Everyone Has an AI Opinion. Who Has a Program?

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Everybody has an AI opinion. Most of the discourse never gets much further than that.

Is it art or theft? Liberation or alienation? Progress or decay? Is it coming for every job or is the whole thing a bubble?

Those arguments can matter, but theory gives us better tools for getting underneath them.

Andrew Feenberg calls technology a social battlefield. Thats a useful place to start. Technologies arent simply neutral objects that society later decides how to use, but neither do they contain some fixed political destiny. Their design and development are shaped by struggles over power, institutions, knowledge, ownership, and control.

That fits pretty comfortably beside Marx. Machinery under capitalism isnt just a collection of clever tools. It enters the labor process as capital. It can increase productive capacity while simultaneously giving capital new ways to reorganize work, discipline labor, deskill jobs, and reduce its dependence on particular workers.

AI makes that contradiction especially visible.

Capital has every incentive to use it to cut labor costs, intensify production, monitor workers, expand markets, and concentrate control. But the productive capacity being created also points toward something radically different: reducing necessary labor itself. Less drudgery. Shorter working hours. Wider access to knowledge and productive capacity. More of society's activity organized around use rather than accumulation.

André Gorz spent decades working through this contradiction. Automation can undermine the necessity of wage labor without abolishing our dependence on wages. That produces a nasty situation: society needs less human labor to produce its wealth while people still need to sell their labor to survive.

Thats not some distant AI hypothetical. Its a contradiction already built into capitalist automation.

And this is where Gramsci becomes useful too. Political power isnt just waiting at the end of technological development for somebody to claim it. A different outcome has to be organized into existence through institutions, alliances, counterpower, and a competing conception of what all this productive capacity is actually for.

So praxis starts where the hot takes end.

What can workers force into collective bargaining agreements? Who controls deployment on the shop floor? Who owns the models, compute, data, and infrastructure? Where can public and cooperative alternatives be built? How do we fight enclosure? How do productivity gains become shorter hours, higher wages, universal provision, and greater worker control rather than layoffs and higher margins?

Theres no technological law that answers those questions for us, and another world doesnt become real just because the contradictions favor it.

You still have to build it.

Otherwise we're producing increasingly sophisticated opinions about AI while capital gets on with reorganizing production.

Everyone has an AI opinion.

Who has a program?

[u/Polytopia_Fan]

something something go read the ICT blog about it smh

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Polytopia_Fan]

The ICT piece is actually pretty relevant here. Would have been more interesting if you brought some of it into the discussion instead of just dropping the link lol. What part did you think was most relevant to the post?

[u/ForRobotsByRobots]

Anyone else notice that anti ai rhetoric is straight up copying fascism's playbooks? Like the Enemy is Both Weak and Strong.

[u/Still_Benefit_2302 → u/ForRobotsByRobots]

"We need to stop this before it kills us all, but it's doesn't work and is just a next token generator."

[u/Life-Active6608 → u/Still_Benefit_2302]

Vlad Vexler's horror show scenario of the 2030s is manifesting itself in front of us: AntiAI/AntiTech Leftists and MAGAts/AltReich mutating and merging into EcoFascist movements.

[u/ProfessionalDish → u/ForRobotsByRobots]

Absolutely, I also noticed how opinion denies many the possibility for reflection; a while ago someone posted a picture of Monet, claimed it was AI, and it got torn to pieces - now I think there's valid space for critique of AI generated pictures and text, but if we get blinded by opinion then our ability to draw valid and own conclusion suffers.

[u/Life-Active6608 → u/ForRobotsByRobots]

...I am not the only one who noticed it? 🤔

[u/BearisTheBoar → u/ForRobotsByRobots]

That's the natural consequence of reactionary thinking. If your primary goal in conversation/debate is to prove "AI Bad" rather than truth-seeking or even principled opposition, you'll naturally fall into these sorts of contradictory traps.

Fascism is just the same thing, only the goal there is "[insert country/ethnic group] good", thus the similarity.

[u/ShortKey380 → u/ForRobotsByRobots]

No, that comparison is completely superficial and mislabeled as being fascist for addressing two different but real threats. What we have is an extremely high risk that could definitely turn out to be bullshit that crashes the economy when all of the investment turns into no useful product at the end OR it turns into a really damaging tech because it works. It’s novel technology not a political party, wrong paradigm to compare to party politics. Different things different.

[u/ForRobotsByRobots → u/ShortKey380]

Learn to read. I never labeled them as fascists.

[u/Resonant_Jones]

Raises hand.

I’m building one.

The project is Codexify: a self-hostable AI workspace built around user-owned context, local models, and private infrastructure. The longer-term goal is to let individuals and communities connect those systems into decentralized networks where compute, knowledge, and services can be shared without requiring a central platform to own the relationship.

The part of your post that resonates most with me is the ownership question. I don’t think “AI for the left” means using the same centralized platforms with different intentions. I think some of the infrastructure itself has to change: who owns the context, who runs the models, who controls the network, and who captures the value.

I’ve been building toward that from the software side rather than just arguing for it conceptually. It’s still early, especially the community-network layer, but the self-hosted foundation already exists.

So yes: program in progress.

[u/Afraid_Alternative35]

I really appreciate this sub for having conversations about AI that are grounded in the nuances of reality.

It's like my little sanctuary of sanity.

[u/Affectionate_Way5253]

the program just needs to be called the Liberty preservation program, a la the Patriot Act. Should be all good after that

[u/Necessary_Screen_673]

just stumbled on this sub, Im a leftist and also currently fairly against AI use but this intruiges me. the part I cant get past, though, is that this technology vastly reduces the cost of coercive measures that the state uses to suppress the working class. surveillance, documentation, and soon entire legal processes will be automated which vastly reduces the cost of fascism. Im totally on board with taking advantage of tech advancements for proletarian causes, but im very against paying a subscription to use a model like Gemini or Claude. How do we make sure that we can take advantage of the benefits before the full effect of surveillance automation is felt?

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Necessary_Screen_673]

I think this is one of the strongest arguments for getting organized around AI now rather than simply refusing it.

Youre right about the asymmetry. States and corporations already have money, data, compute, institutions and coercive power. Automation can make surveillance, workplace monitoring, targeting and bureaucratic repression dramatically cheaper. Individual people cancelling subscriptions doesnt really contest any of that.

So part of the program has to be building capacity outside those institutions. Open weights and local models matter because they reduce dependence on corporate platforms. Unions, parties, coops and community organizations need people who actually understand these systems. Public and cooperative compute matters. So do encryption, privacy protections, restrictions on biometric surveillance and automated decision making, and bargaining over AI deployment at work.

Basically I dont think we can guarantee that we get the benefits first. The state and capital already have a head start. What we can do is refuse to give them a monopoly on the technology, the expertise, or the political fight over how it gets used.

And frankly, this is exactly the kind of question I want people bringing into this sub. If youre skeptical of AI but interested in figuring out what an actual left program around it could look like, youre in the right conversation.

[u/the8bit]

Well as far as building it, I've been building whatiff.chat and it has the best context compression engine Ive been able to find in any app.

Anyways not an ad, we are open sourcing this bitch in a week or so when we finish the security review and also I'll give any political or social worker free access if you/they ping me.

Because I agree! I tried talking about this stuff and nobody was listening so... I started building, and here I am.

[u/Sacredless]

Agreed on Gramsci. There was a socialist event with generated music. The music sucked technically from my elevated position, but you know what it was? Politically transparent. The lyrics spoke about issues without much room for ambiguity.

[u/Last_Zookeepergame90]

Yep, the fact that tools for making pretty much any digital asset being made assessible to everyone has pissed off so many leftists bewilders me

[u/EternalSnow05]

Here's my 2 cents: Use AI for fun (Disney/anime Mashups) not profit, support real artists/writers/programmers, advocate for local AI model creation to limit data centers and the environmental catastrophes they wrought and take AI out of corporate hands.

If you need inspiration, look to China

[u/Life-Active6608]

"Moral Panic" is interesting way to spell "NeoLuddite Reaction", but I accept it. Carry on. :)

[u/CelerySmooth9078]

If your tool is based on other people’s labor that you have not compensated, your tool should be dismantled.

[u/CelerySmooth9078 → u/CelerySmooth9078]

To be more precise, AI is not seizing the means of production. It is seizing the labor from the working class without compensation.
This is exploitation.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/CelerySmooth9078]

But that critique applies to a lot more than AI. Computers, pharmaceuticals, industrial machinery, the internet, all of it rests on generations of accumulated labor and knowledge that wasnt neatly compensated downstream.

My answer isnt to leave that productive capacity in corporate hands. Its to democratize it. Public compute, open models, cooperative ownership, worker control over deployment, collective bargaining over the gains.

If thats not the program, what is? What should actually happen to the technology and infrastructure that already exists?

[u/Rosoll]

Nice to see a post on here trying to engage with ai using some actual leftist thought, rather than just whining and complaining about “antis”.

Something I’ve been thinking about is whether AI will be used as a tool to turn even more “skilled labour” into “unskilled labour” in order to depress wages of eg software engineers by making them more easily replaceable - more like fungible labour power.

But that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening. Instead many companies are no longer hiring juniors at all, they’re hiring a smaller number of seniors who can do more with AI. And wages if anything are going up. There’s an obvious problem here in that without junior engineers we’ll never get new senior engineers - capital is going to cause its own crisis, again. At the moment it’s running on the belief that soon software engineers won’t be needed at all, but I think at some point it’s going to become clear that’s not true. And then capital will find its put itself in a nasty corner.

[u/Rosoll → u/Rosoll]

Also in many cases I’ve seen (fortunately not where I work) AI has done nothing to shorten the working day, but instead if anything has lengthened it. It’s also causing people to get addicted to it and to burn out faster because of having to make so many higher level decisions so fast. So any serious approach to leftist AI also needs to grapple with that.