What country do you mean though? Is this a country specific sub?
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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There's a socialist country in the world?
Cuba calls themselves socialist, with some credibility.
Plenty places call themselves it, but they're all either Social Democracy or Capitalist Fascist but coopting the word "Socialist" to sound less scary
Which is why I only listed one credible example?…
Still don't know which country is discussed here - could help to know.
Sorry, meant to reply to gwl, was using Cuba as example of a country that could claim to be socialist.
I can claim to be a banana, don't make me one
So explain to us how Cuba is not socialist, please. I am open to being convinced, though spotty and mushy does not a banana make.
What country tho
Yes, we live under capitalism, and IP is just one of the bourgeois property forms they use to privatize and subsequently commodify "products of the mind".
While it shouldn't explicitly be fought since it's pointless, it's even more dumb to outright defend it since it's a mechanism that's not there to "prevent exploitation of the masses", but to protect bourgeois and petty bourgeois, with workers in creative or medical fields being hired by those bourgeois for a wage and then truly getting exploited.
This includes the theft of work and wage from independent small time artists
Honestly just read Wage Labor & Capital or something, that sentence makes you sound like some right-wing liberal who's going to cry about striking workers or something.
Honestly just read Wage Labor & Capital or something, that sentence makes you sound like some right-wing liberal who’s going to cry about striking workers or something.
I don't think that's a coincidence because so many people who are part of this movement say crap like that. Because the attachment to intellectual property as a moral foundation of rightness is a capitalistic and therefore right-wing viewpoint. One that is not compatible with a leftist society.
And how does this statement in any way have an effect on the problem at hand?
gen AI is harming people which capitalism is actively trying to crush beneath their boot
And the usage of it is tantamount to a tacit agreement with capitalism doing that.
If we're talking about gen AI as a whole and not just IP law, I assume by the problem at hand you mean small business owners in creative industry being displaced.
And yeah, under capitalism, technological advancement kinda sucks for everyone in general, not just AI. For those being made redundant, it's either proletarianization, going for a shittier more general job or homelessness, for factory owners to get the same profit margins the factory needs to be creating more stuff to keep up with LTV and so on.
Gen AI isn't anything special in this regard either, but the reaction is amplified because a bunch of hitlerite small business owners that run social media accounts and create slop content are afraid that AI is going to take their job.
This is the primary demographic of people who are the most affected, it isn't some vague notion of "the masses", and going on a moral high horse being like "if you use genAI you support capitalism, we need to FIGHT the technology so small business can continue creating slop and stuff they don't want to be making since it's profitable", then not only is it promoting lifesfyleism, but has never worked and just puts you in the same category as luddites except reactionary since you want to go back in time now before Pandora's box opening.
You know Luddites were actually not against progress right?
That was dark propaganda against them by the dominant socioeconomic class of the time.
The luddite movement was against using industrialisation to remove workers rights and to reduce safety standards which was prevalent at the time. It started as a direct response to the horrendous death of a child in a factory.
And they did actually win in the end, though as a splinter group after the original fell apart due to the bad PR.
That's why there's safety standards now, and statutory minimum of legally mandatory holidays in EU.
My argument is that genAI is being used for the exact same reason now, to erode workers rights.
Maybe you need to brush up on your history lessons?
Luddites were an embryonic form of workers struggle against labor saving technology back in early 19th century, back when there was no theory or analysis for workers to actually know where the issues were coming from, so way before the birth of scientific socialism.
They were mostly violently suppressed by the government, any gains that they might have had were really temporary and local (like some temporary wage increase), so
That’s why there’s safety standards now, and statutory minimum of legally mandatory holidays in EU.
is just you talking out of your ass, especially considering that luddites were contained within the UK, and it happening ~150 years before EU was even formed. These rights were concessions that bourgeois states gave to the working class to pacify them, since the threat of a communist revolution back when was real AND the post-WW2 superprofits allowed these kinds of rights and welfare in general.
Now if you're gonna go "genAI technology displaces workers, erodes their bargaining power and thus their rights" then yeah no shit, that applies to every labor saving technology under capitalism. If you then hyperfocus on one piece of technology due to moral panic spearheaded by petty bourgeois slop creators who risk getting displaced, saying how it has to go and how that's gonna fix everything - you're just a reactionary that wants to turn time back, it is an impossibility.
Luddites were based in the UK
It's almost like progress in one country can make progress happen in others, but no, that would be impossible!
Especially not when that country had an empire at the time that could force vassals to follow the same rules!
And it happened 150 years before the EU was formed
Cool, what's that got to do with anything? You've heard of "grandfathering" right? Taking existing rules and going "y'know what, they work, will just copypaste as they are"
I love that you keep trying to paint artists as Slop creators. You mean the thing that takes hours of dedicated practice, learning and trial and error? That thing?
Slop creators, those who use genAI, are the ones who try to displace them.
And again, your points all fall apart when you mention one very very very specific thing. We don't live under socialism, so to work towards it, shouldn't a goal be to ensure the Safe and Healthy lives of those who live, right now, in the real world, so they can then work towards improving it and hopefully making socialism real.
And your points would fall apart if you actually decided to read what I wrote instead of cherry picking sections out of context. For instance:
Especially not when that country had an empire at the time that could force vassals to follow the same rules!
The rules in question: "They were mostly violently suppressed by the government, any gains that they might have had were really temporary and local (like some temporary wage increase)". A temporary local response to some movement where individual capitalists decide to temporarily bump up the wages to appease luddites and so they can continue exploiting workers and accumulating capital unimpeded isn't some universal rule that was applied everywhere.
Also this entire exchange literally came about because of some off-hand remark about luddites that wasn't even important to the argument.
Whatever, I'm disengaging.
Sorry for thinking that other humans deserve to live a happy life without fear of their livelihood being destroyed, that's very unlefty of me.
I didn't know that using robots to replace people by doing a bad but cheap job was a core tenet of socialism.
I'll have to read up on the part of the socialist theory that states "For the Robots and the Capitalist Oligarchs that own them, by the Robots and the Capitalist Oligarchy that owns them"
Also i would add that whatever comes out from AI is their (AI) product not yours. Making the LLM user losing its core abilities by delegating their core activity to the LLM, meaning losing even more value as a worker and becoming even easier to replace (that also is one of the. Main reason of this big LLM hype.).
Looks like that marx "capital" is more actual then ever!
And if “they” own AI slop output, does that also mean they also “own” the content the AI trained on (art and such)?
While you’re thinking about that, consider how many working families have been bankrupted by copyright infringement lawsuits. Not many, but while you’re pondering that, ask yourself or look up how much Meta was fined for pirating millions of books (zero).
Quite a few have been bankrupt by it, once every few years they "make an example" by allowing a corporate to sue some random nerd doing piracy for everything they're worth
What i meant talking about ownership in my previous comment, was the AI Slop user, that they could feel to have done something, but they actually didn't the AI did it, and they didn't wrote a line of the LLM output. Meaning that he did to himself more harm, thinking of being more productive. He didn't produce anything, let a tool do it, that has been able to arrive at that point by stealing data all over the internet, without paying a penny. And the user didn't gain anything from it, didn´t learn anything, that in the long term is a loss of skills, meaning a loss of value, and being easier to replace, that was what I meant.
And the big corporations will get out without paying much, they pirated content, but they have money. So any fine for them will be just a bunch of pennies. But I think that now they pirated more than piracy at its peak. But this has been considered fair use (Also the destruction of thousand of physical books, to have them digitialized to train the LLMs...)
Fighting for incremental change and working within the system only serves to prop up the existing system. This is a status quo argument, and is not a revolutionary leftist position. It's a liberal position.
This doesn't engage with the point at all. There are places and times to fight particular battles.
fwiw i think slop machines are boardline useless and largely culturally harmful but even if they worked well. Like if extruded images were worth looking at and chatbots were reliable for things other than lie and cause psychosis then promoting them at this stage would be harmful.
Capital controls them, it is intrinsic to the approach that massive amounts of hardware and energy are needed to create them, as well as input data and unpleasant human labour. They will be used to crush labour, making revolutionary action harder, and atrophying skills and becoming dependant on them is placing yourself at the mercy of silicon valley freaks.
Resisting further degration of working conditions and bargaining power through imperfect means is a good tactic. Disney or whatever gets way more power from being able to fire all the writers, animators, and actors than keeping control of some fucking cartoon for another few years.
fwiw i think slop machines are [borderline] useless and largely culturally harmful but even if they worked well. Like if extruded images were worth looking at and chatbots were reliable for things other than [to] lie and cause psychosis then promoting them at this stage would be harmful.
Technological development isn't intrinsically harmful though, and that includes so-called "AI". It's the ways in which capitalism exploits new (and old) technologies that is harmful, because of the way capitalists use those technologies to drive down labor costs and eliminate jobs.
Capital controls them, it is intrinsic to the approach that massive amounts of hardware and energy are needed to create them, as well as input data and unpleasant human labour. They will be used to crush labour, making revolutionary action harder, and atrophying skills and becoming dependant on them is placing yourself at the mercy of silicon valley freaks.
I'm actually with the Luddites here. They didn't have a problem with the concept of textile mills. What they had a problem with was the fact that rich capitalist owners gave zero consideration to the health and safety of their workers, while paying them a pittance. I have the same attitude towards the "AI" industry as you do. It's being promoted by pyramid scheme AI-bros who are only interested in manipulating markets to get disgustingly rich. Those guys are scum. They have zero consideration for the environmental, social, and psychological harms that their products produce. But folks aren't fighting against them by complaining to us, they are instead directing their energy to fighting with an anarchist instance which is dedicated to fighting against capitalism, including corporate abuses of "AI" tools.
And when you say "capital controls them" that is only true of corporate AI. There are many open source models available. There is no reason why AI needs to use gallons of water to answer a web search, and the results can't be trusted. That's why I don't use AI web searches. There's no reason to build huge datacentres for AI. I can run an AI model on my PC at home, using no more power than it takes to browse the internet for a few minutes. Hobbyists and anarchists can deploy a locally hosted AI to work against capitalism, with none of the downsides. It's perfectly possible to use AI tools ethically and responsibly.
Who the anti-AI crowd should be mad at are the CEOs who are firing workers left and right to be "replaced" with AI tools that are totally incompetent. I'd bet good money it won't be long before the whole ponzi scheme comes crashing down once productivity starts tanking at those companies. And I'll be cheering on the end of the AI bubble as much as the next person. But those same CEOs will have generated a good little stock price bump in the meantime, so they can dump their shares early and depart richer than ever when the shit hits the fan. Again, the problem isn't AI, it's scummy capitalists doing scummy capitalist things.
Now what about our instance? Have we replaced anyone with AI? No. Have we used millions of gallons of water to generate our locally generated AI images? No. Most of them are produced using db0's AI Horde which is an open source, distributed, locally run model. Are we responsible for any of the harms associated with corporate AI? No. And we have never "promoted" AI, at most, we have just defended the way in which we use it, because it isn't harmful in that context. And yet...
We are relentlessly hounded by a bunch of misguided activists and trolls as though we are the font of all evil. The anti-AI crowd has some good points, but they need to target their efforts on the source of the problem, not towards a bunch of techy anarchists who like to self-host stuff. Yet our mods have had to deal with multiple death threats, transphobia and doxxing over our stance on AI, mostly from libs who are obsessed with protecting copyright law. In terms of relative harms, the anti-GenAI crowd on lemmy has done way more actual harm than anyone on this server has by posting an AI image.
Resisting further degration of working conditions and bargaining power through imperfect means is a good tactic. Disney or whatever gets way more power from being able to fire all the writers, animators, and actors than keeping control of some fucking cartoon for another few years.
I'm 100% with you that those things should be resisted. But folks are fighting us instead. And that seems like a waste of time and effort if you ask me.
My arthritis is playing up, if I come across as terse forgive me.
Technological development isn’t intrinsically harmful though, and that includes so-called “AI”. It’s the ways in which capitalism exploits new (and old) technologies that is harmful, because of the way capitalists use those technologies to drive down labor costs and eliminate jobs.
I don't want to argue a strawman position (i.e. that technological development is intrinsically harmful) but I do adopt the position that certain technologies lend themselves more readily to good, and conversely bad, ends. I think this is extremely obvious and won't bother explaining further unless asked.
In the field of so called AI I will admit that the underlying technology, the transformer model, is freaking awesome. Huge step forward, unlocked giant leaps in computer vision among many other things. The chatbots and diffusion algorithims? not so much, genuinely I struggle to think of positive social impacts. Most people give me are based on fundamental misunderstandings of how they are made and what they do, e.g. they are an appalling way to learn a topic or improve your writing (see semantic ablation if you need that last one explained https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/semantic_ablation_ai_writing/).
Mass manufacturing anti-information not only misleads people but also buries real information in a tide of slop. They are fundamentally designed to seem plausible, aka to deceive a user that information/communication/language/art is happening when it is not.
There are many open source models available.
This is a popular refrain and it based on a misunderstanding of what they are. They are open weight models, the source (the information used to make them) is not shipped. They are more like shareware. In theory you could tweak them, like you could go to neuron 65423455 and tweak the weight but as the models are by nature inscrutable this is not a useful exercise. You cannot study what training went in, analyses sources for bias, replicate the creation, or anything else a truly open source model would be, you can simply run the finished product.
Hobbyists and anarchists can deploy a locally hosted AI to work against capitalism, with none of the downsides. It’s perfectly possible to use AI tools ethically and responsibly.
Can you? The technology is fundamentally nondeterministic, impossible to analyse, extremely convincing which makes disinfo/bullshit (in the Frankfurt sense) much more dangerous. Further because of the compute required to train them and the lack of source these models rapidly become outdated and of diminishing use. I think capital is better undermined by building solidarity, sabotaging these machines/their training, and making sure you retain your ability to operate without tools created by them.
But folks aren’t fighting against them by complaining to us, they are instead directing their energy to fighting with an anarchist instance which is dedicated to fighting against capitalism, including corporate abuses of “AI” tools.
I don't think anyone is trying to harm the instance, simply convince people. Are people ddosing you guys? doxing people? If you believe someone is doing something harmful you basically have a moral duty to try and convince people don't you?
Are we responsible for any of the harms associated with corporate AI? No. And we have never “promoted” AI, at most, we have just defended the way in which we use it, because it isn’t harmful in that context. And yet…
The horde is interesting but I do think that it is dependant on capital as outlined above, and that in general using these things devalues language/art/humanity and harms your brain.
In terms of relative harms, the anti-GenAI crowd on lemmy has done way more actual harm than anyone on this server has by posting an AI image.
There are many devoted leftist that are against this stuff, there are many horrible techbro types that love it. It is not reasonable to smear a position based on the worst people that hold it.
Cool. And your point is?
Buying yourself a little treat to feel better about being exploited under capitalism is also against leftist theory.
But guess what... That doesn't magically turn the person that does into a liberal.
is it petite bourgeois to be a poor farmer that only just sells enough to survive? you sell a basic human need
Art is also a basic human need, though one more abstract, and less essential (though even cavemen had it)
It's capitalism you should be fighting, not technology. That's my point.
I don't think OP wants to actually fight capitalism, the way they talk about art as something capitalistic to sell and make money and not something to admire and enjoy really shows that. OP isn't just accepting capitalism. He is embracing it completely.
Don't be bloody stupid.
I'm accepting that artists need money to live, cause we live in a capitalist society.
It's not being pro-capitalist to say "artists need to eat food, and AI is taking food from their mouths."
You literally said "Art is also a basic human need, though one more abstract, and less essential (though even cavemen had it)" and are interpreting that to mean that Art is a commercial industry that needs to be protected artificially. That's a pro-capitalist viewpoint, and your entire argument here has been "this is the way things are and there are no socialist countries so we shouldn't bother changing things, and just be good consumers." Which is the sentiment of a liberal who does not wish to fight capitalism in any form.
In short it is pro-capitalist to uphold the status-quo, just because of the way things are. That line of thinking doesn't create change or positive impact. It serves to keep things the way they are.
Why not both?
You know, because it is more constructive to address actual problems instead of compromising by wasting time going after capitalist boogeymen.
I got banned from !leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com for being a "Anti GenAI pro-IP troll" when making exactly the same point
You got banned because this rabid anti-AI garbage about art theft and stealing from artists is literally pro-capitalist liberal garbage. You can expect to be banned from other leftist anarchist spaces for this crap. It's a miracle you didn't get banned sooner. Most liberal trolls get banned real fast for this crap.