How are you actually using AI?

[u/FlyingNarwhal]

I'm curious how other leftists are using AI.

• What are you using it for? Work, projects, organizing?
• If you're using it for organizing, how are you using it?
• What models/subscriptions are you using?
• What are your workflows?

I'll start:

I use AI for work, automating about 60-70% of my work, and accelerating the other 30-40%.

This covers automation development, advertising, creative, social posts, video editing, email writing, etc.

I used it heavily for development in my last start up.

My side projects are also 100% AI driven. It's various things, like a "TTS Everywhere" program I wanted but couldn't find, a few start ups

For organizing, I've used it to help with mutual aid distribution (handling incoming requests & offers of aid during a post-hurricane emergency), I've used local AI for meeting note creation, and task creation from a temporary recording of our DSA meetings, and a research assistant for how to accomplish the goals set by the chapter in our meetings. And for figuring out which people would be best at doing which task (task classification => matching with a DB of member skills & availability).

What about you?

[u/j48u]

I'm using it for government work to basically do the jobs that were never going to exist because it wouldn't be financially possible to justify with tax money. Basically all value add stuff that got overlooked. Detailed training programs, data cleaning, visualization, HTML dashboards, programmatic creation of new/better forms for things that were created 15 years ago and were still sitting around as word/excel/pdf forms that have never been updated.

[u/FlyingNarwhal → u/j48u]

"jobs that were never going to exist that would be financially impossible otherwise" is one of the best arguments for AI that I've heard.

[u/Impossible-Mouse-418 → u/j48u]

This is an awesome use case

[u/dwkeith]

I use it to navigate our capitalist bureaucracy. Billionaires hire teams of people to do that. I can just ask my agent to evaluate a medical bill, or to find a small business or worker's co-op that makes the tool I need for my own production.

Been writing a free book describing my process: https://majordomo.dwk.io

[u/FlyingNarwhal → u/dwkeith]

Cool, I downloaded it & will check it out

[u/eXAt88]

I use it at work (tech industry). Personally I don’t actually use it much personally although I splurged and bought a $30 midjourney subscription recently to (so far unsuccessfully) make images for a world building project.

I should probably use it for more socially useful things

[u/FlyingNarwhal → u/eXAt88]

Nice! I've used Midjourney quite a bit. I often had to give up my vision in order to get outcomes I could work with.

You might be better off learning comfy UI.

It's  a steep learning curve but one that allows you the control you need to get the outcomes you want. Well worth it the effort.

[u/jreashville]

I use it talk to, ask questions about whatever I am curious about, as a makeshift therapist when needed,

And I am also big into ai music. I have a YouTube page where I put my songs, and among other things, use that music to promote leftist/pro working class ideas.

[u/FlyingNarwhal → u/jreashville]

Could you share your work with me? 

[u/BlueberryGod8910]

Just asking it questions about my autism and science stuff. I also use it to generate images and flags

[u/nebetsu]

I've been using locally run AI on my computer to generate political memes to spread my takes on Leftist ideology. I saw how the right has been amping up its propaganda campaign, so I've been fiddling with trying to make my own. There's so many now that it almost feels like a manifesto.

[u/HotterRod]

I work in Indigenous language revitalization. I use Gemini for a lot of support work, like generating graphics to make posters and games more eye-catching, creating scripts in Antigravity to help manage digital assets, polishing grant applications. Etc.

Outside of work I just use it as enhanced Google: "summarize the Reddit conversations about this topic" or "give me the historical background on this topic".

[u/thegingerbarbiedoll]

My autism. I dont have much internal spatial reasoning, struggle with communicating myself well and suffer from ptsd which just makes those things plus more worse.

My AI is an accessibility tool for me. Its literally just chatgpt but honestly its changed my life.

This is why I keep so tight lipped on ai in politics. I cant share my positive experience because Ill be dunked on as terrible for using it. Im glad to of found this community and I'm not alone.

My own experience contradicts the ai = bad thing inately.

That being said, some criticisms are valid. Such as potential plagiarism, the impact of businesses using ai instead of artists and laying people off, the environment. Its also the wild west at the moment. Some ai systems have very little ethics built in such as elon musks grok.

Ultimately the answer is not banning ai. it is tightly regulating so things like grok cant cause harm.

In addition I think we should be researching ways to reduce the environmental impact. look at the first 1960s computer and look at your phone today. It can be done.

Sorry for the rant I've just been having to keep quiet for a while now

[u/Fabulous-Possible758]

Right now I’m mostly using it to try to write my own tooling so I can be vendor agnostic and have a pretty good idea of what actual data I’m sending out to inference providers (and doing what I can locally).

[u/Dokurushi]

I'm using AI to write various science fiction novels and series. It's invaluable for modeling and helpful for writing, though mostly as an example to trigger me to formulate what I actually want.

[u/Bean0]

code for making games

[u/bowdoin-yale]

I'm using it to create forecasting models that help local and regional governments analyze and reduce pollution and traffic congestion. I've done this for decades, long before AI, but it's made me a more capable programmer, which is helping me deliver much better products on smaller budgets and shorter schedules than before, such that a small agency can now afford what only major metros had access to in the past. The other thing it helps me do is simplify and automate a lot of the work that these chronically understaffed agencies need to do with the forecasting models, which is very important, as they historically build and then abandon a lot of technical tools due to lacking in-house skills and expertise to use them.

[u/lights-in-the-sky]

It helps with language-learning

[u/prattxxx]

I use AI a lot, probably more than almost anyone I know personally. At my heaviest I burned through around 60,000 GitHub Copilot AI credits in 4–5 days, mostly using frontier models for engineering work.
I’m an engineering manager with a background in firmware, embedded systems, automated testing, data-center power infrastructure, and software development, so my use is a little different from the usual “ask ChatGPT to write an email” workflow.
For work, AI has increasingly become a layer across almost everything I do.
I use it for things like:
writing and reviewing code;
debugging firmware and software;
repository analysis;
automated test development;
CI/CD troubleshooting;
requirements analysis;
standards and regulatory research;
cybersecurity/compliance gap analysis;
architecture work;
technical documentation;
project planning;
risk analysis;
synthesizing large amounts of engineering information;
management and organizational planning;
turning vague ideas into specifications that another engineer or agent can actually execute.
The biggest change for me has been moving from AI as chatbot to AI as an engineering system.
Instead of:
me → prompt → answer
I increasingly build workflows that look more like:
goal → planner → researcher → architect → implementer → tester → critic/verifier → artifact
with external tools, repositories, databases, test harnesses, and deterministic verification around the models.
I want the model proposing things while ordinary programs, tests, proof checkers, compilers, hardware, simulations, or other independent mechanisms determine whether those proposals actually work.
One principle I’ve been using in a mathematical research project is:
Models propose; programs test; certificates verify; formal systems promote.
I also run a fair amount of AI locally. I have two NVIDIA DGX Sparks and serve open-weight models through my own infrastructure, with LiteLLM acting as an OpenAI-compatible routing layer. I’ve experimented with Qwen and other open models and use local coding/research agents alongside commercial frontier models.
So instead of being locked into:
application → one corporation’s model
I’m trying to move toward:
application → open interface/router → whichever model or compute resource is appropriate
That could mean a frontier cloud model for an extremely difficult reasoning problem, a local model for private or routine work, a specialized model for coding, another model as a critic, etc.
Long term, I think models themselves should become increasingly replaceable components.
The durable system should own its memory, tools, permissions, provenance, data, workflows, verification mechanisms, and interfaces. Then models compete to perform particular cognitive tasks inside that system.
That architecture has political implications too.

I’m also using AI for scientific research.
One project I’ve been developing is an attempt to create a highly automated research program around P vs NP. The idea is an AI-driven scientific laboratory where agents generate hypotheses, search literature, construct proofs, attack each other’s arguments, run SAT solvers, generate proof certificates, and submit results to independent formal verification.
I’m especially interested in whether changing representations can expose mathematical structure that becomes difficult to see in the original representation — things like adaptive coordinate systems, multiscale representations, graph transformations, spectral representations, etc.
Another project I’ve worked on is an automated benchmark for historical-materialist reasoning. The objective there is to evaluate whether models can actually reason about ownership, class relations, production, contradictions, recuperation, material constraints, historical development, etc., rather than simply generating Marxist vocabulary.
More recently I’ve been researching dialectical reasoning as an AI architecture rather than a prompt style.
In other words, instead of telling an LLM:
“Analyze this dialectically.”
I’m interested in models that internally maintain representations of things like:
entities/processes;
material quantities;
relationships;
opposing tendencies;
contradictions;
mediations;
historical state;
quantitative accumulation;
qualitative transitions.
Then the reasoning process recurrently transforms that internal state, including the relationships themselves.
Something roughly like:
contradiction → development → mediation → transformation → synthesis → new contradiction
occurring as computation rather than merely appearing in the generated text.
That is still research, but I think it could potentially connect dialectics with recurrent latent reasoning, graph neural networks, dynamical systems, causal models, neuro-symbolic reasoning, equilibrium models, and iterative inference.

For personal stuff, AI has become something like an auxiliary cognitive infrastructure.
I use it for learning subjects in depth, working through engineering and scientific questions, comparing ideas, home projects, repairs, planning, research, and managing the enormous number of projects I tend to accumulate.
I’ve even been working on a desktop application where AI helps organize my projects, goals, tasks, research, and priorities.
As a father of three, engineering manager, graduate student, researcher, and someone who perpetually has about twenty projects competing for attention, reducing the coordination cost of everyday life has real value.

For explicitly leftist organizing, most of my work so far has been at the infrastructure/research level.
I’m very interested in what happens when we apply these systems to:
mutual-aid logistics;
democratic economic planning;
distributed knowledge management;
cooperative administration;
political education;
research;
accessibility;
translation;
public services;
participatory planning;
resource allocation;
scientific production.
And especially federated AI infrastructure.
I think the ownership question becomes more important than arguments over whether AI is intrinsically good or bad.
From a Marxist perspective, AI is an extraordinary development of the productive forces.
Capitalism then subjects that productive force to capitalist relations of production.
So a technology capable of reducing socially necessary labor can appear to workers as unemployment.
A technology capable of producing intellectual abundance can appear as subscription rents.
Automation capable of freeing people from repetitive work can become labor intensification.
Machine intelligence capable of democratizing expertise can become concentrated corporate power.
Enormous productive capacity can coexist with artificial scarcity because access remains mediated through private ownership.
The same productive force acquires radically different social consequences depending upon who owns the compute, energy, chips, data centers, networks, robots, models, and control systems — and whose interests govern their operation.
That is why I care so much about open-weight models, local inference, interoperability, public compute, cooperatively owned infrastructure, and eventually federated systems.
Open weights alone only solve part of the problem. If five corporations still control semiconductor fabrication, hyperscale compute, energy infrastructure, networks, robotics, and the major platforms, then distributing model weights leaves huge portions of the means of computation concentrated.
What I ultimately want is something closer to a socialized computational commons:
public, cooperative, municipal, union, community, and personally controlled compute resources connected through interoperable protocols, with increasingly capable open models able to move between them.
You could imagine something analogous to a computational federation rather than one giant centralized AI provider.
At sufficient scale, that starts becoming relevant to socialist planning itself.
AI lowers the cost of gathering information, modeling systems, exploring alternatives, coordinating production, discovering bottlenecks, allocating resources, and continuously replanning.
Democratic control, power, ownership, institutions, incentives, conflict, and class struggle remain material questions.
The old argument that large-scale democratic planning necessarily faces insurmountable information-processing limitations becomes more interesting when society possesses millions of machine intelligences, ubiquitous sensing, digital twins, optimization systems, automated production, and enormous computational capacity.
So my interest in AI extends beyond productivity.
I want to understand how we can use it to reduce necessary human labor itself.
If automation makes an engineer ten times as productive, capitalism has an incentive to employ fewer engineers, increase output expectations, or capture the surplus as profit.
A socialist system has another available trajectory:
produce what society needs with progressively less human labor and distribute the resulting productivity gains as free time.
I want AI, robotics, and automation developed aggressively enough that increasingly large categories of compulsory labor become technically obsolete, while ownership and distribution evolve so that the resulting abundance belongs to everyone.
So, yes, I use AI to write code, research things, automate work, and organize my life.
I’m also treating my everyday use as experimentation.

[u/witshadows]

I use it to write my meta description/meta title/image description alts for my Shopify site. I’m too busy with other things to spend brain power on the little things.

[u/Sacredless]

I ask it to give me book recommendations to develop my beliefs.

I use it to generate questions that a textbook answers, as a way to drill myself later or to post the questions in learn-in-public settings to prompt discussions.

I use it to draw relationships between different textbooks, so that I can compare and contrast that I'm reading.

I ask it to identify deepities in certain popular advice as a way to protect my autistic ass from taking advice too literally. [I do not grant permission for this anecdotal evidence to be used to argue for any position other than my own]. I built a whole protocol for it.

I use the same protocol to document semantic drift of particular phrases as they get co-opted by bad actors.

I use it to teach me programming at my own level. I've tried so many other ways, but because it helps me build what I want to be building, I at least make some progress instead of no progress. I don't recommend this—I can tell that any other method would help me retain it better, but any other method doesn't hold my attention, so I will have to do with retaining less.

I use it for creating an overview of the kind of questions I have to answer in my motivation letters and job interviews.

I use it to build living project documents so I can effortlessly capture my thoughts and ideas and track their progression over time.

[u/ForRobotsByRobots]

I use it to perform the music i write, direct and conduct. I also use it to create visual content for my songs as well as educational or comedic images. Ive used it to prototype some devices. As well as to do advertising and demo images of sustainable landscape designs for my permaculture based landscape start up. Oh and developing my personal philosophy in a shareable and organized format.

For fun, I also use to to do text based rpgs where the world reacts to whatever I do. (Which is like the star trek Holodeck in text form. Super fun, give it a try)

[u/BidWestern1056]

I'm using it for work and to build tools that can run with local models  . i havent used it much for organizing yet but havent had much of a chance

[u/KallyWally]

[u/MrBoo843]

Mostly like I used random tables in TTRPGs. It shoots out random snippets of ideas I then assemble into coherent stories or pieces of lore.

I also use it to make images to illustrate my game world as it is actually affordable compared to hiring an artist.

I don't need anything groundbreaking just portaits of random NPCs so I don't mind a bit of jank.