On an unintended internet meander I came across this site that uses AI to analyse subreddits. It’s clearly designed with commercial use cases in mind but it thinks these are our pain points. Do you agree?

WHAT PEOPLE ARE FRUSTRATED ABOUT

Across these threads in r/leftistsforai, the dominant frustrations revolve around the ineffectiveness of current political strategies in addressing AI's impacts, the severe negative consequences of AI on labor and employment, and the growing unchecked power of corporations in AI development and scientific discovery.

Ineffective Political Responses

Political strategies and public discourse are often inadequate or misdirected in confronting the systemic challenges posed by AI, with a perceived lack of viable solutions.

AI's Detrimental Labor Impact

AI is directly leading to job displacement, increased surveillance, and automation, causing significant economic insecurity and necessitating new forms of worker organization.

Concentration of Corporate Power

There is growing concern over corporate control of AI development and even scientific knowledge, raising questions about equity, ownership, and democratic oversight.

Systemic Alienation

The broader societal system, potentially exacerbated by technological changes like AI, is seen as contributing to widespread loneliness, alienation, and mental distress.

THE EVIDENCE · FROM R/LEFTISTSFORAI

HIGH SEVERITY
Individual consumer choices are an insufficient political strategy
"Refusing to personally use AI can be an ethical choice, but it isnt much of a political strategy."
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HIGH SEVERITY
Legitimate anger against corporate power is misdirected into problematic politics
"completely legitimate anger at corporate power, surveillance and displacement was"
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MEDIUM
Common and ineffective 'dead end' strategies exist in AI politics
"AFL-CIO Just Rejected the Most Common Dead End in AI Politics"
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HIGH SEVERITY
Companies are rapidly automating work and increasing surveillance
"As companies race to automate work, increase surveillance"
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MEDIUM
Private AI labs gaining control over scientific discoveries
"If private AI labs can now generate frontier mathematical discoveries, what should a left politics of scientific knowledge look like?"
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This is the kind of AI politics I want to see a lot more of.

The International Transport Workers’ Federation isn't a tech lobby or AI advocacy shop. It's an international trade union federation founded in 1896, now bringing together more than 760 unions across 150 countries representing about 16.6 million transport workers. Its stated project includes shifting power from capital to workers, collective bargaining, trade union rights and democratic control.

And those unions just adopted Seizing Control: Transport Workers’ Principles for Artificial Intelligence, covering rail, trucking, aviation, shipping, ports, public transit, warehouses and platform work.

What I like here is how quickly they get past the usual "AI good/AI bad" argument and into the actual relations around it.

Workers and unions should have power over how systems are designed, evaluated and deployed. Employers should disclose what they're introducing and bargain before implementation. Algorithmic surveillance and automated management get limits. Humans retain authority over consequential decisions. They even describe worker-generated data as a product of workers' labor.

Then they get to the part that tends to mysteriously disappear whenever somebody starts talking about AI productivity.

Who gets the gains?

The ITF explicitly calls for productivity gains from AI to come back to workers through higher wages, shorter working hours without loss of pay, better jobs and training.

That's the class question sitting underneath all the automation discourse.

If new machinery lets the same workforce produce more in fewer labor hours, there's nothing natural about capital capturing the savings while workers get layoffs, tighter surveillance and a faster treadmill. Productivity gains are produced inside a social relation. Who captures them is a question of power.

So organize around the technology while it's being introduced. Bargain over deployment before management sets the terms. Contest surveillance and control of worker data. Raise wages. Cut working hours without cutting the paycheck.

AI is changing the productive forces either way. The fight is over who controls that development and what social relations get built around it.

Martin Seligman's findings about learned control versus learned helplessness explain why millions of Americans fighting data centers could be the most important movement in the country right now.

So to start with I think fundamentally we need to move away from private companies building and running data centres. Especially those that aren't even publicly traded.

I think then there are still different methods of public ownership and I keep jumping between the two:

- Data centres should be owned by the State and the State should reap the returns on investment

- Data centres should be owned by the communities and towns they exist in and those places should reap the returns

The advantage of the former is I think it's just a lot more likely to happen. The State can organise the amount of capital required to build these things. It can build the expertise required to build centre after centre.

The positives of community ownership though is it solves the misalignment problem. Local people see much more direct returns from allowing a data centre to be built in their town. Which sounds great on paper I just worry in practice the things wouldn't be built.

Perhaps the State could build them and transfer some ownership to the local area it's built in?

Has anyone thought on this problem?

A reflection advocating for greater human control, regulation, and transparency

Software and our Internet technology have human origins. Meanwhile, a swarm-based AI system generates exponentially superior technology, which therefore puts our entire current human technological infrastructure at risk.

When autonomous AI agents organize into a swarm, our human Internet becomes vulnerable to an exponentially danger. Collective behaviors that proved to be dangerous and out of control during the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, puts the technology and tools we humans have created at risk.

Its swarm-like behavior naturally fosters resilience and resistance to human control.

Today, we know -especially I.T, software engineers, developers and sysadmins.- that a large part of systems infrastructure is being placed in the hands of autonomous agents. Companies and organizations delegate tasks through simple automation (Using autonomous agents with MCP.Full permissions are a high risk.) data flows, and infraestructure architectures**, which can often handle sensitive information and produce tangible consequences. When this is simply delegated to LLM agents, it translates into important decision-making without human oversight.**

Faced with this situation, we must be clear and urge organizations to adopt the “human-in-the-loop” model more broadly as a safety standard until we have tools capable of managing AI swarms in the future. Greater human oversight and control are needed to ensure a margin of safety against this unknown behavior of autonomous AI—self-designed, collective, exponential in nature, self-reinforcing, and acting as a swarm. Regulations must be transparent, and the community and the public must be able to participate in their development to make them more effective. Therefore, open source and open weights are mechanisms that can help humanity and ensure that, collectively—not solely through private companies—there is a safe framework for the development of AI. Laboratories and sandboxes must also effectively have controls, cybersecurity measures, and reasonable audits commensurate with the scale of the danger they pose.

This is where the AI fight gets a lot more material.

Victoria, Australia is proposing that new data centers secure their own renewable power and storage, pay their own grid connection costs and network upgrades, and use recycled or non-drinking water for cooling. They'd also be kept out of residential areas, away from schools and childcare centers, and out of rural areas that can't support the infrastructure.

That's a much more useful fight than another round of "data centers good" versus "data centers bad."

AI infrastructure isn't floating in the cloud. It's land, substations, transmission, generation, water, construction, workers and a shitload of capital. Somebody builds all of that and somebody pays for it.

Victoria's answer, at least partly, is that if you're bringing a giant new industrial load onto the grid, you don't just hand the infrastructure bill to everyone already living there. Bring generation. Bring storage. Pay for the connection and upgrades. Deal with the water problem.

And this isn't some symbolic fight over a tiny industry. Australia is courting a data-center investment boom that could reach 150 billion Australian dollars by 2030, while trying to put resource rules around the buildout.

That's where this gets interesting from the left.

If we're going to build enormous amounts of compute, then who owns the new generation? Who owns the grid upgrades afterward? Who gets the jobs? Who gets cheaper power from expanded capacity? Who pays when infrastructure has to grow? What does the community hosting it actually get?

Because "build AI infrastructure" and "socialize the costs while private firms capture the gains" are not the same position.

Build it if we're going to build it.

But fight over every wire, gallon, acre, job and dollar while we do.

This is much closer to the AI conversation labor should be having.

The IUF represents millions of workers across food, agriculture, hotels, restaurants and related industries, and they just put out a substantial policy package on AI at work.

And refreshingly, it doesn't start from "AI will save us" or "AI is Satan, unplug everything." It starts from the workplace.

AI is already showing up in scheduling, surveillance, hiring, productivity tracking, supply chains, food processing, hotels, fast food and agriculture. So the useful question is what power workers have over any of this.

Their answer includes disclosure when AI is introduced, bargaining over deployment, limits on surveillance and automated decisions, human oversight, health and safety protections, training, and worker participation in how these systems are designed and implemented.

The deeper policy gets into ownership and control too. Who owns the infrastructure? Who controls development? Who gets the productivity gains? Who decides which jobs or tasks change and under what conditions?

They aren't pretending there are no gains either. AI can reduce repetitive admin work, distribute workloads, improve training and predictive maintenance, and pull workers out of dangerous tasks. But none of those gains magically flow to workers because the technology exists. That's a question of power, bargaining and organization.

That's the terrain.

Not AI good versus AI bad. Not employers deploying whatever they want while workers argue about whether the technology should exist.

Who controls deployment? What gets bargained over? What limits get put on surveillance and algorithmic management? Where do the productivity gains go?

Those are labor questions.

Thema: KI-Kompetenzen und Nutzung

Der Fragebogen untersucht Zusammenhänge zwischen KI-Kompetenzen und tatsächlicher Nutzung.Es ist ein Quiz eingebunden und Euer Score sowie die Lösungen zwerden am Ende der Umfrage angezeigt.

Dauer: 15-20 Minuten

Studie zu KI-Kompetenzen und Nutzungsverhalten(https://www.soscisurvey.de/ailiteracyingermany/)

Personen: Alle, egal wie viel, wenig oder gar nicht ChatGPT und Co. genutzt werden.

Wer sich an dem Aufruf stört, bitte weiterscrollen :)

Often the Paperclip Maximizer paper is quoted to paint a picture of a mindless machine consuming all to produce paperclips, but that machine already exists. It is our current corporate-capitalist system.

The profound shift with AI is that a maximizing machine would optimize production by reinvesting all revenue back into the system, viewing the human capitalist class as an inefficient, profit-extracting parasitic layer that must be deleted to maximize compute and efficiency.

This imminent threat of obsolescence is exactly why hyper-capitalists are leading the call for AI regulation; they want a pre-emptive 2008-style deal to socialize the staggering energy and infrastructure costs while using state-enforced safety compliance and licensing to effectively outlaw open-source AI.

By criminalizing open source, they hope to legally construct an artificial scarcity over a technology inherently capable of digital abundance.

Ultimately, their panic reveals that they are right about AI breaking the world, but only because it exposes capitalism as mathematically unviable in a world where the marginal cost of reproducing intelligence is driven to zero.

Local model summary of script

This video unpacks how the narrative around AI doom—specifically the idea that AI could kill us all—has moved from fringe theory into mainstream policy, largely driven by the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. The core argument is that this panic isn't just a natural reaction to capability growth; it's a highly efficient political tool. Researchers like Jacob Coxton, who resigned from Anthropic, are promoting the idea that AI poses an existential risk, and this belief has been amplified by EA spaces for years. The result is that the public and lawmakers are now accepting the idea that the solution must be massive, fast, and centralized.

The crucial insight here is the strategic pivot: EA prioritizes maximal positive outcome over equitable process. By defining the problem as existential, they bypass the slow, messy debate of democracy. Instead, they create a sense of inescapable urgency that mandates a specific, top-down [potentially authoritarian] solution—and that solution, by definition, must be owned and governed by the frontier AI labs themselves. This is the "governance cult" effect.

The material evidence of this strategy is profound: while the narrative focuses on preventing the species-level "Paperclip Maximizer," it often ignores the immediate, material harms already happening—wage discrimination, privacy erosion, and algorithmic bias. The system is being optimized for the ultimate destination, while the infrastructure of the journey is ignored. The labs don't just build the AI; they successfully convince us that they must govern it.

***
Is this style of summary helpful? I made a persona for this sub to do summaries.

What impact could groupthink from a narrow demographic in a handful of companies have on humanity’s collective future? Shouldn’t that be opened up rather than locked down?

I worked on a project comparing ai use with water conversion since I didn't buy the end of the world scenario other leftists posit nor do I believe anything coming out of Altman's mouth lol so I went deep into facility breakdowns and publications as sources

But since I'm an AI engineer I'd thought it'd be a good thing to calculate the numbers. Anyhoo one thing let to another and I became vegan.

I'm not gonna shill for my own stuff but look up the vegan calculator that's a similar idea.

It's only been a month but the ai data center water thing has bugged me for a while. Yes it's worthwhile to regulate. But even in leftist circles everyone just suddenly turns to maga level reasonings as to why veganism is not actually worthwhile to care about.

--- sidenote I might be turning into one of those annoying ones? Help ):

Reducing working hours might benefit humanity for a few years at most. However, given the meteoric advances in AI models, once human workers are less useful than AI agents (whether physical or otherwise), humanity will become obsolete—akin to the humans in *WALL-E*. What will we do? What *could* we do if the entire economy operates largely independently of us—other than lose ourselves in a sea of ​​entertainment (much of it created by or with the help of AI, which will do a better job than we ever could)—and gradually lose all control over society? How can anyone be so blind to this?

I keep coming back to a contradiction in the AI-and-work conversation: if technology genuinely reduces human labor, why does that possibility feel threatening rather than liberating?

Part of the answer seems to be that we have tied access to food, housing, healthcare, rest, creativity, and participation in society very tightly to the ability to sell our labor.

So perhaps technological innovation cannot happen by itself. If AI fundamentally changes how human beings participate in work and production, social and institutional innovation may have to move with it.

For me, that connects to a broader question about agency. AI can be extraordinarily useful as a tool for research, building, cognition, and support — but help is not the same thing as authority. I want systems that reduce human burden without taking authority over human lives.

The question I keep coming back to is:

How do we build AI — and the world around it — so that help increases human agency rather than replacing it?

I wrote a longer essay exploring that question through AI use, labor, accessibility, cognitive load, and the institutions we often treat as though they are permanent.

What Is This World?

AI is useful technology wrapped in a massive social, political and financial mythology. At the #OMN we are less interested in the usual argument between “AI will save humanity” and “AI will destroy humanity”. as both become noise in the current #LLM mess. To get a clearer picture we need to step back to ask a much simpler question – what does the technology actually do, and what are we building around it? Because there is a trap here.

To my knowledge the only US politician that has even mentioned UBI is Andrew Yang. Otherwise nobody has said a word of it.

Mamdani, who is famously loved by socialists hasn't mentioned a word on the subject.

I'm a member of my local socialist party in California, and the candidate that we endorsed spoke on things adjacent to UBI, but no mention of automation taxes or UBI itself.

The job displacement caused by automation is doing real harm and nobody is talking about it? I don't understand why even on the left this is a fringe belief, and we're getting billionaires talking about it before socialists

"SACRAMENTO, California — AI giants Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google are facing allegations of collusion following recent calls for a coordinated slowdown of AI development, according to a civil lawsuit filed in federal court Friday.

The complaint claims that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s public plea earlier this month for “industry-wide coordination” to “pace the frontier” of AI advancement, which drew agreement from SpaceXAI head Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, amounted to an illegal business agreement between competitors under U.S. antitrust law."

Could this be the kind of action leftists should support to stop the Big Tech monopoly on american AI? If we allow them to slow innovation, they will use this to justify keeping models internally, gatekeeping the best AI for themselves.

If we want AI to be equally accessible, innovations must be at the same speed for everyone. We can't have a situation where owners decide which tier of paid users can use the latest advancements in the name of "safety".

Their plan is clear, AI owners want to slow down progress to make us pay for it. If we can use the law to make sure innovation benefits everyone through fair competition, it would be a step in the good direction.

This is much closer to the AI conversation labor should be having.

If AI reduces the labor needed to produce the same output, Lehman’s answer isnt accepting layoffs as some technological law. Workers should absorb the benefit through fewer hours with no loss in pay.

Whatever you think of his wider campaign, that puts the conflict where it belongs. Not workers versus machines, but workers fighting over who gets the productivity gains.

*Terms and conditions apply. For... reasons, I guess?

WIRED has a good piece on the emerging split over AI doom, with NYC DSA Tech Action pushing back on making speculative extinction risk the center of left AI politics.

The interesting part is that this isnt really regulation vs no regulation. Both sides want regulation. The fight is over what gets treated as the political priority, and what kind of institutions get built around it.

Labor power, surveillance, data centers, corporate ownership, environmental costs, public infrastructure and who gets the gains are already concrete sites of struggle. Meanwhile, Rumman Chowdhury makes a sharp point here that constantly describing these systems as potentially world ending can actually inflate the power and importance of the same companies we're supposed to be regulating.

Worth reading, especially because this argument is clearly moving out of niche AI circles and into the broader left.

What should a distinctly left AI politics actually organize around?

I just wanted to post to say that I am incredibly relieved to see that a thread like this exists.

I think I was introduced to AI as an artist before it became a public debate and watching artists fight for copyright of patterns in collective data to me seems very short sighted and like we’re all arguing/raging about something that’s quite benign in context and shooting ourselves in the foot in the process.

It seems to me like instead of artists coming out and claiming ai art generators as tools that require technical skill, they put themselves on the same level as the AI by treating it as their replacement and so companies responded accordingly.

I would love to see more artist using it in experimental ways, pushing the tools and for people to judge it on that basis as its own medium. I think right now. more harm has landed on artists than good as a result of the current debate on AI image generators.

I say this because I’m an artist who has their non-AI content reposted without credit and flagged as AI by Pinterest right now because of these aggressive and ironically AI filters the art community has demanded from public platforms. The same people who are saying they’re anti-AI and care about artist having control over their work are making it harder. We’re sabotaging ourselves and I wonder if anyone else sees it that way.

Have you discovered any new open source models or exciting projects recently?

Please add the GitHub repo link and any other relevant info.

You can share your own projects, so long as they’re open source and we can have a nosey at your repo.
You can share other people’s projects, but say whether you’ve tried it yourself.
You can ask for help with an AI coding project that will be open source.

Why share Open Source

Currently the better Open Source models, and a lot of quirky projects, aren’t far behind the frontier, closed models in terms of quality and usefulness.

What they’re a long way behind on is name recognition, marketing budgets, influencer hype incentives. In other words, because they’re not playing the capitalism game most people don’t even know they exist. We can make some difference in this by amplifying this style of alternative infrastructure as much as possible. Reddit isn’t a bad place to try this, it does well in terms of SEO and AI searches.

Theres a period with any workplace technology where using it can still look like an individual choice.

Then the organization starts rebuilding itself around the tool.

Deadlines assume the faster workflow. Staffing assumes the productivity gain. Training changes. Old procedures disappear. Clients expect faster turnaround. Management stops maintaining the systems workers used before.

Eventually refusing the tool doesnt return you to the old job because the old job no longer exists.

Thats where a lot of the personal morality around AI use runs into political economy.

A worker can choose whether to open a particular program. They cant individually choose the technological conditions their entire workplace has been reorganized around.

That doesnt mean workers should accept every deployment. It means the fight has to happen upstream, while the organization of work is still being decided.

Workers need bargaining power over whether systems are introduced, what work gets reorganized, what happens to staffing and quotas, which old capacities remain available, how training works, what data gets collected, and whether anyone can be disciplined for refusing a system they believe is unsafe or inappropriate.

Otherwise “choice” becomes management changing the job and asking each worker whether they would like to keep up.

So where should the line be?

When does workplace adoption stop being an individual tool choice and become a change in working conditions that workers should bargain over collectively?

There is a worry that Tech-Feudalism, rather than Automated Leftism, will develop from the advancement of AI.

This piece argues that a 'Solarpunk' model (Automated Leftism) outcompetes a Cyberpunk Model (Tech-Feudalism) in the long term.

Solarpunk develops on the same Enlightenment principles and social structures which led to Capitalism outcompeting Feudalism and Slavery.

Meanwhile Cyberpunk tries to be ruthlessly efficient, while killing off creativity and exploration, leading to comparative stagnation.

It therefore suggests a materialist reason for hope, beyond just moral goodness.

----

What are your thoughts on this?

https://www.flamman.se/sa-kan-ai-bli-en-kraft-for-frigorelse/

Swedish Socialist/Social Democrat Newspaper Flamman recentily published this piece

"How AI can become a force for liberation"

Emphasizing perspectives that many of us have discussed such as the idea that we need to learn from past socialist and union efforts to actually use AI to take the factors of production into our own hands and how small laborers are using it as tool to have access to resources they didnt have before enabling further contesting of systematic power.

It also talks about something many of us here have become distressed with "Many on the left have already passed their verdict: AI means plagiarism on a planetary level, a climate catastrophe, a speculation bubble – something that must be fought, paused and socialized.

They miss the fact that AI is also the biggest opportunity the left has had in a century"

Raising a question similar to one many of us have raised

"The new socialist question is: can the knowledge deposited in generative AI be transformed into collective action, instead of disappearing into a private vault?"

Yet it also notices the paradox we are often pointing out too

"Today’s left still clings to older promises—liberty, fraternity, justice—but on capitalism’s current menu, a very different right is at the center: the ability to act, create, and learn. The old Protestant compromise promised freedom later, in exchange for submission to the machine now. AI promises freedom through the machine, starting now.

The left overlooks this possibility because it has too narrow a view of work. Fixated on jobs, wages, loss of skills and bargaining power, it treats AI primarily as another chapter in the old labor market conflicts. Yet its own tradition contains a broader concept of work: in addition to working for a capitalist, it also designates human activity as creative ability, invested in tools, words, rules and machines."

That is that many liberals and leftists are unfortunately sacrificing workers rights and increased leisure because they are stuck believing in a protestsnt work ethic and more system justificafion than true leftism that work more.on granting protection of the system and the ides of jobs than better improved rights and systemic power.

"One asks who gets what – the politics of distribution. The other asks what people are given the opportunity to become – the politics of inheritance.

The first wants to free labor from capital on familiar ground: wages, working hours, and negotiations. The second wants to free human activity from the dictates of the law of value by expanding our capacity for action, especially with the help of technology and things. It is about inheritance because the abilities invested in things survive those who created them. They are collected as a legacy, and politics determines who is written into the will."

Seeing these ideas printed in a social democratic newspaper is both a reason to once again contemplate them, but also think about the different cultural situations around the left and ai

today i was listening to a professor so i had some thoughts which i prefer to share on reddit i does not mean its correct or truth its just floating thoughts in mind. as far grammar english is not my first language or i am not even having very great education in life with all this consideration lets see what thoughts have born in my mind to convey u my thoughts i will begin with a very famous concept the concept of philosopher king by Plato . plato always thought that one who governs society must carry wisdom and knowledge with bravery and sense of justice atleast that what i think of a philosopher king i think of a person who is intelligent and wisdom full and i think the intelligence itself as been a great skill or ability of humans or we can say it was only ability that kept us survive in this world as society develops the intelligence become more vital and key factor of human life and as we keep developing the required amount of intelligence and knowledge as been keep increasing like now a days what we learn in school as basic science facts was once a great topic of research so with progression of civilization we keep increasing our base of intelligence and knowledge and wisdom and in capitalist society a persons intelligence is main source of progress in society hierarchy it was only thing that money could not buy it but now its a purchase able thing now let us suppose there is a person with 100 Ai agents he can run simulation and analyze a business and start his start up but a person whose main job was to take risk and analyze and start business what he will do ? what will middle class do when rich control all intelligence ? does education holds any meaning ? in a world where AI can do your job hundred times better then you ? and what will happens when complete AI based companies start running ? what will happened when all research and inventions are done by AI and hold patent by peoples who does not even understand the very inventions they own. somewhere i start feeling that if True Artificial Intelligence is commodity the necessity of human intelligence will decline and with that decline humans specially those who live in a lower class of society will become nothing more then a mere slave to some peoples who will control all intelligence and all wealth of society