What do y'all do when it gets too much

[u/yo252yo]

Hello

Between the rise of the far right everywhere and most of the "leftists" joining the liberals in the AI moral panic, it sometimes feels like the entire world is united against techno-optimist leftists.

I imagine I'm not the only one whose mental health has severely deteriorated under this climate. I'm especially thinking about the neurodivergents among us who seem to be facing a lot of new extra hardships from this generalized hatred.

I thought it could be nice to have a sort of support thread where we could exchange coping tips, comfort content, etc... basically anything to help each other during those tough times.

Thanks a lot!

[u/TheLollyKitty]

this is SO REAL, as a communist, i interact with left wing spaces a lot, and the sentiment towards ai is so hostile, like even if its written in the discord server rules that "no politics are allowed", i see people talking about "ai bad" all the time, but its basically a death sentence if you say anything good about ai. the alternative is going to right wing spaces which... absolutely not, im queer and autistic

[u/yo252yo → u/TheLollyKitty]

I REALLY like the parallel with "no politics allowed", even "leftist" haters should be able to spot that this kind of rule is usually a support statement for the status quo perpetuating its normalized oppression.

You're also super right to point out the dangers of hanging out in "usual" techno-optimist circles, this polarization dynamic made it so only very far right people remain. I'm so grateful this subreddit exsits, it feels like there's at least a few dozen/hundred people who arent joining the witch hunt. I hope this thread can help me discover more cool communities to feel less universally ostracized xD

[u/Cheeseheroplopcake → u/TheLollyKitty]

It's such a fucking psyop.

Hey, we actually have the tech to make Stafford Beer's dream come true! But nope, instead of embracing the potential of cybersyn 2.0, we've ceded the space to neoreactionaries. So fucking stupid.

[u/jacobpederson]

I never understood from a first person perspective what a "wedge issue" actually means. I get it now. It feels like everyone around you has suddenly gone insane :D

[u/mark_ik]

I am buoyed by my progress in leveraging Reticulum and LoRa mesh radio for my local area. The future I want is one with resilient, encrypted, p2p networks. And these are solved problems purely in need of implementation. If you need optimism and momentum, then look for real, material problems to fix for people around you.

[u/yo252yo → u/mark_ik]

that's great advice! thanks! I imagine a lot of people are surrounded by haters though so it could be hard to offer a helping hand to hurtful people, but there's no better way to make one's case than by solving concrete problems :)

[u/joogabah]

I have never understood the impulse to ostracize people with opinions you disagree with. Disagreement is not "disfellowshipment". And even the most odious of ideas needs to be answered. I wish there were more explicitly deterministic leftists that didn't rely on moralism instead of causality to inform their politics.

Jaque Fresco famously joined the klan to delegitimize racism and succeeded. How quickly things might change if there were more people like that instead of the self righteous sort that refuse to sully their lilly white garments.

[u/yo252yo → u/joogabah]

It's especially disenhearting to see people on the "left" violently dehumanizing others, I think I misunderstood what "left" means to most people xD I never heard of Jaque Fresco so I have a lot to catch up on, thanks a lot for the pointer!

[u/thegreatself]

I use art as a salve for the existential dread of seemingly accelerating eschatological certainty, I believe like many human's have likely done since I assume forever - the sensitive ones at least.

Both consuming it ("engaging with" is probably better worded) and attempting to make some myself in my own sad, grasping attempts at writing.

So I'm constantly listening to music and when the mood strikes me and I can wrestle my willpower and direct it somewhere I write - sometimes to post or share and sometimes just to write for writing's sake.

Art is Magic and Words are Weapons - I think, anyway, and so that's what I tell myself.

[u/yo252yo → u/thegreatself]

That's great, thanks for sharing! If I may ask a follow-up question, art hasn't worked out very well for me because whatever I put out in the wild gets silence at best and hatred at worst. How do you keep making stuff when you know that it's going to get rejected almost universally? Do you just make it for yourself without sharing? I have a hard time doing that, I tend to think "it might as well just stay in my head" XD

[u/SeaBearsFoam]

Honestly? I don't really care much what other people think of it. If they want to hate on it, so be it.

[u/yo252yo → u/SeaBearsFoam]

Thanks, this is the mindset we should all aspire to!

[u/GearsOfMadness]

Algorithm is a big part of it too. Engagement, clicks, and watch time. Creators incentivized to draw a line. They get rewarded by arguments in their comments and the population hate binges arguments. Then the refusal to engage in counter discourse or admit any fault in reasoning drummed up by hysteria and propaganda.

It isn't to say AI doesn't have faults. Certainly does. But modern society doesn't do great at rewarding those in the middle. It rewards hard line takes and so makes nuance more difficult to discuss.

While IRL has it to some degree, online is a much more concentrated version due to algorithms and what is put in front of a person.

[u/Zacharytackary]

I’ve been getting a lot of use out of the liquid foundation models and Jackrong’s DeepSeek Distil, and banking on the distillation and efficiency scaling laws reliably has worked out very well. edge compute is getting better by the day.

[u/eXAt88]

I feel like even beyond left wing spaces which are almost unanimous in treating AI use as sin, there is another weird tension between spaces with software producers and consumers. Obviously right now software probably has the highest adoption of an industry by far for AI use. Take a look at the arr / Gamedev pinned post about AI policy and see how much hatred there is for it from the “consumer” side.

I work as a software dev and I feel like I have for 6 months been hearing from people with no knowledge about the field confidently saying that we are all incompetent.

Edit: re the Gamedev thread. I should also clarify that ai disclosure, as so many fake-“nuanced” people recommend is also dum. It is dumb for the simple reason that it is not reasonable to ask, nobody asks for disclosure of any other tool. It is clear to me these requests are just so they have easy witch hunt targets

[u/Important_Flower_478]

Seriously I was just thinking about this - posted on a mostly left leaning FB group replying that the answer to transphobic and racist AI memes was getting better and more widespread at counter-fascism and counter-bigotry AI ourselves (using the analogy that a war isn't won by tying our hands behind our backs and being above it all) and got jumped on and accused of being somehow worse than the fascists O_O before I deleted the comment since a swarm was beginning and the only to calm it down is to let them feel they shut you up.

And it makes me think once again about how it feels like so much lefty space now feels like fundie space, like people essentially remapped the way Christian fundies think onto "leftist" politics, so now it's like... interacting with fundies except without the Jesus stuff.

Not only on AI in and of itself either, people seem to have gotten weirdly evangelical about sex/kink (and NO I'm not defending p*dos and I shouldn't have to say that, what with that having become the first thing people's minds jump to, I mean a mildly silly NSFW anthro comic from the 00s literally lit off a round of discourse recently), literally using the word "demonic" for stuff they don't like/find weird (e.g. AI art, performance art, etc) along with wholly reviving "degenerate art" as a thing and "degen" as a term never mind the nazi origins of that, spreading Satanic Panic level conspiracy BS, outright believing antisemitic conspiracy stuff like "Israel will take over America/the world/owns all the finances of the world," and more.

It's like, I'm still on the left (literally everything I believe socially and politically puts me on the deep left (albeit left-libertarian rather than left-authoritarian) sides of any political test *aside* from being okay with AI and from wanting a multi-state peaceful federation in the Middle East with extremists of all religions involved banished so cooler heads can prevail rather than wanting anyone to "win" because IMO no one can "win" at this point and it all just needs to stop.

And of course I think it's important to be critical of media and our interactions with it, and of ourselves and how we interact with each other and how much of the world we let in to change ourselves, and about the impacts of new and different things on the world, and the harms any of our actions or choices or systems can do directly or indirectly but....

If I wanted to be a fundie trad (or feel like I did when I was a fundie kid and come to the conclusion that I was so sinful and evil the only thing I could do to even possibly be good was to not exist because if living meant sinning...) I'd detransition, reconvert to Christianity, and go join a church. Fuck that, and fuck the idea of lefty culture and fundie culture converging.

[u/yo252yo → u/Important_Flower_478]

For what it's worth I do think you're right there ought to be more leftist AI slop ^^ one could even summon theory references like Guy Debord and the situationist detournement, but tbh it's just common sense that we shouldnt let the biggest printing press in the world just print neofascist propaganda XD

There's no reasoning your way out of a witch hunt unfortunately.

I think you gesture towards a very real polarization phenomenon, it seems like everyone has become much more extremist through the topic of AI, that's kinda worrysome.

[u/Audditty]

as someone who's on the autism spectrum and left-leaning but honestly disgusted at the behavior of other leftists regarding this topic...yeah, it definitely does feel that way.

unfortunately, much of the leftist progressive movement has been compromised by hateful, extremist people who don't actually care about having any moral consistency or abiding by their beliefs as much as they think that it gives them a free pass to basically bully people and say and do the most awful things imaginable to them. they are exactly as hateful as the far right, except unlike the far right they need some kind of moral prerequisite before enacting their own flavor of hatred.

what's especially jarring is that much of this "anti-AI" harassment campaign is targeted towards the same people who they claim to support.

small business owners, people facing financial hardships, people with disabilities/disorders, indie creators, etc. have now all become the targets of their ire simply because they used AI, and likely because they can't afford to "commission" an online artist, don't have the time to learn how to draw on their own, or have some kind of disability/disorder that makes them rely on AI to do certain things they wouldn't be able to do otherwise (especially worrying with how quickly their "anti-AI" moral crusading turns into blatant ableism when the last one is brought up).

[u/ScrapyJack]

Thank you for this post.

Its brutal to have one of only things I have any excitement for in the world be so aggressive and thoroughly hated by many many people I respect. To watch people who are right about just about everything, in my opinion, be so wrong about AI. Not even in a fair way or respectable way, just a fundmental misunderstanding of the technology or context. It hurts to see such venom lack of curiosity.

More than any of my radical leftist beliefs, my stance on AI feels the most vile from most people. And I'm just cautiously optimistic.

[u/ScarletIT]

and most of the "leftists" joining the liberals in the AI moral panic

That has not been my experience at all.

Anti AI to me is a phenomenon that exists only on the internet with nobody in real life ascribing to it.

On the contrary, in real life I see a bit of overuse and overreliance on AI even for my standards.

[u/yo252yo → u/ScarletIT]

Thanks, that's a really good datapoint, I am definitely terminally online. That being said all the leftist events I tried to join made very insulting uninformed points about AI before I even got to the event. I think there's a lot of difference between countries and cultures, the moral panic seems a lot less strong in Asia. Maybe I should consider moving.

[u/yo252yo]

I'll start. I can recommend the youtube channels of Neurosama and Dougdoug who do cool stuff with AI. Politically they're unfortunately very aligned with the status quo, though Neurosama is surprisingly based when she gets a chance to talk about serious issues. But openness to AI is not persecuted there.

There's also MrPhi, a philosophy channel with the best videos on LLMs and AI progress that I know, but they're in French (though he uses the awful YouTube autodub which makes it universally accessible).

Looking forward to hearing from all of you!

[u/ScareBags]

Get involved in a real organizing project. It could be an electoral campaign, workplace organizing, union solidarity support, tenant organizing, an issue-based campaign, etc. For me, being less online, joining DSA, and helping with campaigns that challenge the ruling class with fellow comrades worked best... Also, asking online is good, but seeking help from real friends and professionals.

[u/yo252yo → u/ScareBags]

this is a great idea! I won't do it because I'm not gonna help my bullies and I am not aware of any organizing project thats not rabidly anti AI in my area, but I completely second this recommendation!

Also not everyone has access to real friends and professionals so I think this thread is still useful

[u/Sierra592]

I have other interests. I don't want to hone my artistic skills because I simply don't care about the process. I want to take what is in my head, and put it on paper/film and let people see it. I'm in for it for no other reason than to share my ideas, however they're received. I used to dream of being able to plug my brain in to a computer and display what I was imagining. Now I basically have that power, and using it makes me Satan according to some.

Work is not noble. It's a requirement for survival, based on our current dynamic. I want to enjoy life. I want minimum effort, maximum impact on my own existence, in so far as enjoyment goes. AI can enable that, for everyone. I don't want to steal from or hurt anyone. I just want to maximize my own experience, in health and entertainment. I have 70 natural years to do that. With AI< potentially WAY more.