And i don’t mean stuff like deepfakes/sora/palantir/anything like that, im talking about why the anti-genai crowd isn’t providing an alternative where you can get instant feedback when you’re journaling
They are against it because anything bad that could come of further adoption of AI will happen if it’s profitable for the capitalists. Even now NVIDIA is continuing to pump the bubble when everyone knows it’s a bubble, because of the profits.
The prospects are entirely different in China, because capitalists are regulated. But nobody who is vehemently against AI is aware of the difference and likely will tell you China is capitalist. So all the problems that arise from capitalist control of AI are ascribed to AI alone as well.
The prospects are entirely different in China, because capitalists are regulated.
The potential consequences are severely reduced because of this, but up to a point the government will allow capitalists to do the same harmful things they do in the west. They just won’t allow them to collapse the whole economy and destroy the lives of half the country. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the prospects of LLMs are fundamentally different, just that their potential fallout is much more limited because China is not capitalist.
but up to a point the government will allow capitalists to do the same harmful things they do in the west.
Can you please give any examples of the Chinese government allowing capitalists to do harmful things to the Chinese people?
Commodification of housing is a recent example. They were allowed to do harm, up to a point. When the bubble popped, the state caught it to prevent it from doing massive harm.
This is a strange question to even ask. China has labor exploitation, China has capitalists, China has rent seeking behavior, these are all things that do harm people and the Chinese government acknowledges them. That’s what the socialist market economy means, you take the bad with the good.
It might seem like a strange question but people tend to have wildly different pespectives and understanding about China depending on what part of the world they’re in, what the media they consume says about it, and whether they’ve lived there or not. So even if we agreed with each other it’d still be worth going through because we’re in a public forum where it’s helpful for others to be more illustrative.
“up to a point” is doing massive work here.
China has capitalism: in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, and in Macao. When you cross the boundary between Hong Kong and Shenzhen it’s like night and day. Shenzhen ain’t no backwater either, but the cost of living, quality of life, environment, air pollution (the prevalence of electric cars makes so much difference that despite being less strict about smoking in public, it’s still cleaner in SZ), advertising, cleanliness of public facilities, parks in walking distance of everywhere… when they say ‘take the bad with the good’ that doesn’t mean not doing anything about the bad, and the difference a government can make in dealing with the bad is huge.
I agree with you, however they still tend to act mostly after some damage has been done. That’s the purpose of the socialist market economy, to allow development of productive forces but catch it when it goes wrong. That doesn’t mean capitalists are prevented from making harmful decisions to begin with. The difference with Hong Kong is that there’s basically no catching, it just gets worse and worse.
As I said, a typical recent example was the housing bubble the government had to step in to catch. It was allowed to go on for a while before it was stopped, and it did harm people during that time.
China objectively treats AI differently than the West. Whether that constitutes a ‘fundamental’ difference I don’t know, I’m not big on that word philosophically, but the fact that Chinese private companies are providing their models open source, and you can use them free of charge (the most you will pay is a very low fee for API usage) shows a huge difference, they don’t consider it a product to make a profit on, i.e. A commodity.
AI is also not held solely by the capitalists in China, the government develops on it. Just recently Beijing schools started a pilot program to teach middle and high school students AI through science projects.
What we need to ask is what do they see in it, what this fills for them and helps them with.
the situation is fundamentally different in China https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/the-ghost-in-the-machine
Those people are usually Westerners that take the easy route which is to blame a tool for the issues caused by capitalism.
However, if you look beyond the small western world into countries like China, Cuba, Vietnam and others in the global South, AI, including genai, is celebrated. You can find plenty of content in Xiaohongshu with comments fascinated with the inventions of people.
One example of this is this song created by a person that used AI for the production of it:
- Stand on the right side of history http://xhslink.com/o/2b6FrtTZhiZ
This is another where someone produces a video regarding neoliberalism to educate:
- How China Shattered the Neoliberal Dream http://xhslink.com/o/hq98nP5zd
There is even a Yotube channel called Dialectical Fire that posts incredible content using AI.
All I know is that this new form of luddism will disipate into history similarly to the past luddism of past century.
All I know is that this new form of luddism will disipate into history similarly to the past luddism of past century.
You’re aware that the luddites were correct, right? They weren’t vulgar technology haters, they had valid concerns about their pay and the quality of the products produced (actually an excellent comparison to many people who oppose LLMs), which turned out to be accurate. The idea of luddites as you use it here is explicitly liberal propaganda used to smear labor movements for expressing valid concerns, and they didn’t dissipate into history, there were and are subsequent similar labor movements.
The point is that even though the concerns the luddites had were correct, their methods were not. Hence why they failed. Now, people are trying to do the same things that we know don’t work.
Can you elaborate dear? why do you say their methods were not?
I think Yogthos and Cowbee said it well, but I just wanted to add some of Marx’s thoughts from vol 1, chapter 15 in regards to luddites if you haven’t read it, forgive me if you already have.
spoiler
About 1630, a wind-sawmill, erected near London by a Dutchman, succumbed to the excesses of the populace. Even as late as the beginning of the 18th century, sawmills driven by water overcame the opposition of the people, supported as it was by Parliament, only with great difficulty. No sooner had Everet in 1758 erected the first wool-shearing machine that was driven by water-power, than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workpeople, who had previously lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament against Arkwright’s scribbling mills and carding engines. The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used.
It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used.
Sadly, a lot of them still can’t, as evidenced even in this thread.
I hope AI discussion in the future start to blossom further into something better, because as it stands, it just feels rather disheartening when things get like bad? I’m not sure what it is with AI that leads to like, other comrades willing to call other comrades “dumb” elsewhere or other dejecting statements. It just gets very demoralizing.
I think it will pass in few years max. AI bubble will either break or be deflated, Chinese will improve their tech even more, online shitstorm artisans will either find new niche or get a job, AI creations will get less recognizable and so on.
I hope AI discussion in the future start to blossom further into something better
It will improve but I feel that some comrades are disconnected from stories where AI is having a positive impact in people’s life. Stories that will make them question: “Why are there good stories in China but not in the West? What is missing for the West to have similar stories?”.
I try to post a lot of AI news in c/Technology but it clearly is not working. Sorry for the ping but @CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml by pure coincidence do you have any ideas on how to improve visibility regarding AI?
I appreciate the view and the tactical point, there is of course truth in there. Now there’s the matter of ability as well. Imagine being a resistant during fascist takeover. Every bit would count wouldn’t it? I can’t blame the ghetto kids for burning cars, if you understand me.
I’m not sure if I entirely understand? What your describing sounds like a different situation compared to talking about ai and means of production in general? I just mean it just sounds like your describing war or guerilla warfare in that context? in which, in terms of war, every bit does count like you said. and to go to ai, fascist states are using it for fascistic purposes like what the ruling class in the united states is doing with it. but I feel like that has less to do with the tool considering ai has a a wide variety of use like with what China showing what to do with it, and more to do with the people employing it for fascistic purposes? and in turn that has to do more with resisting oppressing and fascism in general and less to do with ai? I’m not sure if I properly articulated my thought.
I’ll answer more thoughoughfully later but don’t worry about it, I was just thinking aloud
Their methods failed to effect structural change, and their whole movement was ultimately swept away.
Luddites attacked machinery, blaming it on their declining quality of life. The correct approach is to attack the capital relations directly, ie to attack the capitalists themselves, and take hold of the productive forces built up by capitalism already, directing it for the good of all rather than the profits of the few.
I mean, the combative communist cells here have blown weapon industry plants. It’s true they “failed” but it gave people hope
That’s different entirely though, sabotaging the war machine is entirely different from attacking factories for consumer commodities.
Of course. I’m just saying sabotaging the tool of production cant be “that” useless, would it.
The luddites were dead fucking wrong. Instead of seizing the means of production, they thought smashing them would solve their woes. It doesn’t matter that the luddites were skilled machine operators with a rudimentary form of class consciousness; their understanding of the issue was idealist and therefore opposed to Marxism. Luddism is liberalism.
Mfw luddites didn’t know about seizing the means of production because they were stupid enough to exist literally before Marx was born.
I see we’re doing the great man theory here now on lemmygrad…
If it wasn’t Marx, it would have been someone else. Marx is not a god, nor a great man, but expecting a group or proletarian industrial workers with little to no education to magically become Marxian revolutionaries before Marx is disingenuous at best.
Nobody is expecting anything magical here. What’s being said is that they were clearly barking up the wrong tree. Having the full depths of the analysis that Marx brought to bear was obviously not a prerequisite for realizing that it’s who owns the technology that’s the actual problem rather than the technology itself.
Adding to what other comrades eloquently explained, we should not repeat the mistakes from the past but actually learn from them.
Instead of focusing on the tool and projecting the evil from capitalists into it, we have to build a labor movement with the intention of seizing the means of production and to fight the capitalists and the imperialists. Socialism is the only way out and the proof of its success is already showing in places like China. Examples:
- AI in spotlight as Chinese online literature pursues global reach
- Designer in the era of AI
- Reporter show some AI innovations from healthcare to animations of old paintings in China
Working toward a world where the workers own the means of productions is a better endeavor rather than destroying the means of productions and sabotaging the tools as those luddites did.
What I don’t like is that they’re selling a toy as a tool, and arguably as the One And Only Tool.
You’re given a black box and told to just keep prompting it to get lucky. That’s fine for toys like “give me a fresh low-quality wallpaper every morning.” or “pretend you’re Monkey D. Luffy and write a song from his perspective.”
But it’s not appropriate for high-stakes work. Professional tools have documented rules, behaviours, and limits. They can be learned and steered reliably because they’re deterministic to a fault. They treat the user with respect and prioritixe correctness. Emacs didn’t wrap it in breathess sycopantic language when the code didn’t compile. Lotus 1-2-3 didn’t decide to replace half the “7’s” in your spreadsheet with some random katakana becsuse it was close enough. AutoCAD didn’t add a spar in the middle of your apartment building because it was statistically probable after looking at airplane wings all day.
I mean software glitches all the time, some widespread software has long-standing bugs in it that its developers or even auditors can’t figure out and people just learn to work around the bug. Photoshop is made on 20 year old legacy code and also uses non-deterministic algorithms that predate AI (the spot healing brush for example which you often have to redo several times to get a different result). I agree that there’s a big black box aspect to LLMs and GenAI, can’t say for all AI, but I don’t think it’s necessarily inherent to the tech or means it shouldn’t be developed more.
Actually image AI is severely simple in its methods. Provide it with the exact same inputs (including the seed number) and it will output the exact same image every time, with only very minor variations. Should it have no variations? Depends; image gen AI isn’t an engineering tool and doesn’t profess to have a 0.1mm margin of error like other machines might need to.
Back in 2023 already China used an AI (they didn’t say what type exactly) to blueprint the electrical cabling on a new ship model, and it did it with 100% accuracy. It used to take a team of engineers one year to do this and an AI did it in 24 hours. There’s a lot of toy aspects to LLMs but this is also a trap of capitalism as this is what tech companies in startup mode are banking on. It’s not all neural models are capable of doing.
You might be interested that the Iranian government has recently published guidelines on AI in academia. Unfortunately I don’t have a source as this comes from an Iranian compsci student I know, they say that you can use LLMs in university but need to note the specific model used, time of usage, and can prove you understand the topic then that’s 100% clean for Iranian academic standards.
Iran is investing a lot in tech under heavy sanctions, and making everything locally (it is estimated 40-50% of all uni degrees in Iran are science degrees). To them AI is a potential way to improve their conditions under this context, and that’s what they’re exploring.
Back in 2023 already China used an AI (they didn’t say what type exactly) to blueprint the electrical cabling on a new ship model, and it did it with 100% accuracy.
Do you have a link to the story? I ask because AI is a broad umbrella that many different technologies fall under, so it isn’t necessarily synonymous with generative AI/machine learning (even if that’s how the term has been used the past few years). Hell, machine learning isn’t even synonymous with neural networks.
Circling back to the Chinese ship, one type of AI I could plausibly see being used is a solver for a constraint satisfaction problem. The techniques I had to learn for these in college don’t even involve machine learning, let alone generative AI.
I sent the story on perplexity and looked at its sources :P (people often ask me how I find sources, I just ask perplexity and then look at its links and find one that fits)
https://asiatimes.com/2023/03/ai-warship-designer-accelerating-chinas-naval-lead/ they report here that a paper was published in a science journal, though Chinese-language.
I did find this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S004579492400049X but it’s not from the same team and seems to be about a different problem, though still in ship design (hull specifically) and mentions neural networks.
This is sort of the issue with “AI” often just meaning “good software” rather than any specific technique.
From a quick read the first one seems to refer to a knowledge-base or auto-CAD solution which is fundamentally different from any methods related to LLMs.
The second one is some actually really impressive feature engineering used to solve an optimization problem with Machine Learning tools, which is actually much closer to a statistician using linear regressions and data mining than somebody using an LLM or a GAN.
Importantly, neither method is as computationally intensive as LLMs, and the second one at least is a very involved process requiring a lot of domain knowledge, which is exactly the opposite of how GenAI markets itself.
I mean software glitches all the time, some widespread software has long-standing bugs in it that its developers or even auditors can’t figure out and people just learn to work around the bug
yeah my dad can kill a dozen people if something goes wrong at work. Yet they use windows and proprietary shit.
If software isn’t secured it shouldn’t be used.
We can make software less prone to errors with proper guidelines and procedures to follow, as with anything. Just to add that it’s not solely on software devs to make it failproof.
I would make the full switch to Linux but I need Windows for photoshop and premiere lol. And I never got Wine to work on Mint, but if I could I would ditch windows today. I think helping people get acquainted with linux is something AI can really help with, and may help more people make the switch.
I never got Wine to work on Mint, but if I could I would ditch windows today.
apologies if this is annoying, but have you tried Lutris?
it’s designed for games, but i use it for everything that needs wine because it makes it easy to manage prefixes etc. with a nice guiNo worries, I haven’t tried it but I also don’t have my Mint install anymore lol (Windows likes to delete the dual boot file when it updates and I never bothered to get it working again). I might give it another try down the line but I’m not ready to ditch Adobe yet. I’ll keep it in mind for if I make the switch in the future.
yes. It’s a tool that can (and must) be seized and re-appropriated imo. But it’s not magic. Main issue is that capitalists are selling it as some kind of genius in a bottle.
There is stuff like spellcheck and languagetool which can give you a specific variety of feedback.
Why would you want instant feedback when you’re journaling? The whole point of journaling is to have something that’s entirely your own thoughts.
I dont like writing my own thoughts down and just having them go into the void lol and i want a real hoomin to talk to about these things but i dont have one TwT
What does “go into the void” mean? The LLM may use them as context for a while or it may not use them as context at all, it may even periodically erase its memory of you.
I find talking about heavy or personal things way easier with strangers than with people you know. There’s no stakes with a stranger you can literally walk up to someone on the street or in a park who doesn’t look busy and ask them if they want to talk.
Yeah but what if i make em uncomfyyyyy
The ability to self-actualize and shape the world belongs to those who are willing to potentially cause momentary discomfort.
Also the default status of many people is lonely and/or anxious; receiving social energy from someone often at least takes their mind off that.
Advancements in material technology in the past half century have often ended up stunting our social development and well-being.
Yeah but the things i ask the robot about a real hoomin would find it really creepy to talk to a stranger about
Is it okay if I push back a bit? Since your last comment just feels a little dismissive? I don’t know the Free Penguin or why, but I will point out to other things why someone might not be able to easily talk to someone? Like for example, if someone can’t can’t walk or get around, they won’t be able to just talk to someone like that. Mainly speaking about my mom before she died since she had copd and her health decline after something happened at her work place. But anyways she really hurt her spine and couldn’t get around. I remember her being very upset with how alone she was.
Then also speaking for myself, I have a speech impediment, + anxiety, so it is really difficult for me to just approach someone and talk to them depending on various factors. along with that, another thing to, but some strangers can be outright hostile and make things worse and someone else might just have a lot of bad interactions with strangers.
Chronic loneliness and anxiety are a function of societal arrangements that are exacerbated by capitalist solutions, not inherent and unavoidable parts of the human condition until they are cured by a panacea ex machina.
Believe it or not, before 2022 we did have lots of different approaches around the world to these things. And we are poorer for turning away from all those approaches.
I am a rather awkward person in many ways, I am instantly recognizable by many people as “weird”, I have my own share of anxiety that I’ve gotten better at masking over the years. If I spent ages 19-25 interacting with a digital yes-man instead of with humans, I would have no social skills.
Your response sounds closely analogous to when car proponents use the disabled as a shield. We don’t need everyone to drive, we need to minimize the distance between each other, and making driving (or LLM usage) a necessity for getting by in society only creates bigger problems, because the root problem is not being adequately addressed.
I feel like you might be taking me at bad faith here or misinterpreting me.
Chronic loneliness and anxiety are a function of societal arrangements that are exacerbated by capitalist solutions, not inherent and unavoidable parts of the human condition until they are cured by a panacea ex machina.
I agree? I’m very aware.
Believe it or not, before 2022 we did have lots of different approaches around the world to these things. And we are poorer for turning away from all those approaches.
I would argue that depends. Not everywhere has a lot of different approaches to these things. If anything, if we go to LLM’s, all they did was take inherit contradictions and brought them to new heights, but that these things were already there to begin with, maybe smaller in form.
Your response sounds closely analogous to when car proponents use the disabled as a shield. We don’t need everyone to drive, we need to minimize the distance between each other, and making driving (or LLM usage) a necessity for getting by in society only creates bigger problems, because the root problem is not being adequately addressed.
Again, where do I say that besides being taken at bad faith or misread into? All I’m simply is trying to point out that there usually reasons why someone would turn to something like an LLM or might not easily talk to someone else. As you said, the root problem is not being addressed. To add, it also just leaves a bad taste in my mouth and kind of hurts, to be that what I said sounds closely analogous to using the disable as a shield, especially when I was talking about myself or my mom.
Since for example, when my mom was in the hospital before the last few weeks she died. She had to communicate on a white board for staff since they couldn’t understand here. I also had to use the same white board to because staff couldn’t understand what I was saying either. Just to give you an idea of how I have trouble speaking to others. I’m not saying someone shouldn’t try to interact with others you know and just go talk to a chatbot. People should have another person to talk to. Besides I’m interacting with a stranger like with you right now am I not?
Do you worry about AI psychosis?
I would be extremely cautious about that sort of usage of AI. Commercial AI’s are psychopathic sychophants and have been known to drive people insane by constantly gassing them up.
Like you clearly want someone to talk to about your life and such (who doesn’t?) and I understand not having someone to talk to (fewer and fewer do these days). But you’re opting for a corporate machine which certainly has instructions to encourage your dependence on it.
Have there been cases of deepseek causing ai psychosis or is it just chatgpt
lol
do not use an LLM for whatever the heck you think you’re doing with it.
I have one that knows a lot of things about how to spy on the cops during an uprising
Why not?
you do not seem to understand what the technology is or its limitations. Other commenters have corrected your farcical assertion about
instant feedback
you do not seem to understand what the technology is or its limitations.
Stop projecting yourself onto others. The other commenters that you are referencing were corrected as well for their own farcical and fallacious assessments.
Please come back when you can comment without insulting people’s intelligence, this doesn’t add anything to the conversation. This isn’t reddit.
i didn’t insult their intelligence at all. plenty of people are fooled by the talking scrabble bag, this is a matter of education and credulity.
“Providing and alternative where you can get instant feedback while you’re journaling” Forgive me, could you elaborate? I’m a little confused
I sometimes put some of my more sensitive thoughts into an LLM mainly cuz i dont want em going into the void and i dont want a hoomin getting uncomfy reading them either
Why would you want to outsource one of the last vestiges of being a human we have left (thinking) to a 3rd party of any kind?
I don’t care if it’s an AI or an underprivileged person in another region of the world, get that shit out of here. The internet and similar tools of isolation are bad enough, now we’re being handed keys to an artificial friend keen on severing our social connections and ability to think on our own.
I think about it too i only ask the robot after i alr thought about it
I scanned the thread and am not sure if anyone else has mentioned that GenAI is obliterating the value of creators’ (i.e., visual artists, musicians, writers, etc.) labor. This is ruining people’s livelihoods and will drastically reduce the amount of new human artistic output.
This is on top of the various other economic, environmental, ethical, and inaccuracy issues with it. This is all why I won’t touch the stuff.
Meh, if your art is matched by genAI, it’s time to do something else. Also genAI could at the same time that it destroys the livelihood of certain people, also increases the livelihood of other people, think of someone that recently started selling a tomato sauce, with genAI they don’t have to pay thousands of dollars to a graphic designer for a brand logo or a label.
I must be missing something and would like to understand this line of thinking. Do communists really think that the availability of easy knock-off logos and labels outweighs artists getting paid for their labor?
Yes? I certainly prefer abundance of stuff over scarcity. If you had asked me that the availability of mass produced furniture outweighs artisan carpenters getting paid for their labor i also would’ve said yes.
GenAI can be used to generate the boring art that no one wants to do so artists can dedicate themselves to making novel art.
Fair enough, I get your point.
That’s a loaded question; ‘knock-off’ is a value judgment.
Artists don’t form a class - no profession does. Between artists, you will find proletariat, bourgeois and petit-bourgeois artists. So we must first ask, which artists are we talking about protecting exactly?
Artistry is also not the first job/skill that’s being automated. If the only problem was ‘livelihood’ (that is, per your usage of the word not the labor-power one is able to provide but the current work for which they are paid) then we might as well destroy any piece of technology that makes a job more accessible so that people can remain experts in their field and ensure they keep a job in their very specialized skill, and that would immediately revert us back to the feudal period where everyone worked the fields and the women also mended clothes on the side for some petty cash. And you died at 30 of dysentery.
But that’s not how capitalism works; capitalism tends towards monopolization. None of what AI is doing right now is entirely new or unique. Capitalism itself started by obliterating many jobs (proletarianizing people in the process, getting them from their self-sufficient farms and looms and into factories working for a wage), and yet we still consider it progressive because it lays the conditions down for socialism and then communism. It created a proletariat for which the ideology could be laid down: marxism.
I think the question no one has asked yet is what would people who don’t like AI want to see done about AI? You can certainly try to legislate, but we know how laws go. Get another party in at the next elections and the laws change entirely. You can try to ban AI, but other countries will keep using it and something else will eventually pop up and spark the same debate. The mechanical loom and the steam machine are just two historical examples. Internet was considered a novelty in the early 90s and people thought it wouldn’t last.
But you can’t undo the contradictions, and the wheel keeps turning. Whether AI will endure is something that is not dependent on our arguments, whether pro or against. As communists we understand automation will make communism possible, and it’s only under capitalism that it leads to the destruction of jobs (AI hasn’t really led to job destruction but that’s not the main point here). Under communism automation replacing your job means you still get the result of this automation and also you don’t have to work anymore, in a nutshell.
These are all contradictions of capitalism Marx highlighted before and this is why the solution is socialism.
I also highly recommend this essay which is easy to follow and highlights these contradictions about AI, artists and capitalism: https://polclarissou.com/boudoir/posts/2023-02-03-Artisanal-Intelligence.html
There is certainly a lot to say about AI (and technological advancements) in capitalism, but our sights are on socialism.
Thanks for the explanation and for the link.
I think the question no one has asked yet is what would people who don’t like AI want to see done about AI?
Regarding this question, one possible answer for me is that I would like AI to pay its own way. Right now, AI is losing money hand over fist despite massive subsidies in the form of “free” source content and shared energy expenses, so in its current state it’s completely unsustainable and leading toward a major rug pull from under everyone.
I can definitely agree to that, and I also think these are important questions to ask but a lot of the discussion I see revolves around artists specifically (and specifically illustrative artists), leaving little space for other stuff. So thanks for answering sincerely.
The function of the state is to reconcile class differences, but class differences are irreconcilable. How can you make a proletarian rationally agree that they should be paid less and the bourgeois more? All history of civilization is the history of the class struggle; in capitalism the state works for the bourgeoisie, and in socialism it works for the proletariat. So while I would also like for AI companies to struggle their own way on the market (they couldn’t compete against China anyway), they wield enormous power over the state, especially the legacy companies, and get whatever they ask for. In the same way Musk gets tons of subsidies for SpaceX and Tesla - the point is to funnel money to the bourgeoisie.
Therefore objectively speaking I think China is the single major factor for destroying the oversized western AI industry. Project Stargate was announced (500 billion for AI over the next years), and literally a week later Deepseek came out and completely demolished that idea before it even took off. It was built for a fraction of the cost of GPT with a fraction of the hardware, and suddenly a 500 billion investment didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. In fact chinese models are largely open source and they are so cheap to run, they don’t even charge anything. It’s hard to compete against free.
What we’ll see soon enough in the west however is monopolization of AI; fewer companies will remain and it will be mostly controlled by 1 or 2 company (probably microsoft and google, maybe meta). I can’t really say what the consequences of this monopolization will be yet.
It’s not like there’s a lot of novel model creators currently either - the costs are too prohibitive and companies like openAI are hemorrhaging money and their 20$/month subscription tier is never going to fill in that massive bottomless hole (they’d need 35 million subscribers for it to break even), so they rely on both private and public funding. Even after releasing the semi open source gpt-oss which boasts 200 billion parameters, the most popular open source models remain z.ai, deepseek and qwen - all chinese models, and you can run a 20B model at most on consumer hardware (with a 1500$ GPU). So even that bet didn’t take off, nobody is even using oss beyond the novelty it seems.
Thanks again for the additional analysis. There’s a lot to think about. I really need to study AI more so I can understand it better and make better critiques as well as know where it’s actually most useful.
no problem, thanks for reading.
Do communists really think that the availability of easy knock-off logos and labels outweighs artists getting paid for their labor?
One would have to explain why it is not capitalism but the technology itself that is at fault. Marxists should be for the socialisation and automation of all labour; under capitalism this may mean unemployment so for artisans that leaves only one source of income which is the defense of proprietorship which is again reactionary.
For marxists the above should be relatively straight forward but for the uninitiated it may take more reading around. In practice though our opinions often reflect our relative class positions or aspirations ie under capitalism often “emancipation” or just protection of income in the long-run often ends up being seeking to become a labour aristocrat (which here could involve gatekeeping skilled labour) or bourgoisie aspiration (protection of intellectual property).
One should not lament the weaver for the loom; society should advance to give each person freedom to enjoy non-paid activities and should increasingly advance so that we should not have to be paid in order to survive ie working towards the abolishment of wage slavery. However, under capital there is no mechanism for this so results in the increasing contradictions and immiseration of society.
(Marxism is a science, and the above context it is the understanding of the mechanisms of capital and how we could potentially build socialism from that understanding)
Thanks for the explanation.
One problem I see with comparing GenAI with earlier automation like the loom, etc. is that GenAI is in no way paying for itself so far or any time in the forseeable future. It currently loses money hand over fist despite massive breaks in the form of “free” source content and subsidized electricity. I imagine that those previous forms of automation were self-sustaining financially from fairly early after their invention.
Thank you!
One problem I see with comparing GenAI with earlier automation like the loom, etc. is that GenAI is in no way paying for itself so far or any time in the forseeable future. It currently loses money hand over fist despite massive breaks in the form of “free” source content and subsidized electricity. I imagine that those previous forms of automation were self-sustaining financially from fairly early after their invention.
There is an economic phenomenon called the Tendancy of the rate of profit to fall (https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall) which correlates with what you are saying; under capitalism there is no clean way out of this which is why you see AI market bubbles in the west that you don’t see it in a socialist country like China.
And it is also, as you have rightly pointed out, why the return on investment is generally signifcantly worse than it was before (as a general trend). If one does a course in business administration in the west they do mental gymnastics why the rate of profit in the IT sector as a whole is so abysmal and have ad-hoc theories with no predictive value to explain the phenomenon (ie they don’t have a scientific approach).
You’ll find, and pretty much every marxist will testify to this, that seeminly puzzling politico-economical phenomenon/contradictions under liberal economics not only have robust explanations in marxism but also very good predictive powers - as a science does, and continually refines theory to reflect better observations seen as a science should.
Edited to add - some further reading just in case you need them if you read the article in the above link:
Thank you for the additional analysis and readings! I need to read a lot more about all this and other relevant topics and theory.
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This is the correct take from an ML perspective (essentially an extension of the fact that we should not lament the weaver for the loom):
https://redsails.org/artisanal-intelligence/
The problem is not the technology per se (criticisms such as energy consumption or limitations of the tools just means there’s room for improvement for the tech or how we use it) but capitalism. If you want a flavour of opinions on this this click on my username and order comments by most controversial for the relevant threads.
Artisans that claim they are for marxist proletariat emancipation but fear the socialisation of their own labour will need to explain why their take is not Proudhonist.
That post really is an excellent article in truly understanding the Marxist critique of reaction and bourgeoisie mindsets. Another one that people here should read along with it is Stalin’s Shoemaker; it highlights the dialectical materialist journey of a worker developing revolutionary potential:
Class consciousness means understanding where one is in the cog of the machine and not being upset because one wasn’t proletariat enough. This is meant to be Marxism not vibes-based virtue signaling.
Meanwhile in a socialist country: China’s AI industry thrives with over 5,300 enterprises https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9357646
Marxism is a science. People should treat it is as such and take the opportunity to study and learn, to develop their human potential beyond what our societies consider is acceptable.
It has a flattening effect. The things that come out the other end don’t sound human. They sound like the collective mouth of reddit and blog spam.
I don’t know why you’d use it for journaling. what feedback do you even need for journaling? Shouldn’t that be your thoughts and not your thoughts filtered through the machine of averages and disembodied?
That’s kind of like the how people where talking about how genai always fucks up the hands in pictures. I don’t think that’s permanent
Yea so i type my natural thoughts in and tbh i have some of em that i currently dont share w humans cuz they’re kinda sensitive and i dont use genai for emotional attachment just to see them written in a different way i guess
genai turned the internet into a hellhole. nothing is genuine. information became worthless. facts don’t matter anymore.
it carries itself into the world outside the internet. slopaganda, decision making and policymaking are affected by genai and will make your life actively worse.
welcome to the post-fact world where you can’t even trust yourself.
The Kavernacle has videos on this. He talks about how it’s eroding emotional connection in society and having people offload their thikcing onto chatgpt. I think this is a problem But my main issue i’m most passionate about is the issue of misinformation. In the process of writing thsi post i did an experiment and asked it some questiosn about autism. I asked them waht autsitic burnout is. They gave an explanation that’s incorrect, and furthers the incorrect assumption alot of pepole make that i’ts something specific to autistic people. But it’s a wider phenomon of physiological neurocongitive burnout. I confronted them on this they refined their position then I asked them why they said it. It constnatly contradicts itself and will just be like yeah you are correct i am wrong, while continuing to not repeat the same incorrect claim. https://i.imgur.com/KINH7lV.png https://i.imgur.com/EHtDwNj.png According to chatgpt their own sentence contradicts itself. They also proceeded to tell invent a new usage of a very obscure medical term that is not widely used then try to gaslight me into believing it’s a commonly jused term among autsitic people whne it isn’t https://i.imgur.com/LStZdNg.png
And what frustrates me even more is a couple months ago i had someone swear to me up and down that, the hallucinations in chatgpt were fixed and they ain’t that bad anymore. Granted, they were far worse in the past. It litaerlly tol dme autims level system was something that no longer exists despite it being currently widely used.
But here’s the problem. I am an expert on this topic. Most people aren’t asking chatgpt questions about things they are an expert in, and they also are using it as a therapist.
All in all i wasn’t expecting it to have no hallucinations but i was atelast expecting it to not still be a massive issue in just basic information retrival on topics that aren’t even super obscure and information si widely available about.
Ultimately here’s the issue. The vast majority of pro-genai people don’t know what genai actually is and why it is bad to use it in the way they are as a result. GenAI is a very advanced from of predictive text function. It just predicts what it thinks the words following that queery is based on the tereabytes maybe evne petabytes of infromation it’s scrapped from the internet. Which means it’s not really useful for anything beyond very basic things like asking it to generate simple ideas or summarize an article or video and very basic coding. I only dabble very lighlty in programming but frmo hwat i’ve heard actaul experienced programmers say it trying to use chatgpt for major coding just means having to rewrite most of the code.
And honestly i think the main reason is that i feel like i worry too much about my own self-image and have had bad experiences with other hoomins on the interwebs being absolute assholes to me cuz i told them im a commie in confidence only for them to share it with their friends who then went on to harass me and idk i just feel like because the robot wont talk about me behind my back i dont feel as much weighing me down talking about more sensitive stuff to it
I thought you were a penguin? You’re a fake penguin, A huamn pretend to be one.
Mr. The Fake Penguin the answer is to find better friends. maybe try joining an online communist group or something. Also i’m ckinda confused cause you say and like you are refreencing something but ikd what you are referencing.
Wait a sec, what you said up there sounds exactly like what that guy said to me that I’m “pretending to be Russian”
It was a joke, a la “in the internet nobody knows you’re a dog”. But adding to his point, yes, you need better friends.
Maybe join the Genzedong matrix server? It was a pretty chill place back when I used it.
Also if you have access, consider therapy. One of the greatest advantages psychologists have over LLMs is that they are able to disagree with you. That could help you with whatever thoughts you’re struggling with, without having to care about being judged.
yeah i was in communist groups and still am, it was just that the roblox elevator community is a shithole filled with people who make being anticommunist their whole personality and harass anyone who dares to say anything positive about the CPC
You are, you admitted it you are a human pretending to be a penguin.
ok why are you so eerily sounding so similar to that guy saying i’m pretending to be russian
Kavernacle talks about this a lot. I agree with him mostly. very vague paraphrasing here. But kavernacle basically talks about how went to a stag (british bachelor) party and a bunch of people used chat gpt to write their speeches. Chatgpt is going to end up replacing people’s indepenent thinking and human connection. It also encourages intellectual laziness in general. Another problem sit he absolutely massive ramifications it’s goingt o have in terms of mis/disinformation. Another issue, I have with pro gen-ai people is that, they don’t fucking understand how ai works. Most of the peolpe i’ve met who are openly professed ot me they are pro gen-ai haven’t understood like even the basics of machine learning. Which causes an issue cause chatgpt is not a reliable source of information.
Here is an example of chatgpt 5 goofing https://i.imgur.com/oY1NmCO.png If you challenge the ai on their incorrectness they will admit they are wrong. Tbf though in the past i’ve seen it say straigth up incorrect informatino like saying the autsim level system isn’t in the dsm anymore. It’s definitely improved somewhat. Here is chatgpt literally deciding a very very obscure term for a specific phenomon in depression is a widely expanded on (Atleast as far asi can tell from skimming literally every result on google) into a much larger category that has well defined symptoms evne though it was never defined in any of the papers that mentioend it beyond congitive impariment. In just ten minute chat on autsitic burnout it went from initially telling me what it admits to be incorrect information to making up a new usage of a very obscure (it’s used in less than 4 research papers term for a feature of major depression some people experience.
