I regret to give anyone this information that didn't already have it, but "the left for AI" as a cluster of ideas both a) exists and b) is infopoison of the highest order
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@jonny have encountered this in the wild, have done everything to avoid pointing it out to keep it from spreading
haven't seen it anywhere else, so i guess that's working
@jonny thank you for this entire thread and for saying the things that i was too scared to say to a former mutual of mine who kept wondering out loud "why aren't leftists embracing AI more" because i'm too dumb to read theory
@xan
Theory is often a poor substitute for looking around and evaluating the things you see around you, which is what Marx did after all.
There is this hilarious word salad ive seen spun a few times that goes something something labor theory of value something something intelligence displaces money etc and so on therefore the left must harness the labor power of AI
@jonny funny how fast the "Come on, we need to be ***materialists***, let's not reject AI by pure ideological purity" proceed to stubbornly ignore every material consequences of AI, uh ?
@jonny I don't think I've seen _quite_ this version, but I definitely see “the left needs to advocate for ethical, leftism-compatible AI,” and I'm deeply tired of that position.
@reillypascal
I don't see how the groups I'm in would benefit from high volume nonsense text rather than idk "money" or "time"
It has gone far enough to suggest that maybe opposition to AI is in fact a conspiracy propagated by the AI companies to keep people from realizing the um capacity for AI-assisted organizing (?!?) and apparently this is an increasingly common strain in some tankie circles who believe that the international vanguard of communism failed because of not enough computers. That the left is being left behind while the corporate execs and fascists marinate in the utopia of AI.
@jonny I was left behind on NFTs and Bitcoin too
so far no regrets but I'll keep you posted
@jonny I was not prepared for reading this post
I don't even have enough strength of will to explain how bad of an idea this is and how it makes no sense and has nothing resembling a concordance with this reality except to point at all the billions of dollars spent creating and pushing this technology on every front and say "surely the whole of global capital spending entire civilizations worth of riches to get us to use this technology might suggest they think they have something to gain by people becoming reliant on it"
I instead view the situation as one that has eminent empirical validation where the largest companies in the world are trying to get us dependent on a technology that yields full control of what is possible to know, what happened, and what can be done as a subscription product with inelastic demand once saturated.
The reason the right and corporate center are experiencing great gains with AI are that they are floating on massive piles of exploitation that cushion losses, that the things they need are probabilistic managerialism where imprecision is a benefit as it can be constructed to always err in the managers favor, and the winning end state for them is total surveillance with carefully controlled access to information. None of these things can be "adopted by the left"
No you cannot use LLMs to optimize your meetings without alienating the people actually doing work in your group. No you cannot use LLMs to guide your vanguardist international strategy. No you cannot use LLMs for keeping abreast of what your local fascist paramilitary is up to. No you cannot use LLMs to unionize your colleagues. No you cannot use an LLM to promote or coordinate a general strike. No you cannot use LLMs to generate a vague kind of labor currency. Yes using LLMs isolates you from people around you, yes LLMs are antithetical to solidarity with people around you, yes using LLMs corrodes the basis of social cohesion needed for local organizing, etc.
@jonny The only legit use I have seen for an LLM, outside of making broken prototypes no one wants to maintain, thus far was still scamming people... but for the right reasons?
https://hackread.com/white-supremacist-dating-sites-wiped-okstupid-lol/
Basically, they phished a bunch of white supremecists, because they were happy to talk to the chatbot about anything, given the classically attractive female avatar it was given.
@theeclecticdyslexic ok in that very specific case, yes, using LLMs to catfish fascists is a fine use of LLMs for the left.
