Tbh that just shows Drag doesn’t understand leftism very deeply.

1. Being anti-AI is an intrinsically reactionary position to hold.
2. Leftists should be trying to seize the means of production, not trying to destroy them.
3. The anti-AI movement puts heavy emphasis on the impact on artists, but most leftists don’t believe in copyright or the ownership/privatization of ideas and that includes things like art. Artists absolutely should be publicly funded and properly compensated for their work. But simply fighting against AI tooling will accomplish nothing, and arguably serves to perpetuates copyright rent-seeking by corporations and individuals.
4. Fighting against or banning the use of AI tools in leftist spaces will accomplish nothing, except to give the capitalists an advantage over leftists. The genie is already out of the bottle. AI tooling, although incredibly annoying in some aspects (such as when it gets inserted into fucking notepad) is also extremely powerful and useful for certain applications. Why would we want to fight with a hand tied behind our backs over some romantic idyll of pre-gen AI times?
5. A hammer can be a tool or a weapon. Same with AI. Nobody is talking about banning hammers, despite the fact they are often used as weapons or for nefarious purposes.
6. The anti-AI movement is primitivist and regressive in nature. It hearkens back to the “good old days” when artists were well compensated by rich patrons, and artisans and skilled craftsmen filled every small town. It’s a fantasy that never really existed, and one that will never exist under capitalism.
7. FOSS AI projects are available such as Db0’s AI Horde which seeks to democratic access to GenAI. There is no requirement to use corporate tooling.

The mod is not shutting down criticism of AI slop. Otherwise they would have nuked the whole comment chain, including 9point6’s comment, and yet they did not.

Gen AI has no place in leftist movements. It’s owned by capital.

You don’t simply destroy means of production - you seize them.

My retort to this standard ‘ai has no place in leftist spaces’ is pretty straightforward

I ‘stole’ a model that has now been fine-tuned on my own hardware, which is powered by solar.

I use this model primarily to write letters to judges for leftists, lgbt+, and street kids, to use when they go to court for small infractions. These will usually contain some old case law, some cultural references, and historical references, as well as the statements from these victims of a police state gone mad, and character references from their neighbours/community.

I am not a lawyer, nor a scholar. I live in the woods and maintain a mostly off-grid lifestyle. I do not have access to lawyers, or community spaces where leftist legal scholars might hang out. The closest damn grocery store is an hour away.

I would not have the time nor ability to source these cases, check on outcomes, and write eloquent letters tailored to each case, but I do have time to prompt my model a few times with the standard template I used to use pre-LLM and then check that any mentioned cases or historical stories are real before sending the letters.

I can say with certainty that 4 of those letters resulted in people going home free who would have likely spent time in jail for simply existing in a manner not approved by the state. And at least 3 more were a significant part of the judge’s decision.

Dogpile me if you want. But if you shit on this usage without offering an alternative way to achieve the same thing I will discard your comment as worthless and not reply.

IMO - The small harm done by my local model is VASTLY outweighed by even one innocent person not being confined by the state.

Someone in this thread had mentioned ‘We do not simply destroy the means of production, we seize them’. And that feels a lot like truth to me.

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