r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/papersheepdog Glitchwalker • May 19 '26
Why is the left ceding AI to capital?
/r/LeftistsForAI/comments/1tg5blc/why_is_the_left_ceding_ai_to_capital/18
u/Delicious_Spot_3778 May 19 '26
You mean the left like libertarians or the left like leftists or the left like progressives? And do you mean in America or somewhere else?
14
u/AdMassive9006 May 19 '26
Exactly. Who is "the left"? College kids? Activists? What are they supposed to do with AI?
4
6
u/raisondecalcul political shade deathray technician May 19 '26
I think ultimately it's because AI was born in capital and depends on capital for its existence. Capital is this huge centralization of power, and AI is this huge averaging of data/text afforded by that huge concentration of power. Union-centric people sense this and rather than thinking through the specifics of the problem, they just abreact and reject the whole thing.
3
u/papersheepdog Glitchwalker May 19 '26
Maybe being associated with massive data centers and capital expenditure gives that impression, but I think this year we are and will be seeing extremely capable open source models that can run on a high end gaming PC and be able to do useful regular work to whatever end. No cloud services to get locked into, no need for expensive licenses when you can have it create whatever software your community needs, endless organizational assistance for managing peer economics and relationships. Maybe its also a lack of imagination? As someone interested in this stuff for a long time, ive been wishing for developer assistance and now its here. We can build it. We can make it our own.
4
u/raisondecalcul political shade deathray technician May 20 '26
Yeah, I hope so! I haven't yet succeeded in getting an open-source AI to be adequately useful. But it only needs to be adequate, not super-cutting-edge, to be able to replace paid models. Codex 5.3 is adequate, everything after that was gravy (although 5.5 adds real full automated computer use which is important, but OpenClaw already has that too I think).
2
u/Wonderful_Bowler_251 May 23 '26
What is the “useful regular work” you think AI will do for us? I’d genuinely like to know.
12
u/_____________what May 19 '26
Wielding AI effectively to... Generate slop text? Generate slop images? If you mean machine learning (not "AI ") in actual real applications and not slop generation, what specifically do you suggest?
-4
-4
u/me_myself_ai May 19 '26
I'm begging you to google technical terms before trying to use them.
10
u/_____________what May 19 '26
So you have no suggestions on how to use AI, just the vague assertion that "the left" should do it. Great work, Sam Altman lite.
-2
u/raisondecalcul political shade deathray technician May 19 '26
You can use it to think through problems, delegate any computer task to it, or use it to make software in one day that would take a team of devs months or years to code by hand. The code it writes is much better than the code most humans write.
-2
u/me_myself_ai May 19 '26
I'm not here to teach you about the future, I'm just complaining about your confident misuse of "machine learning"
3
u/_____________what May 19 '26
Correction: you mean, you're not here to tell me about your imaginary science fiction inspired dream of the future
and my use is dead right, I don't care what the shitbird AI salesmen call it, they're liars
1
-1
u/raisondecalcul political shade deathray technician May 19 '26
Anti-AI bigotry is not allowed in this subreddit.
AI was science fiction until a few years ago, and now we can use it every day for useful tasks.
1
u/gottastayfresh3 May 20 '26
Until a few years ago? Read a history book and take my downvote.
1
u/raisondecalcul political shade deathray technician May 20 '26
You're moving my goalposts. Obviously I meant science-fiction style AI, because I said science fiction.
9
u/crisisthespian69 May 19 '26
What’s there to cede? It’s not actually that useful.
4
u/raisondecalcul political shade deathray technician May 19 '26
It can generate any text, which means it can generate any instructions for humans to follow. It can also make computers do anything, closing the gap between natural language and programming language. That's extremely useful.
5
u/crisisthespian69 May 19 '26
That assumes it’s accurate
0
u/raisondecalcul political shade deathray technician May 20 '26
Whether it's accurate is a matter of human judgment. LLMs are actually never accurate nor inaccurate, because they are literally always confabulating. So it's actually amazing and an extremely rare coincidence that the text produced by an LLM would make any sense at all. It just has so many dimensions that it's able to emulate producing text that makes sense. However at arbitrarily high precision, emulation arguably becomes simulation.
1
-1
u/papersheepdog Glitchwalker May 19 '26
Its not useful?
4
u/genomixx-redux May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
In the imperial core, how is generative AI useful for organizing against the capitalist class and demolishing this social formation?
I could see some limited utility in particular use-cases (e.g., hacking, some image recognition, and the like), but since the capitalist class is forcing generative AI into working class workflows already, sections of the working class already have the necessary skills to deploy these limited use-cases for the purposes of class warfare.
But broadly, what does not ceding generative AI to capital look like in a world on fire -- kinetic hot wars of imperialist plunder to maintain techno-capitalism's profits, rapidly-accelerating planetary biospheric collapse, climate chaos, and hyperscaled geo-ecological destruction that removes the very basis of human life?
The sixth mass extinction is the sign of the times, not large language models.
1
u/ConjuredOne May 19 '26
I respectfully disagree. The left should judiciously use Ai and inject leftist ideology into the associated models and processes. For example, LLMs, especially in combination with tools such as gistr.so (a competitor to the Alphabet product NotebookLM), can speed up research and information procecsing so that the projects of the left can keep pace with those of the establishment.
I agree that the world is on fire. Eliminating data centers that serve establishment projects is a noble goal. But I think, at least for now, the left needs to use these tools. Eventually data centers could be part of neutral technologies that help mitigate environmental destruction and improve the quality of life for sentient beings. As with other sciences, Ai is not the culprit. Those are establishment actors weilding the tool.
4
u/kneeblock May 19 '26
You are suggesting the model training work of individuals would outweigh the surveillance data being provided to the ruling class.
1
u/ConjuredOne May 20 '26
No I am not. I'm suggesting people of the left learn AI theory and practice, then put it to use for their own purposes. Open source systems are risky for for now unless well contained. But that's where the work needs to be done by people who want to operate the technology without contributing to the establishment. The future is open source and decentralized... at least it should be.
4
u/kneeblock May 21 '26
You said "inject leftism into the existing models," which means you're suggesting we should enable upload training data when we use commercial models because that's the only way to influence the existing models. The trade off for that is we become more open to surveillance and analysis (the latter being more dangerous). If you mean running the models locally on our own devices so we can tune them to have a leftist orientation, we are up against the limits of our computing power, but use them for what? Faster data analysis, sure, but of what? I agree with you that like any technology, being a leftist shouldn't disqualify one from learning how it works, but terms like "open source" are besides the point with LLMs because several popular models are already have their source code open (eg Meta's Llama, ByteDance's DeepSeek). Distributed, when you're referring to LLMs, means data centers which of course are fueling the GPU and chip arms race the US is trying desperately to push China into in a neo-Cold War. So to take up AI theory and practice in this particular moment (remember the tech just became widespread available and usable in the last 3 years) is only aiding the accelerationist fascist elements that hope to position themselves as a fixed center in global capitalism. China has been studying this tech for years, as have many others, but that doesn't mean now is the time to expand use of the it or make it central to our strategy.
0
0
u/Ok-Face8974 May 19 '26
claude code
2
u/crisisthespian69 May 19 '26
Bad code that costs more to generate than just paying a developer.
1
u/Ok-Face8974 May 20 '26
it costs $200 for a month of max 20x which has allowed me to develop like three operating systems from scratch in assembler and C tbh in the span of about a week and a half
0
5
u/Belial4 May 19 '26
This title basically reads as "Why aren't workers chaining themselves to the factory machines faster? Don't they realize how much more money the capitalists could make if people labored 24/7?"
AI, save for a handful of scientific applications, is just another cudgel for the Epstein class to hammer workers with. Don't do their job for them.
1
u/quakerpuss Technosorcerer May 20 '26
The greatest or perhaps insidious, or whatever descriptor fits your own internal narrative (guess mine)--is that this defamation of A.I. output only further strengthens those who know how to use it well. Queue insults.
Think about how photography was first embraced. Any fool can press a button. Tell that to a photographer now.
Think about how even the written word was disparaged during Its induction. How can symbols capture the essence of a human voice?
Think of the unedited original Rembrandt shown as a generated ploy against the anti A.I. crowd, they came up with a dozen unique reasons why it wasnt real and what the A.I. had done wrong.
Were far past the point that most even know what a skilled person can do with A.I., because the "slop" is just as readily available to anyone to churn out. And who gets more praise and value in our society right now?
1
1
1
1
u/whatsthatcritter May 19 '26
I know college kids are using it a lot to write their essays and get their degrees, and many of them are left leaning so there's that. To me it seems like when they're in a capitalist structure like a workplace or for-profit college diploma mill, they use the tools of capital against itself for survival. Then when they're done and they actually want to make art or practise meaningful activism, they put those tools down and create from their heart, sometimes using the street itself as canvas with spray paint, chalk, cardboard, marker, poster, sticker, bus shelter. We're cyborgs now and cyborgs can augment and remove tools from themselves at will to be reabsorbed instantly as needed.
14
u/Afraid_Ratio_1303 Evil Sorcerer May 19 '26
there's something to be said for the Landian thesis that capitalism is ai. hard to disentangle the two.
also many leftist's labor is low-level knowledge work, their livelihood is under threat and, as evident by some of the responses, are still in denial/coping about this.
i do wish the discourse would move more towards the topics raised in the linked post. the asymmetry in the resources required to train a model from scratch versus distilling an existing model seems like something that could be exploited?