Comment by Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net on ChatGPT Should Not Exist

Good post by David Golumbia on ChatGPT and how miserable it all is :rat-salute-2:

Not wanting your quality of life to significantly degrade because tech bros are stealing to commons again is anti-materialist got it.

Basing things on what you “want” and not what is actually possible is idealism yeah. AI is coming and there’s nothing we can do about it except seize the infrastructure when the time is right, and use its power for ourselves

Y’all really hate the idea that there might be anything in life that can’t be discussed in the language of heavy industry, don’t you? Like someone starts talking about feels and it’s like “No! YOu fool! You moron! The only things worth caring about are production throughput in tractor factories! How could you possibly care about anything else at all?!?!?!”

I’ll admit marxists sometimes do this but honestly in this case I don’t really see a problem.

This whole anti AI trend is reactionary to the core, it’s based on nothing other than “the machines took our jobs” and “machines cannot feel therefore machine art BAD”.

A) why are you worried about these things? they live in the deepest and most unsettling parts of the uncanny valley. From an artistic perspective, they’re a joke.

B) Material conditions change. You can’t pretend them away or waste your time trying to stuff cats back in bags. That way lies the failure of Luddism: it had no answer to the looms beyond their destruction, which meant it was doomed to failure. You have to find a way to use the thing in a just manner, not smash it and expect it to just go away. Luddism’s problem isn’t that it doesn’t identify a real and significant harm, it is that the answer it presents to that problem is the political-economic equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “I can’t hear you!”

C) You can feel however you like about a thing. Feeling that way is ultimately unrelated to the conditions and technologies that led to its creation, however, and it isn’t cause to pursue a quixotic task.

I’m just a pragmatist who deals with the actual trends of capitalist economy and society and not just what I feel like I want

It is if you don’t have any realistic plan whatsoever to actually eliminate the problem, and instead choose to endlessly complain about it.

The coming climate apocalypse is bad.

You moron. You swine. You sniveling worm. Can’t you see that pointing out that something is bad when you can’t fix it is anti-materialist!?

Very anti-Marxist worldview

pointing out bad things is anti-Marxist

I would argue that pointing out bad things is an essential first step in Marxism.

You are basically just being a Bernstein complaining about monopolies and trying to pass anti-trust legislation to protect small businesses.

As Lenin pointed out, monopolization is inevitable under capitalism and its logical end point. It’s also necessary, as only monopolized industry can be easily seized. Capitalism creates the conditions of its own defeat and builds the base of the next system to come that will replace it.

Just like this, automation is inevitable under capitalism and its logical end point. It’s also necessary, as only a post-scarcity and automated based can enable socialism. Capitalists build the base and develop productive forces, and then once it becomes mired in its own crisis it can then be seized for the replacement.

This is the Marxist conception of capitalist development into socialism. You are simply a reactionary or an idealist if all you can do is whine about the inevitable direction of capitalism and attempt to hold it in stasis instead of using the contradictions of capitalism against it.

Trust busting is Liberal policy and anti-Marxist as it preserves capitalism for longer. Policies meant to hinder or prevent automation, or regress to an earlier period of technology, are Liberal policies and anti-Marxist as it preserves capitalism for longer and prevents the necessary development

Actually, Marxists should let capitalists do all the bad things and never oppose them.

V I Lenin

That analogy doesn’t work because you can solve climate change by drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions. You can’t “solve” the existence of deep learning tech except by somehow deleting every trace of its existence and somehow preventing people from creating it again.

I wasn’t equivocating the two problems, I was pointing out the absolute ridiculousness of the assertion that pointing out problems with society is somehow anti-Marxist. Literally the main thing Marx did was point out problems in society!

Love that the people with Marx in their name never understand Marx.

Moralism? Check. Luddism? Check. Failure to understand historical materialism and capitalism’s role in developing automation and production? Check.

You’re inventing specters of points I never made. The things I’ve said are a) Marxists should critique society and b) AI generation tech has no place in a post capitalist world.

Except Marx’s proposed solutions were to use the trends and directions of capitalist society against it, to allow its own contradictions to defeat itself. Not to criticize and whine and try to freeze things in place somehow, those who try to regulate and freeze capitalism in place are reformists and are doomed to failure.

Artificial Luddite reaction against AI automation can only slow it temporarily, not stop it globally. It’s inevitable and the end point of capitalism. There’s nothing you or I can do to stop it, and in fact it’s necessary for socialism for these productive forces to advance to the point of post-scarcity. We simply need to seize them.

So it’s not useful to scaremonger about the technology itself, it’s only useful to promote the seizure of the technology for our own ends.

If you understood Marx and Historical Materialism, this would be more clear. Capitalism is not ontologically evil, capitalism has no moral character it is merely a necessary stage before socialism. This is where a lot of left moralists diverge or misunderstand Marx, and why many also are too harsh on the PRC.

seizure of the technology for our own ends.

What ends could their possibly be to siezing Chat GPT? That we can generate meaningless blocks of text more quickly?

The capitalists will use this and other generation tech to eliminate jobs, naturally - socialists, whose society should not be enslaved to market dynamics, should be able to recognize that this tech is destructive and eliminate or severely restrict it accordingly.

In abstract using math problems to do creative work it tacky, banal, and evidence of a lack of imagination and seriousness. But that’s not a problem. There have been crass philistines that shouldn’t be invited to parties since the dawn of time. Humanity will survive.

In this specific case math problems are being used to immiserate working class artists and reduce everyone’s quality of life by replacing creative work with shitty madlibs copypasta. The solution, surprise surprise, is to abolish the economic form that incentivizes the private accumulation of capital! Ie, abolish capitalism.

Because this is literally just another example of capital seizing the commons in order to profit from it.

Oooh oh shit he’s got a materialist analysis of the problem noooo mah reductive retreat in to scientism to avoid discussing icky feels! What will I do now?!

On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.

Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020

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