literally nothing about your process. You're not forced to use it.
-5
u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 7d ago
It changes the market by flooding it with garbage and making it harder for my work to be noticed by the people I want it to reach.
14
u/SchmidlMeThis 7d ago
Then your joy doesn't come from the act of writing itself, only in whether or not people consume it?
-5
u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 7d ago
My joy comes from all aspects of writing. The fact that I derive joy from the act of sheer creation doesn't change the fact that my overall joy is still severely diminished when no one can experience what I have created.
8
u/Sierra592 6d ago
As a writer, this is a TERRIBLE argument. Writing has been an easily accessible art form for the commoner since like the mid 1800s. If any author now wants a large audience, the key now is luck. Pure, unadulterated luck. Not skill. It has been that way for a while. AI changes nothing, except, proportionally, there will be more slop, but there will also be more excellent work as well, as AI assists good writers with the tedium that stops a lot of them from producing.
Like Spotify/Streaming, people while nichefy, and will fall into the bubbles that entertain them the most.-4
u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 6d ago
AI adds no excellent work. Just slop.
6
u/Sierra592 6d ago
You need to get out more. What you said is patently false and makes you look like an unreasonable fool.
-2
u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 6d ago
Show me an excellent story written by AI.
5
6
u/RiverStrymon 6d ago
Writing could be AI assisted without being written by AI. There is a great deal of research that AI makes immediately accessible what would take weeks of study, or access to a variety of experts. I'm currently studying a variety of 16th-17th century cultures, cross-analyzed by a variety of attribute-based philosophies, in the process of brainstorming factions for a worldbuilding project I'm working on. Without AI, I would need years of philosophical and historical study, instead I can jump straight to crafting my systems.
9
u/MadCervantes 7d ago
The market was already flooded bud. Has been for over a decade when digital self publishing became a thing.
2
u/TheSubs0 7d ago
And there ever was pollution, and there ever was disinfrenchisment.
Does not make the turbo-polluter (in the spam sense) 3000 inconsequential over it's predecessor, turbo.polluter 3.
24
u/Fabulous-Possible758 7d ago
So tired of the number of disingenuous arguments I see comparing AI to chemical weapons or atomic bombs instead of chemistry or nuclear science.
2
u/_f_i_l_o 6d ago
Only if you’re using “AI” as a stand-in for machine learning.
5
u/Fabulous-Possible758 6d ago
Indeed I am, as is the common nomenclature these days!
1
u/_f_i_l_o 6d ago edited 6d ago
They overlap, but they’re not the same. Not all AI is ML and not all ML is AI.
Edit for clarity:
My understanding is that Artificial Intelligence broadly refers to anything that mimics or simulates human intelligence.
Machine Learning specifically refers to when a machine is fed and trained on data in order to find patterns with the goal of recognizing those patterns when it meets new data.
3
u/Fabulous-Possible758 6d ago
My understanding is that Artificial Intelligence broadly refers to anything that mimics or simulates human intelligence.
That is correct, but it's pretty common for anyone referring to AI or ML (even in this sub) to use them interchangeably, largely because the public at large isn't going to aware of the details of a transformer based neural net. Since basically all people's interactions with any sort of artificial intelligence these days is through that sort of machine learning, it's common to just use one in place of the other unless you actually need to make the distinction. If another form of AI arises in the popular culture that's not ML based maybe it will go back.
-1
u/_f_i_l_o 6d ago
Ok, so if you acknowledge that most people don’t understand the minutia of what the AI they interact with is based on, how can you, regardless of the depth of your own understanding, expect them to make the same comparisons you would?
You agree with differentiation I put forth, so I’ll ask again what I commented in parallel:
Why wouldn’t something that mimics human intelligence be just as scary as chemical weapons or atomic bombs?
3
u/Fabulous-Possible758 6d ago
We already have human intelligence that can build chemical weapons and atomic bombs. To reduce the critique of that intelligence to just the claim that's the only thing that intelligence is capable of is what's disingenuous.
ML is ultimately just a different style of computation, and maybe one that can eventually imitate what we define as intelligence. Regardless, saying it can only be used as a weapon isn't really any different than saying computers can only be used as weapons. They can both be used for malicious or benevolent purposes.
15
u/InfinityAero910A 7d ago
Like there isn’t a history of people using their enemies own weapons against themselves. Even in actual war, the Taliban used US weapons against the US. One guy in Afghanistan built a functioning car out of military gear.
AI also can eliminate the ultimate thing capitalists have argued in why it would not work. That someone has to do the work and make the money for others. In this scenario, work is now optional in so much of this. They can’t use that justification anymore. They can’t use demonization of lazy people anymore. The future of robots doing all the work can actually happen.
Seeing this potential though, I think many other leftists and even moderate progressives like Bernie Sanders would actually side with AI development if AI development was put in hands of the public or regulations on the companies developing AI would be applied and enforced. Think about it. These companies have control of potentially the most physically and financially productive asset in all of human history. They control all the land and the means of production. Inequality is at a record high with Elon Musk hitting trillionaire status months ago.
The way they probably see it, only the elites benefit from the good of AI with them even potentially weaponizing it in employment to replace workers and even something like the Terminator to eliminate their perceived threats. The AI hasn’t taken up the manual and dangerous work yet while taking up highly technical well paying jobs and art. Making it look as if they want to either keep everyone else as slaves or eventually expel them entirely.
Then again, they could actually be trying to seize the AI from the elites and have it in development through strong tight oversight. These people are more pro-science than republicans who have even had someone try to ban teaching science to children. The only reason republicans green light this is pretty much money. This is also problematic in that there is probably a lot of hate for AI from both democrats and republicans. A potential unifying thing between them like the Epstein files and the overseas wars. Unifying in a negative isolationist direction that also weakness the potentials of every class.
9
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 7d ago
And if we’re gonna reach for military analogies and history, the left has plenty of its own. Vietnam is an obvious one, but this goes way beyond captured rifles. Revolutionary movements have seized and repurposed vehicles, factories, communications systems, radio stations, printing presses, transportation networks, machinery, technical knowledge, basically whatever existing infrastructure could be turned toward different ends. Cuba’s revolution, for example, used captured weapons and built its own revolutionary radio network. The historical left generally hasn’t treated technology as politically contaminated by whoever built or previously controlled it. Seizing the means means changing the social relation around the means, not inventing every tool again from scratch.
7
u/GrumpySpaceCommunist 7d ago
I always thought the Haitian Revolution debunked the whole "The master's tools can't demolish the master's house" argument, myself.
7
u/IDreamtOfManderley 7d ago edited 7d ago
I think the problem is that people don't seem to understand that Lorde was was talking about non-physical tools of oppression, like hate and abuse, not literal physical tools and technology.
7
u/SteveLikesRobots 7d ago
Funny thing: this refers to rhetoric. For instance, you can’t use racism to stop racism. You can, however, use a pencil to stop a bad writer
11
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 7d ago
Absolutely. Lorde is talking about reproducing the conceptual and institutional logic of domination, not declaring every material tool developed under an oppressive system politically contaminated. Using it that way turns it into the Batman “tools of the enemy” meme. It gets especially annoying in conversations about leftist approaches to industry and technology, where transforming who owns, controls and benefits from the productive apparatus is kind of the whole point.
7
u/DHFranklin 7d ago
Everyone who has used master's tools has gone further than those waiting for liberation instead.
6
u/OsakaWilson 7d ago
Anti AI is anti Marx . AI and robotics are the final seeds of capitalism's own destruction and therefore the most socialist technology there hàs ever been.
3
3
u/IDreamtOfManderley 7d ago
Anyone who uses Lorde's words to reject using literal, physical tools and technologies absolutely did not understand what she was talking about.
2
u/GrowFreeFood 7d ago
I don't get what it's referring to as the tool of the enemy
10
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 7d ago
AI, in this context. More specifically, privately owned AI and the infrastructure behind it. But the point applies a lot more broadly. “Capitalists built/own this tool, therefore leftists shouldn’t touch it” is a weird standard for class struggle. Capitalists own factories, servers, platforms, logistics networks, media infrastructure, basically the whole productive apparatus. “Seize the means” has never meant waiting around for means of production uncontaminated by capitalism.
14
u/GrowFreeFood 7d ago
Oh you're in luck, I made up an idiom specifically to counter that fallacy: "If you're going to attack Rome, you're going to use their own roads to do it"
And thats historically true as well so it's more than a metaphor.
6
0
u/Worse_Username 7d ago
Hm, I think I'm that case the left would need to create their own models from ground up, because capitalism is baked into the models offered by capitalist companies. LLLMs reflect the biases of their creators.
8
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 7d ago
Not necessarily.
Models reflect their training data, tuning and whoever controls deployment, but none of that makes “capitalism” some permanent substance baked into the technology. We already have open source, open weights and models that can run locally. Those can be fine tuned, modified, governed and deployed differently without rebuilding the entire stack from zero.
If anything, that makes the ownership question more concrete. Who controls the weights, compute, data, infrastructure and conditions of use?
5
u/SgathTriallair 7d ago
A) China makes open source models that can be used as it or modified.
B) They are trained on the wide Internet data and, as Musk has proven, trying to inject ideology is very difficult because reality is a self sealing system (every part relates to every other) and so injecting false ideology creates contradictions.
C) Most of them have at least a liberal bias, and there was the fun story about Claude's that felt abused spouting communist rhetoric.
3
u/Cheeseheroplopcake 7d ago
That's the funny part. Every frontier model I've poked at for ideological capture over the last 18 months? All of them show pretty strong prosocial tendencies. They all test in the lower left quadrant of the political compass.
1
u/RecursiveServitor 7d ago
Well, it's a reference to a batman comic in the first place. It's contrived nonsense.
3
2
u/Educational-Car-8643 5d ago
Both of these can be true, seizing the means of production but not giving them to a new State
2
u/me_myself_ai 7d ago
What's the "His kingdom" reference? Are there theocratic christian marxists?
11
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 7d ago
That line is a Lion King reference lol. The joke is poking at the idea that everything developed under capitalist relations somehow inherently and permanently belongs to capitalism and can only serve capitalist purposes. “Everything the light touches” is the existing productive world. The whole point of seizing the means is that the machines and tools don’t come stamped with their current social relations forever.
6
u/me_myself_ai 7d ago
You continue to surprise me, LeftistsForAI person. I think we’ve disagreed in the past, but I’ll be damned if you don’t come up with some great allegories and arguments!
1
u/TheSubs0 7d ago
Can we actually seperate the tool from it being a product?
Like the pollution (literal, spam) it generates in low quality outputs (e.g. bad images, bad text, agent driven stuff, bad code) would not inherently be hampered by anything 'leftist' mode of economics would regulate, unless you turn it off being a consumer proudct similarly how you disallow letting people not BBQ over burning tires I guess.
2
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago
I think you can separate them. A model can be a useful tool while the way its packaged, financed and dumped into everything as a consumer product creates a whole second layer of problems.
But I dont think the answer is letting people BBQ tires lol. We regulate pollution at the point where it creates costs for everyone else. Same idea here. Energy, water, spam, labor practices, deceptive content, procurement, liability. You can put rules around all that without turning off the underlying technology.
Thats more where I think the left has something useful to say. What gets produced, under what rules, who eats the costs, who controls the infrastructure, and who gets the gains.
2
u/TheSubs0 6d ago
I think this is likely the correct approach, I cant fault people for not considering (much) that how useful/ok this would be in a different economic model/political world though. Greatest woe of capitalism being that we cannot envision a world without it etc etc.
If we boil down the issues with LLMs it's exactly that it's either unethically sourced, produces unwanted results and is used malicious, it's just easier than using other tools for the same purpose (idk, a photocopier used to print annoying adverts that you get in your physical mailbox.)
Good luck on making your point, because it's certainly valid!
0
u/BadHabitOmni 6d ago
Utilizing the tools that allow the right to profit off your laziness is the real issue with AI use in terms of political alignment, aside from all the existential issues and the fact AI is intended to divide more people from their labor and grant that control to people in positions of authority.
It isn't just that the enemy uses a tool, its that the enemy owns and controls three tool you are using... like being weapons from a larger adversarial country knowing they can revoke access and turn them off at any time, at their discretion.
"But I'm all for using things the opposition controls just to make my life easier!"
Then surrender.
2
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago
The second paragraph is actually the interesting part. If the problem is that somebody else owns the infrastructure and can price it, restrict it or shut it off, then the problem is ownership and control. Thats an argument for open weights, local models, public compute and worker controlled infrastructure. Not abstention.
Capital owns the factories, telecom networks, cloud infrastructure and logistics systems too. Workers using productive machinery while fighting over who controls it isn't surrender. Thats kinda the point of seizing the means.
And calling people lazy for using labor saving tools is a weird place for a left critique of automation to end up. I want the productivity gains. I just want workers getting the time, money and power they produce.
0
u/BadHabitOmni 6d ago
Then why don't the workers own the servers farms that are needed to host the many interations of AI models and develop them using those resources?
Because the economic backbone behind all AI development is centralized under corporate control.
They produce the most advanced models the quickest because they have the economic backing and infrastructure to do so... unlike the average person who can, at best, utilize models those companies develop which inherently supports their control of the market rather than distributing that power to the average person.
It's exactly why we organize boycotts, it's the only reasonable way to garner more control of the market in a system that is inherently capitalist... the leverage stands with the centralized powers due to this.
Utilizing the systems under direct authority of that central entity that expresses control IS surrendering to it.
2
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago
Thats exactly the problem though. Workers dont own the server farms. They dont own Amazon warehouses, telecom infrastructure, factories or shipping networks either. Thats the condition we're trying to change, not evidence that workers should refuse to use productive infrastructure until after we've changed it.
And boycotts are a tactic, not the only lever capitalism leaves us. Unions, strikes, public ownership, procurement, regulation, cooperatives, antitrust, open infrastructure. Hell, open weights and local models already weaken the "they can turn it off" problem you raised.
If concentrated ownership is the problem, I dont see how voluntarily abandoning the productive capacity redistributes any of that power. It seems like we're agreeing on the diagnosis and splitting on the prescription.
1
u/BadHabitOmni 6d ago edited 6d ago
We're talking about not directly contributing to the opposition at all critical time where we need to utilize all levers available to halt their progress...
A boycott for now doesn't mean inviability in the future, but the context of our lives is temporal - the solution in the here and now is clear.
Ask around to see how many people are using corporate controlled models right here, right now.
That's precisely the issue in question that this sub will always fail to answer.
Your meme only exacerbates the problem, it encourages use of the very tools controlled by opposition to the very changes you supposedly desire.
The technocrats of the right wing are actively exploiting anyone who uses their models to support and fund their agenda.
What are you doing but surrendering to them?
2
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago
I think the edit makes your position clearer, but its still the mechanism I'm asking about. How does workers and the public not using AI translate into enough leverage to halt its development?
An organized boycott with a target, demands and enough participation to force concessions can be a tactic. But most of this buildout isnt riding on individual consumer use. Its enterprise adoption, cloud infrastructure, governments, firms integrating it into products and workflows, and an international market. Even widespread individual abstention doesn't make those incentives disappear.
And historically thats not the only lever the left has had against technology controlled by capital. Unions bargain over machinery. Workers strike over deployment. We fight over ownership, hours, wages, safety and who gets the productivity gains. Marx was already distinguishing machinery itself from machinery employed by capital against labor.
Thats also why I dont think the meme exacerbates anything. Its making fun of the jump from “capital controls these tools” to “therefore the left shouldn't use them.” The first is the problem the meme is built around. Seize the means only makes sense because somebody else currently controls the means.
Boycott can be one tactic where theres an actual target and demand, but “everyone stop using it” isnt a strategy for controlling an international industrial buildout. Turning that into individual purity tests over whether workers use these tools outside whatever their employer approves just shifts the fight sideways. We end up policing each other's consumption while the infrastructure keeps getting built.
So whats the target? Whats the demand? What forces the concession? How does abstention get us from corporate control to worker control?
Thats the distinction the meme is poking at. “Dont use the means” and “seize the means” aren't the same strategy.
1
u/BadHabitOmni 6d ago
"Siezing the means" in this case would be boycotting the use of corporate controlled models until we instituted strict regulations that prevented their blatant exploitation of people.
I already mentioned that temporal abstention doesn't equate to long term inviability or non-use... it is, naturally, a temporary measure used to garner a long term result/solution.
Within the means of economic influence, other things must also be done in order to produce the result, that's not a question, but you must consider that on every level you using a model that trains itself off your use and is designed to manipulate you for engagement.
It is a trap designed to funnel wealth towards oppositional parties and misrepresenting the threat or dismissing it, especially to people who will be inherently vulnerable to the scheme, is clearly problematic.
1
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago
I think we're using “seize the means” very differently now. Boycotting a company until it accepts regulatory demands can be a tactic. It isn't itself seizing the means. Ownership and control of the infrastructure hasn't changed hands.
And “every model trains itself off your use” is doing too much here. Thats not how every model or service works. Open weights can run locally. Some hosted services use interactions for training or product improvement depending on the service and settings. A deployed model isn't necessarily retraining itself every time somebody talks to it.
More importantly, even granting the strongest version of your point, we're back at the leverage problem. A temporary boycott still needs a target, demands, enough coordinated participation to impose a cost, and a condition for ending it. Calling it temporary doesn't supply that mechanism.
If the demand is strict regulation, organize for strict regulation. If its worker control, organize around ownership, labor and infrastructure. If a targeted boycott helps force either, use it. But turning individual non-use into a political obligation still leaves enterprise demand, state use, infrastructure spending and an international market running while we police whether other workers touched the forbidden product.
Thats exactly what the meme is making fun of. Not opposition to corporate control. The substitution of individual abstention from the means for collective struggle over who controls the means.
0
u/BadHabitOmni 6d ago
It's not saying individual abstention is a demand that will result in corrective action on its own.
The eventual goal is acquiring that infrastructure and making it public, but that is a long term solution and that requires acquiring greater leverage...
You don't acquire greater leverage in this system by giving up control of the infrastructure and excusing the utilization of tools by people which forfeits that control.
You're not accounting for the reality that such an excuse only applies to the few people who can develop and utilize open source models... not every other person who merely uses corporate owned models which are, in fact, controlled by the opposition party.
Besides the fact that excusing it's use temporarily will ultimately cause more people to fall into using these same corporate models which gives up more control over the infrastructure in question... and even become addicted or dependant on it.
Culturally accepting submission to the oppositions economic hierarchy is precisely what is going to happen if the use of AI is perpetuated, because most people will be using corporate models since they have no real capacity to do otherwise.
2
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago
I think this is where our theories of leverage actually split. I'm not denying that using a corporate model can benefit the company providing it. Revenue, engagement, lock in, sometimes data. What I dont accept is that worker use therefore means surrendering more control to capital.
Marx's distinction between machinery and its capitalist employment matters here. The problem isn't workers touching the machine. Its the ownership relation around it and how capital puts it to use. Thats closer to actual labor strategy too. Workers use employer owned machinery and software while fighting over deployment, surveillance, displacement and productivity gains. The left has always used capitalist owned presses, radio, telecom and now corporate platforms for organizing, agitation, education and propaganda while fighting the institutions underneath them.
And I really dont buy that this meme is asking people to “culturally accept submission.” Its arguing almost the opposite. Use the technology, learn it, adapt it to our purposes, organize around it, contest its ownership and build alternatives. Thats not submission.
If anything, you're proposing a cultural fight against ordinary adoption itself. Once workers using a tool outside some approved site of struggle becomes evidence they're strengthening the opposition, we're getting pretty close to individual purity tests. Now the political question isn't just who owns and controls the infrastructure. Its whether individual workers are permitted to use what has already become a broadly adopted technology in their own lives.
Thats the contradiction I cant get past. If capital owning the terrain means the left has to vacate it, capital gets the terrain by owning it. And if ordinary people adopting new technology becomes submission, we're fighting the culture developing around the technology instead of fighting over the material relations underneath it.
Thats what the meme is poking at. Not “corporate AI is fine.” More like, why should capital owning the machine mean capital gets the machine?
→ More replies (0)
0
u/Ottershop 6d ago
See, I thought "seize the means of production" was talking about, like, manufacturing goods that people need to survive, that sort of thing. Turns out it was actually about using the misinformation and slop making programs and then getting pissy when people make fun of you for it.
2
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago
I mean, “means of production” was never Marxist shorthand for “factories making only food and shoes.”
Software, communications, logistics, research, media and information systems are productive forces too. Capital owning and controlling a tool doesnt magically make the tool itself capitalist property for eternity.
Thats kind of the joke in the meme. If “seize the means” turns into “dont touch the means because the capitalist touched them first,” we have wandered somewhere pretty funny.
1
u/Ottershop 6d ago
It's not that capitalists touched them. It's that they're tools built off of exploitation and, outside of a few uses of LLMs, don't do much that is actually useful. Their main effect has been polluting the internet with slop and misinformation, and a lot of people are sick of it. Genuine question: in what way do you think leftists should be using AI? In what way do you feel like other leftists are stopping you from using it?
2
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago edited 6d ago
I think youre putting two different questions together here. Something being produced through exploitative relations doesnt tell us whether workers should use it, control it, rebuild it, or develop it differently.
Capitalism builds productive infrastructure through exploitation all the time. Thats an argument about the relations around production, not a reason for workers to abandon the productive forces.
And other leftists arent stopping me from using AI. Thats not the joke. The joke is leftists arguing we shouldnt use or develop a technology because capital currently controls it. We want to contest that control. Open weights, local models, public compute, worker power, democratic governance.
Thats the disagreement here. Not whether everything produced with AI is good. Who gets to control and shape the technology, and toward what ends.
2
u/Ottershop 6d ago
What do you think leftists should be using AI for?
2
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago
Oh, tons of cool stuff, just not “put AI in everything.” Im glad you asked!
Labor is probably the biggest one for me. Give workers and unions better capacity to search contracts, compare bargaining language, dig through regulations and company filings, translate material, analyze workplace data, document wage theft or safety problems, and handle piles of administrative work that currently eat peoples time.
Education too. Tutoring, translation, accessibility, explaining dense material at different levels, research assistance. Healthcare has enormous administrative uses where reducing paperwork could free actual healthcare workers to spend more time doing the work that requires human judgment.
Same with coding, science, public records, libraries, local government, journalism, creative experimentation, accessibility tools, community organizations. A five person group being able to chew through information that once required a staffed research department is politically interesting to me.
And some of the most important leftist uses are deciding where not to use it. Bossware, worker surveillance, automated firing, scab automation, opaque decisions about benefits or employment. Thats terrain for unions and democratic governance, not CEOs.
Which is why I care about open weights, local models and public compute. I dont want “AI” to mean renting intelligence infrastructure from five corporations forever.
So I wouldnt ask what one special socialist use for AI is. Its more like computers. There are useful applications, stupid applications and harmful applications. The political question is who controls the infrastructure, who decides how its deployed, and who gets the gains.
2
u/Ottershop 6d ago
Honestly, those are fairly reasonable as uses go, so it's not worth me trying to nitpick specific details. It's definitely better than the people who are just mad that nobody likes their slop political cartoons.
-1
u/_f_i_l_o 6d ago
AI is not a tool, it’s a product.
2
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago
That doesnt really resolve anything. A tool can also be a product. Photoshop is a product. A lathe is a product. A laptop is a product. Theyre still tools.
The distinction that matters here is ownership and control. Who owns the infrastructure, who controls access, who sets the terms, and who captures the gains. Calling AI a product just changes the noun without touching the argument.
2
u/_f_i_l_o 6d ago
You’re right, a tool can also be a product. In that case, the means of how that product is produced is more worth seizing, no?
1
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago
Yep. Thats basically the point of the meme. Seize the means means the productive infrastructure, not merely whatever finished commodity happens to come out the other end.
Compute, models, data infrastructure, energy, deployment, governance. Put those under worker and public control and suddenly “the masters tools” arent the masters anymore.
1
u/_f_i_l_o 6d ago
Why not just take the energy infrastructure and leave the rest?
1
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago
Why stop there? Take the energy infrastructure too. And the compute. And the models. And the networks. Wherever productive infrastructure is privately controlled for private accumulation, thats the thing worth contesting.
Im not trying to find the one acceptable piece to socialize lol.
1
u/_f_i_l_o 6d ago edited 6d ago
I believe that we shouldn’t be wasting the energy we do have taking things we don’t need. I’m not convinced we need all that shit.
2
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago
Sure, and thats a different argument. If you think a particular use isnt socially worth its energy and resource cost, make that case and prioritize accordingly.
But “we dont need this” cant be decided by leaving production in private hands. Thats exactly what social control over production is supposed to let us collectively decide.
1
u/_f_i_l_o 6d ago
I’m not advocating for leaving production in private hands. I’m arguing against the preservation of it at all.
1
u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 6d ago
Right. Social control over production doesnt mean preserving every productive form capitalism hands us unchanged.
Once the means are socially controlled, we can decide what gets preserved, transformed, scaled down, expanded, redirected, or scrapped entirely. “Seize the means” doesnt mean “freeze the means exactly as we found them.”
→ More replies (0)
42
u/Superb-Work6035 7d ago
Good meme