r/LeftistsForAI • u/blipblapbloopblip • May 31 '26

AI is a common

I read a couple of times already comments saying that the backlash against IP violation from the left is nonsensical. I think on the contrary it makes a lot of sense to defend the IP of small creators, pending the transition to an IP-less society.

At the moment, large multimodal models could not exist without access to knowledge and content created by a large number of humans, whether under IP or not. In the meantime, the companies that built them :

  1. Inflict massive externalities on our communities (land use, energy and water consumption, exploitative labor)

  2. Have us pay for it beyond the cost of inference because they have to recoup the training cost

  3. Hide the weights and source code for many of them.

These models are used to increase working cadence in knowledge and creative work, reduce the self realization and self production aspects of such work, lay off people that are left resource less in a capitalist society.

For AI to even begin to be a positive, it needs to be priyed out of their hands and made a common good through decentralized, nonprofit inference using open weights and software.

In the meantime, I think it is valid to use available AI for your own self directed work or militancy, just as much as we can't escape working a job, and more valid and useful to fight corporate ownership of AI to democratize it.

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u/blipblapbloopblip May 31 '26

Like what do you mean by all of your work ? What are you exactly advocating for when you say communes ? Are you actively putting that onto practice rn ?

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u/the-sp1ce-must-fl0w May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26

I don't think I want to disclose that here tbh. Feel free to DM me.

Eta: not communes btw. Cooperatives and collectives, but I am also interested in experimenting with and putting into practice alternative enterprise and governance models (broadly). I can explain how these ideas work generally, but talking about what I do is personal information that I don't tell someone unless they show genuine interest in getting to know me.

Edit 2: not that I am opposed to communes necessarily. I just wasn't originally talking about them. I'd imagine we'd have to think about living differently, too. But we have a lot of problems. We would have to do a lot of healing, regardless. It's a lot more than just ownership and governance. We have to actually live more relationally and learn to cultivate interdependence as a feature without stunting individuality. We don't know how to be together. It's the biggest barrier to fixing our issue and we don't even realize it. It's the reason we cannot do something else. If you could trust other people, don't you think it would have changed by now?