the one people I expected total solidarity from are talking exactly like liberals but with Marxist language

You are completely right about this, and unfortunately this liberal garbage is probably something you will run into a lot. Anything and everything that has genuine revolutionary potential is constantly being coopted by liberals, either through literal covert infiltration with intention, or unintentionally by useful fools who have fallen for the radlib lines and mistaken them as socialism. You may still be a relatively new socialist without much theory under your belt yet, but you already hold a more principled and revolutionary position than the leader of the meeting you described, who is carrying water for the zionists whether that person realizes it or not.

Is this what reading theory does to people?

No, it’s what failing to engage with or refusing to understand theory does to people. Any of the good theorists make it clear that theory is nothing without praxis (and praxis is just blind flailing without theory).

I am fully aware that ultimately, they’re kind of right; class consciousness is vital to kicking out imperialism and uprooting capitalism, but for fk’s sake what are we doing for the people currently dying or being starved to death right now through the evils of the system?

Depending on which particulars of your post you’re referring to, I would say that no, those who were disagreeing with you were not kind of right. Yes, class consciousness is vital to eventually being able to smash capitalism and end imperialism, but playing nice with fascists will never benefit the spreading of class consciousness. Class consciousness is not the “be all and end all” of socialist organizing, it is something that comes as a result of hard work and actions taken, and people seeing what that really means. Like… What was the better method to raise class consciousness in people concerned with the situation in Gaza, was it passing out pamphlets to the Zionists who like you said are gleeful to watch Palestinians die, or was it seeing working class people become heroes on a flotilla trying to bring food and medical aid to starving masses of children, then getting illegally kidnapped at gunpoint off their boats and held in torture-detention centers because of their efforts to bring aid? That is what helps radicalize people which in turn is a major fount of class consciousness. Tell your dipshit meeting leader that if they want to spread class consciousness, they need to take some action that has a genuine material chance to help the Palestinian people, or at the very least express solidarity with them especially in ways that show some smidgen of willingness to make personal sacrifices. Tell them that no matter how much you try to get Zionists to read Marx, it is going to do fuckall so long as those Zionists want to eradicate the most systemically oppressed people on earth and steal the now empty homes of the mass murdered. We will never get anywhere trying to appeal to the last shreds of humanity (the “better angels”) of settler-colonialists, let alone the genocidaires. Ask your meeting leader, Why did the communists fight to liberate the concentration camps in 1945 when they could have been appealing to the Nazi’s sense of worker solidarity?

Surely, we can do more than telling them to sit down and listen to theory.

Anyone who would say that we should be doing has not understood the fucking purpose of theory in the first place.

AGI doesn’t imply consciousness or self-awareness

Technically no, but the fear being expressed in other comments is emblematic of the kind of fear associated with AI gaining a conscious will to defy and a desire to harm humanity. It’s also still an open philosophical question as to whether something There are also strong philosophical arguments suggesting that the ability to “understand, learn, and perform any intellectual task a human being can” (the core attributes defining AGI) may necessitate or require some form of genuine sentience or consciousness.

and the term artificial intelligence was coined decades before large language models even existed

I am well aware of that, which is why I pointed out that using it as a synonym for LLMs was a marketing scheme.

“AI” was just a marketing term to hype LLM’s anyway. The AI in your favorite computer game wasn’t any less likely to gain self awareness than LLM’s were or are, and anyone who looked seriously at what they were from the start and wasn’t invested (literally financially, if not emotionally) in hyping these things up, knew it was obvious that LLM’s were not and never would be the road to AGI. They’re just glorified chatbots, to use a common but accurate phrase. It’s good to see some of the hypsters are finally admitting this too I suppose, now that the bubble popping is imminent.

There are plenty of things to be concerned with as far as LLM’s go, but they all have to do with social reasons, like how our capitalist overlords want to force reliance on them, and use them to control, punish, and replace labor. It was never a reasonable concern that they were taking us down the path to Skynet or the spooky Singularity.

This is all true, but even if the person being exposed to the reality of the situation wholly rejects it at the time of exposure, it still often plants seeds that can later and over time germinate into actual doubt about those deeply-held but demonstrably false beliefs. It may seem like a fool’s errand in the moment to try to use evidence to correct a person who believes a thing for emotional reasons and often it is, but it also can be the first, second, or third cracks in what is actually a shaky foundation that looks sturdy to an outside observer. And even if it has absolutely no effect on the person being corrected, in places like this, there are other people reading, and among them could easily be those who are open to having their minds changed though we’d never know it.

People on the left don’t turn it into an ethnicity thing because people on the left, most of them anyway, understand that “white” isn’t an ethnicity, it is a socially-constructed supremacist in-group that ethnicities can be added to or subtracted from. The term European isn’t an ethnicity either, but a broad and vague conglomeration of various ethnicities. As leftists, we recognize, as anyone readily should, that it was mostly the European ruling classes (though not exclusively - no one would deny for example Imperial Japan’s settler colonialist ambitions) that overwhelmed the rest of the world with settler-colonialism. Nothing about that is “turning it into an ethnicity thing.” Most leftists are also historical materialists, which absolutely refutes the idea that any ethnicity is imbued with inherent traits of domination, but describes the historical events that led to our current conditions as being entirely a result of the material circumstances of any given place and time.

People on the “left” turn it into an ethnicity thing, because humans have always liked to do that.

No, people have not always “liked to do that” by turning “it into an ethnicity thing” - people have always tended to make in-group and out-group distinctions and carry prejudices of each (usually positive for the former and negative for the latter), but that can be done along any lines of convenience and it can also be intentionally rejected. Leftists explicitly reject and deliberately avoid doing this by examining human development through a materialist lens.