His argument was literally that
- artists, writers, and programmers are “labor aristocracy” and deserve no respect because they’re sitting around making art and writing code while other people are toiling and laboring,
- genAI is a “free resource” (“it’s free for me to use at work”) that “helps everyone make things” instead of having to rely on skill and expertise and therefore makes everything equal,
- it’s hypocritical of people to be worried about the environmental and societal impact of genAI because “only white people are worried about it now that their hobbies are being threatened and everyone else is catching up”.
Pointing out there there are artists and programmers from every race and economic class, as well as perfectly ordinary people in every walk of life who are all actively being harmed both by the theft of ideas and labor and by the physical effects of gigantic data centers ruining communities, was met with much hand-waving and incredibly impenetrable philosophical jargon.
I’m particularly incensed because I’m as leftist and anticapitalist as they come and this felt like the fuckery some conservative cockwomble would try to come up with to parody socialism, except this guy was completely serious.
Wow.
Imperialist huh? Just wait until Unga Dunga hears that about his prehistoric cave drawings.
Well, I suppose if we collectively owned together the means and access to said AI, and nobody would own or be able to claim ownership over it beyond the public domain, I could see this argument perhaps work.
As it is, it’s just another theft by the capitalists aimed to oppress us all, cheat us out of our collective knowledge and published works. The technology is useful and could be made sustainably, but the drive of profit over sense and reason fucks us all equally in this one shared planet.
I hate that it has come to this, when just a little bit of more sense and taste, responsibility, we could have made this a public domain good equally available to all, via public libraries or such offering compute or whatever. And ran responsibly and sustainably with realistic limits and scale.
It didn’t need to be this big of a pig dick in our asses. It was a deliberate choice by those that have the power and the means to make those choices over everyone else.
So in the real world, that’s bullshit.
In an ideal world, it may have been even good.
LLMs take the intellectual labor of billions and convert it into a form that can be privatized and commodified so capitalists can charge for access. It’s the enclosure of the commons extended to the digital realm.
That provocation aside
Socialism by definition is democrarization of means of production. If AI can do everything, and everyone has acess to AI, its a perfect socialism. Thats Star Trek like utopia, right?
You’re wasting time arguing with a troll. Tell him AI is copypasta for lazy tryhards and offer to buy him a coloring book since it’s essentially the same time. You can even offer to hang the pictures on the refrigerator when he’s done coloring it if he stays inside the lines like a good boy.
(know what’s funny, no one ever colors in a coloring book and says look at this “art” I made. Children are smarter then AI bros.)
We democratized misinformation. God bless.
Completely detached from reality.
Don’t call it philosophical jargon though, because that isn’t philosophy. It’s just delusion masked under oxymoronic neologisms.
“Labor aristocracy” what the fuck
People who argue in favor of AI art are, at best, talentless hacks.
genAI is a “free resource” (“it’s free for me to use at work”)
i.e. literally not free, it’s capital the boss allows him to use while on the clock while he works for a wage.
I can entertain a good faith argument that being able to make art while other toil is privilege.
There is no good faith argument that using the plagiarism machine is socialistic, or that it’s anything but privilege as well. You are making “art” while the actual artist toils at their craft
There is no good faith argument that using the plagiarism machine is socialistic
Nailed it.
Debating with a conservative is like playing chess with a pigeon. They just knock over all the pieces, shit all over the board and strut around like they won.
That’s the thing! This guy actually is a very involved leftist, complete with theory and everything…and then he goes on to say this
They sound like a tankie. Tankies are leftists like Dr. Pepper is a medical doctor
I got the reference! Guessing you’re Canadian?
I wish!
Nothing like arguing socialism and imperialism with people who don’t know what either of those words mean.
AI is built on the unprecedented theft and exploitation of the intellectual labor of the creative working class by greedy capitalists.
Literally the definition of stealing the surplus value
I’ve talked with someone that argued that the concept of intellectual property is inherently capitalist, and therefore it taking the art and other works of people doesn’t matter in the grand scheme.
And I guess I see the point. I don’t agree with it, but I can’t argue that well against it.
That is logical equivalent to saying that because property is a capitalist concept theft is a form of socialism.
So the robber barons are actually socialists too, and wage theft isn’t theft because money shouldn’t exist, and if you can steal candy from a baby that’s ok because ownership doesn’t exist and only the strong survive. Delusional people can justify anything.
It’s pretty twisted, especially when you consider the players involved, as well as who is being exploited, and who is benefitting from AI the most.
Even the top brass within Microsoft are quoted as having said that what they’re doing is the “largest theft of labor in history”, and I tend to agree.
After all, the richest men on Earth are getting richer at the expense of the artist, the thinker, the writer and all forms of intellectual and physical labor. Profit may be theft, but theft is also still theft.
Capitalists always frame socialist programs as theft so… it actually lines up.
This is like saying we don’t need to pay a minimum wage now because under communism each will be provided according to their needs.
IP is a necessary evil under the current system to stop distributors like Instagram, tiktok, or AI companies from taking labor from workers (artists, writers, etc.) without compensation.
It’s also saying that artists’ works shouldn’t be considered personal property. Even as an anarchist, I wouldn’t want people taking my drawings and using them however they wanted without my blessing.
That is true… but it’s important to remember, I think, that even under a non-capitalist system, people are still going to care about plagiarism and attribution. Recognizing where an idea came from is a basic sign of respect for the effort that goes into creating them, you know?
IP is a necessary evil under the current system to stop distributors like Instagram, tiktok, or AI companies from taking labor from workers (artists, writers, etc.) without compensation.
Seemingly this did not work.
Almost like rules dont apply for the ruling class and the whole IP spiel is just, as pointed out, completely and utterly capitalist.
And to think that IP laws would prevent the rich from thieving is hilariously naive.
You’re not really a communist if you don’t think the rich can ever be brought to heel.
Of course they can be brought to heel. But not really with laws of the bourgeois state.
Then you bring them to heel to respect IP.
They dont even pay taxes. IP is FOR THEM and is used against US.
They can only be forced to adhere to laws by constant fear of execution otherwise they “invent” a legal loophole.
Ah yes, aristocracy. That’s why artists and writers are infamous for being moneybags
If AI really was a free resource, then maybe that part almost makes sense. It’s losing billions per quarter, it’s not free.
“helps everyone make things” instead of having to rely on skill and expertise and therefore makes everything equal,
everyone else is catching up”.
In both of these statements it sounds like they’re saying, “the AI is smarter than me, and I’m stupid without it.”
Hey I can hack my smart TV with a Claude code subscription and get rid of all the ads and listening device shit so I’m not gonna hate. Ai for the people, baby.
The open models in good inference engines can be dirt cheap, but that’s not a good argument because (among other reasons) it’s not the bulk of what is used.
Honestly any company that uses AI as part of their business model should be running open-weight models locally. They can be fine-tuned to their specific use case, it’s not as compute-intensive as the initial pre-training.
And overall it’ll save the business money because they don’t have to shell out for these flagship APIs that are only going to crank up their rates as they become more desperate to prove to investors that they can turn a profit.
Individuals who use it should be running something between 7 to 24 billion parameters depending on how many resources they can allot to it. And even if you don’t use it, it can’t hurt to keep local copies of a few.
AI…at least how it’s currently being deployed and marketed…is the ultimate expression of Capitalism. They are stealing the labor of others, and leasing it back to the public, for endless profit…all while destroying the environment and undermining the working class.
OP got trolled.
