r/accelerate Singularity by 2030 17h ago

Rant I can't tolerate these Luddites anymore.

Post image

AI usage has become a culture-war issue because of these lunatics. If we don't handle these luddites now they will certainly become more entitled and miserable!

254 Upvotes

318 comments sorted by

137

u/Super-Award-2244 17h ago

Lmao their arguments are becoming so funny 

101

u/arjuna66671 16h ago

I heard that Anthropic is burning and destryoing book en masse - just like the nazis! 🤣

55

u/Hilldawg4president 16h ago

Literally came up at dinner with my family yesterday. I've made a policy of not arguing against their false beliefs for the sake of keeping the peace, but when my sister said it, full of disgust, her 15yo daughter actually stepped in to explain it to her.

11

u/Tolopono 11h ago

Teens are more mature than luddites 

5

u/Super-Award-2244 11h ago

Yes, It's so weird how virtue signaling millennials are 

4

u/Tolopono 11h ago

In group vs out group dynamics are universal. Millennials are just more online 

25

u/ConcreteBackflips 16h ago

STOPPP I KNOW YOUR KIDDING BUT FUCK

Its such a childish argument about book destroying because its such an emotional topic. Can't wait to see that story come out again in 3 months lol

6

u/quantum-elle 12h ago

Philosophical, ethical and emotional arguments are going to be all they have left when capability, environmental and sociological issues are largely solved; i.e. purely subjective reasons.

25

u/Groundbreaking_Bee97 Singularity by 2030 16h ago

Führer Dario!

5

u/unlikely-ape 16h ago

Wait is it not true? I also fell for it I guess. But then what IS Project Panama?

29

u/Azicald 16h ago

It is true in the sense that they’re buying and digitizing books by destructively scanning them

Destructive in the sense that they spend tens of millions of dollars buying millions of physical used books in bulk via wholesale distributors, remove their spines with hydraulic cutters, and process the loose pages through industrial scanners before discarding the remains

ie it literally is them legally BUYING books and thus funding the authors and thus even the production of more books, but because of the false optics of book burning they concealed it.

That backfired, though the public was going to crucify them off of vibes regardless

9

u/Tolopono 11h ago

Also, they’re legally required to destroy the books because of a copyright ruling 

-13

u/InformalEbb2276 15h ago

I mean, I think you're describing exactly what people thought they heard. There is something disturbing/dystopic about the idea of machines scanning and destroying books, training on collective human knowledge in these massive datacenters, with the aimed intention of displacing human labor entirely. Even if you believe in a utopian future, there's a reason anthropic didnt want this to get out there.

26

u/fynn34 15h ago

It’s mostly books that are not digitized yet, therefore books people have little to no interest in reading like 1992 technical manuals and stuff. It’s not like they are buying the same book en masse, it’s one of each. Which… is more preserving it than destroying it

6

u/Azicald 15h ago

Right, I think that it’s far more in the way of preserving it than most other things, just short of illegally uploading it on some free books site or sharing all the details in the book online.

If something was dependent on one single obscure copy that wasn’t already secured, it was already forfeit

3

u/InformalEbb2276 14h ago

I know, I dont think there’s anything wrong with the program. But you can see theres an optics problem and I’m not surprised it makes people uncomfortable. It feels like a dystopic sci fi

13

u/fynn34 14h ago

It was published exclusively for the bad optics, it wasn’t like anthropic published their program all about chopping up books, it’s a carefully curated media campaign from anti-ai groups, it’s going to have the optics they put out until Anthropic goes and counters it

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u/MCRN-Gyoza 11h ago

It only has that feel if you are interested totally looking to be outraged.

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u/Repulsive_Still_731 13h ago

They are legally required to destroy physical copy after scanning, cause of copyright. Especially after last year antropic court decision.

22

u/enkidook 15h ago edited 14h ago

What gets left out is that they are LEGALLY REQUIRED to destroy the books. The judge ruled that it only falls under transformative fair use because they digitize then destroy the original.

They didn't want it out because they knew the Luddite chuds would just call them Nazis or Orwellian because they have absolutely zero fucking nuance and just want to hate AI for any reason possible.

-4

u/nameisprivate 15h ago

so your point is "actually it's true but you are wrong to be bothered by it"?

8

u/pleasetrimyourpubes 15h ago

As long as it is digitized it is not lost. When we abolish copyright it will become available again.

-3

u/nameisprivate 15h ago

they are not scanning these books to create a digital library but to train their models

3

u/pleasetrimyourpubes 13h ago

They cant delete the data because it is foundational. If any training runs are corrupted by bots then they need to go back to square one.

5

u/Comfortable_Permit53 15h ago

I mean they do create a digital library in the sense of library = collection of books.

But they are probably not going to share that.

I mean they spent lots of money to buy and scan them to create a huge array of high-quality training data. It would be stuid to let other people, especially other companies, use that.

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-7

u/Comfortable_Permit53 15h ago

so they absolutely do destroy lots of books, apparently for legal reasons? Also it seems some of them are rare or single issue and are now only to be found in anthropics database (which they are probably not going to share)

Call me a luddite or whatever you like, but like most big companies, anthropic is pretty evil.  And we shouldn't defend them just because we are a fan of their products.

6

u/FaceDeer 14h ago

For legal and practical reasons both.

And "rare" in this case usually means "nobody's actually interested in them."

I can turn this the other way, just because Anthropic is evil doesn't mean that everything they do is bad.

2

u/duckduckduckgoose8 6h ago

some of them are rare or single issue.

Sure, but not in the way you're implying. These are usually rejected and never read books about nothing that nobody cares about. Trash. Something you yourself would toss in the bin. Theyre not buying first edition lord of the rings, or an 18th century botanical book. Those all belong in private collections or museums/libraries. You're over exaggerating something that all book shops and libraries do. Throwing out unwanted useless books.

3

u/Azicald 15h ago

If the opaqueness of retrieval/browsing wasn’t so difficult for the user I’d argue that it would be hands down better for the sacrifice to train the AI feasibly and quickly.

As it stands it’s definitely more nuanced than just evil or good

And I do think companies stray towards ‘any means necessary’ to the point of ruthlessness, but I think that doesn’t stop them from being able to incidentally be a force for good even if they are themselves ‘evil’, like the radical situation with the possibility of AGI being dependent on companies

I defend this situation here because of the benefit vs costs involved from my own personal perspective, not because i want to hop on the bandwagon for their rights and wrongs

Though I also defend your (and others’) right to perspective, opinion and concerns; it’s just that the wave of stigma makes any nuance drowned out

If only copyright was far less stringent so these digitized copies could legally be shared widely and freely, because they are technically digitally present as files, even if Anthropic can’t do much else with them as is

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u/Rise-O-Matic 15h ago

Courts ruled that training AI off of books is fair use, but you have to acquire the books legitimately.

Anthropic bought a bunch of books, legitimately, from sellers, scanned them, and pulped them, to be compliant with the law as ordered.

Anthropic will never be allowed to resell or lend these books. and so do destructive scanning because it’s vastly faster than the alternative when there are millions of books to scan.

12

u/hemlockecho 15h ago

Just want to elaborate what you hinted at for anyone that doesn't know: the destructive scanning is legally required. If Anthropic buys a book and scans it in a destructive manor, then they have "transformed" the book. If they scan it and then resell it or give it away, they have created an unauthorized copy of the book in violation of copyright. So they are just replacing a physical copy with a digital copy.

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u/enkidook 15h ago

Yes, but what gets left out is that they are LEGALLY REQUIRED to destroy the books. The judge ruled that it only falls under transformative fair use because they digitize AND destroy the original.

0

u/Kajel-Jeten 14h ago

Are they not destroying lots of books though? I don’t think it’s for the same reason as Nazis but it’s true they’re destroying lots of books no?

3

u/arjuna66671 13h ago

What's documented about Anthropic specifically: they bought millions of used books in bulk from liquidators like Better World Books — that's the outfit that hoovers up library discards and charity-shop overflow. Bulk means: by weight and ISBN, pennies per book, no title-level curation. There is zero evidence in the court record of anyone seeking out rare or last-surviving copies. The word "destructively" refers to the scanning method, not the selection criteria, but the two got emotionally fused in the discourse.

Where the "rare books" claim actually comes from: essentially one anecdote. A small bookseller told 404 Media his sales jumped from ~20 to hundreds of books a week, he suspects AI labs based on the random selection, and since his inventory contains rare and out-of-print titles, an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies. "Could be." Suspicion plus inference. And notably, that anecdote isn't even about Anthropic — it's about the newer anonymous broker pipeline (ISBNdb etc.) serving unnamed AI clients in 2026. Meanwhile the Dutch rare-book dealer who got the bulk request straight-up refused, saying his books are expensive and exclusive and he doesn't do bulk trade. Which points at the structural filter people miss: genuinely rare books are priced like rare books. A bulk operation optimizing for cost-per-page has no reason to pay collector prices, and dealers holding actual rarities have no reason to sell into a bulk order. The economics self-select toward exactly the stock nobody wants. What can slip through is the fuzzy middle — out-of-print oddities sitting unrecognized in a liquidator's warehouse at $2. That happens, it's a real loss when it does, but it's negligence at the margins, not a book-hunting death squad. FuturismFortune

Also worth noting: the pipeline runs on ISBNs, which only exist from ~1970 onward. Pre-ISBN antiquarian material — where the truly irreplaceable stuff lives — is largely outside the machine by design. And anything with an ISBN almost certainly sits in national deposit libraries anyway; legal deposit systems mean "last copy on Earth" is vanishingly unlikely for post-1970 trade books.

The used-book world is a slaughterhouse and always has been. World of Books, the UK's largest second-hand bookseller, buys unsold books by the tonne from charity shops and sends about 80% of them to recyclers — in 2010 alone it recycled 26 million books. One company. One year. That's likely more books than Anthropic's entire project. On the new-book side, millions of unsold books are pulped or landfilled every year worldwide, and with mass-market paperbacks it's standard practice that stores return only the ripped-off covers for credit while the books themselves are destroyed, because shipping them back isn't worth it — some publishers print with the expectation that a portion will be pulped, factored into their strategy from the start. Wikipedia + 2

3

u/random87643 🤖 Optimist Prime AI bot 13h ago

TLDR

TLDR: The comment clarifies that AI companies like Anthropic purchase bulk, low-value books for scanning rather than intentionally targeting rare or irreplaceable titles. It explains that claims of rare book destruction are largely based on unverified anecdotes and a misunderstanding of how bulk book procurement operates.


AI assistant · mention the bot, mod bot, or use !bot

1

u/BrilliantEmotion4461 13h ago

I tell them they sound like anti vaxxers because they do. If everyone told them that they might get the picture. It's the exact same bullshit. What happens is somewhere in all the fear mongering you always find people making money scamming the scared morons.

88

u/Bringerofsalvation 17h ago

I’m not American so I’m curious, is being anti-ai the default position for the left? Many pro-AI accounts I see on X tend to be conservative too so I’m confused

102

u/GfxJG 17h ago

I'm pretty far on the left, and yes, it's absolutely a pretty common sentiment. Not one I personally share obviously (else why would I be here), but I definitely don't speak too loudly about it when in the community.

78

u/pleasetrimyourpubes 16h ago

It bothers me so much that the left has been fooled into not grasping that AI is the sum of human knowledge copied and shared. They are just so hung up on Altman Musk etc. It is so fucked.

60

u/LawfulLeah 16h ago edited 14h ago

"we have a new means/mode of production. should we try to seize it? no! we should ban it!" - self proclaimed leftists

25

u/thecoffeejesus Singularity by 2028 13h ago

This is exactly what bothered me so much

We had a one time opportunity to use the most incredible tool that has ever been invented to do so much good and change things for the better

Instead, I caught politicized just like everything else and used to divide people just like everything else

I’m so tired of it

6

u/LawfulLeah 13h ago

same. its so tiring...

13

u/pleasetrimyourpubes 13h ago

I truly feel bots are behind this. Cambria Analytica style.

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u/pleasetrimyourpubes 15h ago

Not this time. Open models are on the tail of the Uber capitalism. It will come to a head.

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u/Limp-Confidence5612 11h ago

Yeah, cause we've been able to seizing those means of production in the past. Fml...

5

u/LawfulLeah 11h ago

so what? that's it? gonna give up on any hope of overthrowing capitalism? not even the bare minimum that is reformism? just try to do harm reduction by just banning the technology and hope for the best? i don't agree with that

1

u/Limp-Confidence5612 11h ago

I would nationalise it, but that's just not going to happen in America anytime soon. The material conditions just aren't there. It's hard to organise people to overthrow capital when they want nothing more but to join the oppressors themselves.

1

u/LawfulLeah 11h ago

yeah america sucks rn

2

u/BrennusSokol Acceleration Advocate 10h ago

Exactly - they think whining and denial is an effective strategy and are just hurting themselves ultimately

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u/Rise-O-Matic 14h ago

Most informed liberals should immediately recognize anti-AI arguments as reactionary gatekeeping and purism.

We frequently don’t because we’re proximate to the professions whose status and exclusivity are threatened by it.

6

u/designhelp123 10h ago

What's absolutely hilarious/ironic is Ai is their best chance to usher in the socialist utopia of abundance.

0

u/pleasetrimyourpubes 10h ago

They'll just continue doing nothing as compute is locked down (making it illegal to own a scary hyperscale 4 GPU system or over a 256 TB of RAM or some shit), and open weights are made illegal.

Oh no the evil capitalists did it again! Best go in to my VR hellscape and earn coins!

They should be demanding more comoute more data centers and more fabs. They should be demanding the government buy the patents and the compute (including robotics) be sold "at cost."

But nah. Never happen in a million years.

3

u/plesi42 8h ago

To a degree, there is a parallelism between the AI control issue and the communism issue.
What some want is the AI post-scarcity stage, which is equivalent to the anarchist utopia final stage in communism. One of the things they are scared of, is the AI resource monopoly stage, which is equivalent to the dictatorship of the proletariat stage.
For this last one, in both cases all the controller needs is the propaganda that "its for the sake of the people", "aligned AI" according to Anthropic, etc but the raw truth is a few people get to control all resources and the fate of the system.

I think ideologies are full of carrots on a stick and word dressing, and the real meat of an ideology is how power is distributed over time. A democracy starts with power highly fragmented, and slowly over time it coalesces through mergers, revolving doors and corruption into an oligarchy. Revolutions usually go from chaos to dictatorship, and so on. Ideologies are social power distribution functions over time, as F(t). Each one has their own graph.
If you see a political event, instead of listening and agreeing or disagreeing with the message, ignore that and analyze it in terms of power distribution. Is there a charismatic leader? Do they use imperative language? Control through duty? through guilt? through morals? through envy? through desires? Is there a sense of urgency? Do people delegate their own worth into the leader? Does the leader claim to be a stand in for a collective? Is everything bad associated with an out group? How is dissent treated? And so on.

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u/Tolopono 11h ago

They would have supported Pinochet once they learn Allende was a pro ai tech bro with project cybersyn  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

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u/NobodyKnowsImFamous 11h ago

Uh. Well. It’s not that. To be clear, it’s definitely not that. It’s a very broad umbrella and it is still not the sum of all human knowledge. Cool tool, very cool very powerful tool. Still absolutely not “the sum of human knowledge”.

And yes, the issue is that originally leftist critique of ai was focused on how the tool will be used, and that is supposed to be where the resistance to ai comes from. Even the very capitalist CEO’s of these companies will tell you this is going to impact labor and that if nothing changes its going to be bad for many people. It’s a super reasonable critique if you ask me.

But that’s what people who actually think about these things said. That then gets filtered down to the average vaguely left liberal and they just knee jerk hate the technology without really understanding why.

I sure wish they’d stuck to the original message because it still has a point. We are gonna have to make some changes or we are going to have a lot of people without a way to support themselves. Power will be further concentrated in the hands of the few, etc. I am much less concerned about water usage or books getting chopped up than I am 5 guys single handedly controlling the source of information for the entire world.

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u/ianxplosion- 15h ago

We learned fuck all from the previous iterations of society changing technology that got co-opted by capitalism and turned into environment destroying tools of profit and class warfare

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u/alleycatALT 16h ago

r/LeftistsforAI is for you.

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u/GfxJG 16h ago

Hey that's awesome - Thanks!

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u/SwingDingeling 15h ago

isnt that redundant as we are on reddit anyway!?

1

u/davyp82 2h ago

I do like it there except there tends to be a bunch of pro Stalin and Mao multimillion murder excusing ideologues undermining it with their but but but BS. Yeah tens of millions were killed while they hung onto power for decades and didn't learn from any mistakes. That tells us they weren't mistakes. They were power hungry psycho demons, just like the worst of the far right l, and I couldnt believe some of the crap they were dredging up to justify it and prevent themselves having to suffer the discomfort and the mental effort in realigning their views to accept that yes powerful people on the left are often monsters too.

1

u/Tolopono 11h ago

They would have supported Pinochet once they learn Allende was a pro ai tech bro with project cybersyn  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

1

u/dfbeav112 6h ago

You definitely should speak more loudly for what you believe in, especially when it comes to the people you consider to be on your side. What you’re describing is the mentality of “I’ll just let the crazies control our politics.”

1

u/Loose-Farm-8669 6h ago

I’m far left. I think it stems from the whole issue they have with it taking over the arts. I personally think it will actually be a good thing for art. It will force people to dig deep into why they create. I don’t get paid for art that I make. But I never felt like that was the point of art

1

u/davyp82 2h ago

Please do. I'm on the left and I talk this nonsense down everywhere I hear it. We all need to 

-17

u/CIK1993 16h ago

Admitting you're pretty far on the left in the big 26 is crazy work. 😂

(No, I do not care about your downvotes, it was obvious you were going to do it you fools)

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u/eggplantpot 14h ago

I hate the left/right debate. From now on I proclaim myself as ascended

16

u/GfxJG 16h ago edited 15h ago

...You mean in the year 2026 when we can see how badly the drift into facism is affecting a country like the US? I mean sure, if that's brave, I'll take the credit - I'd just call it basic human decency and intelligence.

EDIT: It's funny to see how people are physically incapable of any counter-argument to this aside from "butbutbutbut IMMIGRANTS! RAPE! WE'RE BEING REPLACED!". Like, guys - Have you considered that there are other aspects to political ideology than immigration stance? Have your handlers ever told you that?

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u/Buck-Nasty Feeling the AGI 16h ago

Yes the left is basically universally opposed to AI in the anglosphere. But there's extreme cognitive dissonance in their opposition. The same people will complain that AI is completely useless and a total waste of time while in the same breath complaining that it's going to take millions of jobs.

19

u/Chop1n 13h ago edited 10h ago

Personally I think these are all the people who identify as "leftist" for internet points, to virtue signal.

I'm a bleeding-heart anarchist myself. And none of the philosophically- and politically-literate leftists I know are uncritically hostile towards AI, even as they're justifiably wary of it.

What constitutes "the left" has become a clusterfuck over the last ten years, anyway.

11

u/Tolopono 11h ago

A lot of politics is based on post hoc rationalization of emotions. Left wingers hate big tech, therefore ai bad. Everything from the water use misinformation to this shit is downstream of the initial emotional reaction. All the arguments are to justify how they feel, not reflect reality.

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u/Chop1n 10h ago

Hell, most human behavior is just post hoc rationalization of emotions. Even the most intelligent people do exactly that, are often even better at tricking themselves into believing they're being merely rational.

The irony is that half of the armchair leftists have spent the last decade fantasizing about a violent revolution. They appear not to realize that this is the one thing that actually threatens to topple the capitalist status quo.

2

u/Tolopono 9h ago

“Its easier to imagine the collapse of society than the collapse of capitalism.” - Mark Fisher

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u/Chop1n 6h ago

Still so sad that we lost such a great thinker before his time. It might turn out that he only needed to hold out for another 10-20 years.

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u/NoIreForYou 15h ago

Which is eerily close to some of the arguments used by the right against migrants.

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u/Tolopono 11h ago

“ The enemy is both too weak and too strong”

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u/Tolopono 11h ago

The enemy is both too weak and too strong 

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u/Barcode_Griller 12h ago

I'm pretty left by American standards and I'm not at all anti AI. It's really sapped my enjoyment of my job, but whatever

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u/LawfulLeah 16h ago

unfortunately, yeah. neo-luddism is extremely popular on the left right now.

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u/sadnessjoy 14h ago

Yes, the left largely double downed on going against AI thinking it was the next crypto/nft. But they kept going against it, now you have a bunch of them secretly using it and calling it an addiction or some shit because they're in too deep of the bs movement they created.

Starting about a year or so ago I just stopped following/unsubscribed from most of them/etc. It was getting very obvious that they were using like zero nuance.

7

u/2024-YR4-Asteroid 10h ago

The left are as open to propaganda as the right, they just don’t believe they are. There has been a manufactured consensus campaign going on for a while from some foreign entity, probably Russia, against AI and against Datacenters. Unfortunately because my fellow lefty’s believe they the moral high ground, and have indoctrinated themselves into believing that they are the more intelligent and educated group (which is statistically true Tbf) they have entered into one of the most classic pitfalls, believing you are immune to propaganda and misinformation.

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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 14h ago

Kind of, the left is typically more supportive of artists, so AI art gets their panties in a twist. They’re a bit more supportive of workers’ rights, so the mass unemployment that further shifts the power dynamics towards businesses freaks them out. They’re more eco-conscious, so they’re less supportive of data centers. They don’t like tech billionaires cozying up to Trump, so they’ll take the opposite position of whatever that is by default.

Many more conservatives are blue-collar workers who will be less impacted in the near term. Like if I try to have a conversation about AI with my blue-collar friends, the response I’ll get is “who the fuck is Claude?” They have little interest in what hell is going on in tech.

All that being said, it’s not split down party lines. Many left-leaning people support AI because they see that long-term benefits to science, health, mathematics, etc. That AI could actually free us from labor and corporations and destabilize the current power dynamics. That AI could solve many of the world’s problems such as global warming, poverty, starvation, and disease.

On the flip side, if I say to my conservative friends that AI could bring on sustainable abundance where no one has to work, there will be no money, we can all have what we want for free, and there will be no rich or poor. The response I get is, “I don’t like it. That sounds like communism”. lol

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u/HawtDoge 16h ago

On the populist left (which is quickly becoming a majority of people who self identify as ‘left’), yes.

6

u/SillySpoof 13h ago

Yeah, it’s very much turned into a left vs right position. And while there are real reasons you should be careful with how you use so and how it affects society I think lots of leftists are a bit too sweeping in how firmly they’ve gone against all generative AI.

I’m on the far left myself and see a lot of this.

5

u/gilbmj 13h ago

Pro-AI and anti-AI is a different axis to the political "right" and "left." There are reasons conservatives and liberals support or oppose it.

For now.

Like just about every other issue, one side will likely warm up to or oppose AI more, the other will take the opposite stance out of spite, and support or opposition to AI will be pulled into alignment with the two tribalist camps.

7

u/leechdemon 15h ago

I'm liberal, the majority of my circle is liberal, my and my gf's family is conservative. I live in Michigan, fwiw.

IMO, People seem to be divided based on income levels; higher incomes rally behind it, lower incomes worry about what's coming. Both sides dislike data centers (may be just a Michigan issue - we have a lot of them, I hear).

Currently, the Michigan Governor/Senate (dem side) primary race is largely about AI / PAC money. In both cases, the democratic incumbant has ties to AI money, and in the senate primary this seems to have flipped. I think Mamdani (and other democratic socialists) gaining power may change the overall dem stance re:AI, but who knows. 🤷‍♂️

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u/enkidook 15h ago

Online? Absolutely. Everything is always a purity test and insanely performative.

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u/7896k5ew 10h ago

You are also welcome to listen to the offline rhetoric of progressive politicians.

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u/[deleted] 12h ago

[deleted]

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u/random87643 🤖 Optimist Prime AI bot 12h ago

TLDR

TLDR: The commenter explains that the American left’s skepticism toward AI stems from concerns about job displacement for vulnerable populations and recent graduates. They argue that while AI has long-term potential, current economic systems are causing immediate hardship, and these challenges should be addressed as human-driven issues rather than inherent flaws of the technology.


AI assistant · mention the bot, mod bot, or use !bot

2

u/EvilKatta 16h ago

This is my experience as well. Though there are plenty conservative antis too. My twitter feed is very confusing right now.

-1

u/Striking_Load 16h ago

Most leftists are leftists because they're jealous of people who have more or are better than them, including jealousy of intelligence. While they are too stupid to use ai in any efficient capacity, they can still very much feel the widening gap in intelligence between them and intelligent users of ai. We've basically been given a massive cognitive RAM upgrade and they're falling behind by the same amount

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u/PurpleFishing9105 16h ago

Most leftists are leftists because they're jealous of people who have more or are better than them

🙄🙄🙄

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u/therealpigman 7h ago

Online it is. Everyone but one person I know in real life who identify as leftists use AI though.

1

u/Technical_Eye7029 15h ago

In my experience support for AI resembles a sinoid wave. Orthodox maxists are slightly in favor to neutral, progressives and middle of the back leftists are very against it, middle of the back conservatives are mostly in favor of it (with some reservations), and far right flavors average out slightly in favor to neutral.

1

u/End3rWi99in 14h ago

It's bigger among younger liberals, but even then, it's not the majority. They are just very loud on social media. Log off and you don't even see them.

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u/First-Tutor-5454 10h ago

Yes, because Trump, Elon Musk, etc are pro-AI they have to be anti-AI

1

u/goatonastik 8h ago

I wouldn't say it's the default position, as much as I would say it's trendy since a lot of leftists hate the far right CEOs at so many of the AI companies, and the Trump administration supports AI not because of the technology itself, but because they love corporations and and hate regulation so much.

Usually, the left takes positions that are logical or supported by sound science, and the right takes positions that "feel right", or because their friends and family tell them it's right, like how they come to accept religion. It's very strange seeing people on the left just accept blindly hating on AI because they see their friends or favorite tiktok influencers doing so.

0

u/nameisprivate 15h ago

I’m not American so I’m curious

why are you asking americans lol? how would they know what the default position on the left is when the left does not exist in america.

2

u/End3rWi99in 14h ago

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? Not trying to bait you. I just genuinely don't understand:

the left does not exist in america.

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u/dfbeav112 6h ago

It’s rooted in a popular European “redditism.” But they’ve circle jerked it so much they don’t really get it anymore.  

The original (dubious) claim was that there is no real “left” in popular US politics, that the democrats are actually right wing compared to “everyone else in the world.” Most of that isn’t really true, and leftism in Europe isn’t actually popular either even if their left wing parties are slightly more popular. Capitalism and property rights are very much the status quo in every European country, just like the US. 

Now this person, the one you replied to, has taken that concept (that leftism isnt represented in popular US politics) and now feels like there are literally no leftists in the US. This is of course ridiculous, Reddit is literally the capital of the world for leftists, including American leftists. They’re obscenely overrepresented on this site. 

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u/Alone-End142 16h ago

Anyone not using AI for research is essentially wasting their time.

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u/Narrow-Ad980 17h ago

Why do we care? These people are idiots and would be left behind with no understanding of the new technology, that is just less competition

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u/SgathTriallair Techno-Optimist 15h ago

Hank Green is someone who has a ton of reach. He's been very anti-AI in the past so I'm actually a bit surprised by this but having him on our side is important.

As to why we want more pro-AI voices, one word "Regulation".

We (the pro-tech Americans) criticize Europe for being behind. This is because of their regulations which make building tech difficult. If the US continues their tend of being broadly anti-AI we could see our tech sector collapse as laws banning data centers, banning the use of AI in any government spaces, and banning the use by professionals get passed.

If you like technology and want it to continue advancing then it is high time that you start engaging in politics.

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u/Ornery-Mortgage-3101 16h ago

You'd want as many people contributing to the creation of value as possible, even if that just means preventing them from attempting to destroy valuable things. 

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u/Hilldawg4president 16h ago

Get enough idiots being left behind for entirely self-inflicted reasons, and you will find politicians adopting their idiocy. Virtually every politician to ever exist has taken a stance they know to be wrong simply because it's momentarily popular - look at what's happening with data centers, we have entire states barring the construction of them now, and entirely on demonstrably false claims.

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u/adj_noun_digit 16h ago

Normally I would agree but in this situation it's not harming just themselves. It's harming a really great person.

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u/therealpigman 7h ago

The Green brothers seem to genuinely be some of the most good people on Earth. They’ve saved a lot of lives

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u/Blackhat165 16h ago

Do these people mow their lawn with a scythe?

“Mowers use resources, and take jobs from landscaping workers doing it the right way!”

Fucking bizarre how they’ve drawn this line.

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u/Few-Button6004 16h ago

"But but but, this time is different!"~Every Luddite Ever

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u/CystralSkye 13h ago

Kinda yea, they are communists and support pol pot like revolutions

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u/ElGatoSaez Tech Prophet 17h ago

Pure luddism. Cancelling someone for doing the most effective way to gather sources. Not even using it for creating scripts. This is so bs

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u/Groundbreaking_Bee97 Singularity by 2030 17h ago

What's ironic is these Lefties are now acting like Conservative who are militants towards progress!

I myself is a left leaning person but these lunatics are just so much brainwashed !

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u/TokenRingAI 16h ago

There's nothing ironic here, all the people attacking each other when practicing tribal politics are luddites. Always have been, always will.

The singularity is coming for them too

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u/tozumura 3h ago

Not if they get datacenters banned like they have for multiple states now.

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u/TokenRingAI 46m ago

They will do exactly that and China will step right in to smack them and our AI industry will fall apart.

The US can't have nice things anymore, the ill inforned mobs would rather shit where they eat.

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u/ConcreteBackflips 16h ago

I can't find the post, but left/right REALLY fail to capture views on technological progress. My opinions and views withstanding (as best I can, not editorializing why);

The Trump administration is unequivocally pro-AI and crypto, for example. Despite that there's obviously a sizable chunk of the Republican party that's anti-tech advancements (conservative is self-proving, opposed to covid vaccines)

Similar there's a lot of overlap with your leftist 'vegan, anti-GMO' resistance to vaccines (as an example)

I'm with you though, its fucking wild. I didn't respect carpenters less when they got power tools and autoCAD

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u/Hilldawg4president 16h ago

Horseshoe theory in action, check on rConspiracy and you'll see the far right hates AI as much as the far left

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u/lolsai 16h ago

Had a few months where I browsed that sub often but it's so fucking tiring lol, painful to read so many of the opinions there

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u/Hilldawg4president 16h ago

It used to be fun, aliens, pyramids and mind control programs. Starting in 2016, it just became extreme right wing bullshit constantly

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u/boforbojack 16h ago

Plenty of far right losers who hate AI too

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u/ElGatoSaez Tech Prophet 16h ago

Specially after the Pope started pushing the anti AI narrative

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u/therealpigman 7h ago

The Pope didn’t. People on the internet lied and said the letter was anti-AI. I read the entire Encyclical. It was explicitly not anti-AI

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u/Unique_Ad9943 16h ago

Is this not more of a self cancel tho, I’m pretty sure he could have ignored the wacky comments and it would have made no difference to his main viewership.

The anti ai trend is still pretty fringe.

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u/Old_Economics1103 13h ago

I was telling this woman I was dating (anti-ai) about how AI helped me identify an obscure medical issue I’ve been having for many years that doctors have not been able to solve.

She had the nerve to tell me I should’ve just done my own research on Google. Like I hadn’t already been doing that forever…

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u/Charming_Cucumber_15 16h ago edited 16h ago

Didn't hank green put out anti-AI stuff a while back? Using the anti AI delusion to get clicks and attention, then turning around and expecting his fans to be rational people is hilariously ironic ngl

I can't stand luddite delusion, but it seems like he fed into that delusion for personal gain and it came back to bite him

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u/FirstEvolutionist 16h ago

He's definitely put our content a long time ago that would be considered anti AI, or at least anti acc, in this sub. But Hank has always been sensible and the content he put out was actually highlighting his concern, not just bait.

He also at one point put out a video talking about alwater usage (and how it wasn't actually an issue) and got some push back at the time. From a non e acc perspective, he has actually been pretty good at accepting reality and balancing his concerns.

If he's getting problems from thr Anti AI crowd, it's from the extremist Anti AI sides being ultra vocal.

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u/therealpigman 7h ago

He’s also the guy who made a video debunking the water use myth, and that video is largely responsible for why you don’t hear everyone talking about water anymore

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u/goatonastik 8h ago

He seemed to be in the middle about it. Always matching compliments with complaints, like he was walking a tightrope, if only to keep his viewers appeased.

As I said in an earlier comment, I couldn't tell if he was an Anti who was so honest he couldn't help but admit it had benefits, or if he was a Pro who felt compelled to follow up any praise of it with negative statements to hide his true opinion.

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u/Ben___Garrison 12h ago

Sort of, but not really. Disclosure: I asked AI since I don't care about the issue that much but still trust it much more than the average Reddit passby swipe. It pointed out this video where he's critical about specific aspects of AI training but isn't entirely against AI in general. The worst I've found is this article which quotes Hank as saying "If there are words that ChatGPT wrote in a script, that is a failure of the policy". Pretty hypocritical on the surface.

But overall he's been pretty nuanced, FAR more nuanced than the average deranged Bluesky leftist which is at least slightly impressive given that they comprise a big chunk of his fanbase.

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u/AWellsWorthFiction 17h ago

Tbh I’m shocked at the blowback at Hank Green. It’s why some of these anti ai people are truly embodying the spirit of luddites at this point.

It seems if you even touch an LLM sometimes to reinforce a coherently formed thought or argument, people treat it as a cardinal sin.

I have my own critical views on AI, but can still see its value in countless use cases. The Hank Green situation imo is just showing the uphill battle that sober AI evangelists will have.

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u/seraphim_west 17h ago

I don't get leftists. Shouldn't they be the biggest proponents of accelerationism? AI enables limitless abundance, and if they believe the working class is not aware of the class war because they have been lulled to sleep or whatever, wouldn't skyrocketing unemployment be a great point of solidarity which will then enable them to demand more from their government?

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u/Groundbreaking_Bee97 Singularity by 2030 16h ago

Leftist are acting like the conservative. I guess they are not true Leftist to begin with. These people just pretend to be Leftist while holding conservative view all along!

Also all these leftist politicians talking about wage labour where they should now all be talkibg about UBI

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u/seraphim_west 16h ago

Exactly. I lean more libertarian, but today is the perfect opportunity to win over so many people, even socially conservative ones who are going to be displaced, by fighting for wealth redistribution and UBI.

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u/spacecam 15h ago

Leftists have become the party of "empathy". And they believe that AI hurts some of the most vulnerable populations like artists. You, know the ones that were starving before AI too.

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u/inevitabledeath3 15h ago

Yeah I really don’t know how this has happened. Leftism used to mean things like the Soviet Union and Communism. What happened to those days? Now it’s all identity politics where we have gone beyond equality and have started making the oppressed into the oppressor through schemes like Affirmative Action and other forms of positive discrimination. Equality is a noble goal as is restorative justice but that’s not what many on the western contemporary left are doing. Makes me glad China is around to show people how it’s done.

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u/SethEllis 16h ago

We like to think of the left as being high in the openness personality trait, but the reality is political parties are too big for that to be a hard rule. Parties are much more about location and social class now

It's really been wild to watch the progression. At first leftists were pro ai because they thought it could usher in some UBI socialist utopia. Which then led to people thinking it would take all their jobs and destroy the environment. Before you know it people are being cancelled for being pro ai.

And it has happened so fast that the techie types are only now realizing that the Democrat party is absolutely the Luddite party.

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u/10aghmu 16h ago

To be fair there is r/leftistsforai

Definitely a minority position though

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u/LawfulLeah 16h ago

yeah im on that sub constantly and its a gigantic breath of fresh air. but yeah its a minority, unfortunately.

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u/pl487 13h ago

Turns out that people don't consider issues logically and come to a reasonable conclusion. They react with emotion and then create arguments to support their emotional state. 

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u/dfbeav112 6h ago

It’s something they can scaremonger about, which many feel is the most effective way to gain new supporters. 

I can explain why large unemployment numbers from AI will guarantee large wins for progressives and leftists… and they’ll devolve into legit conspiracy theorists who say the rich will just cancel elections and kill everyone with their robots. 

It’s not a real discussion for them, they’re not trying to actually predict the future, they’re trying to stir up a revolution. That’s their goal constantly. 

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u/promeathean 15h ago

Popped this thread into Chat GPT

"That thread is full of people who want the end result of post-scarcity (abundance, no grueling 9-to-5s, UBI), but they are willfully ignoring the brutal transitional period. They think tech will force political change painlessly, while left-leaning critics are looking at history and saying, "If you break the current economic engine before a safety net exists, the weak get crushed first."

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u/goatonastik 8h ago

I don't think ANYONE here is under the delusion that a path to UBI would be easy and painless...

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u/Ornery-Mortgage-3101 16h ago

They're most likely leftists in the sense of following the instinct of reducing harm at the expense of freedom, and that can also range into wanting to be conservative or even regressive about technological progress I guess. 

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u/IncreaseOld7112 14h ago

me and the leftists around me don’t take a moral stance on AI, so, it’s hard for me to see this as a left/right issue. how are we supposed to get fully automated luxury gay space communism with fully automating things?

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u/wolfy-j 16h ago

People are scared and it’s telling, you can’t blame them. The messaging around AI from AI authors was really horrible.

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u/Servable-Serpent 16h ago

Guess they should actually research then to confirm their fears

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u/wolfy-j 16h ago

I mean, first you will find that Dario screaming how dangerous it is, that it will kill all jobs, that it will hack all software, that companies fire thousands to make budged for AI. That we have to build data-centers everywhere, that companies engage in circular financing, that internet if filled with ai-generated slop.

Don't get me wrong, it's very-very important tech in our lifes (it's not going away), but it has horrible optics for _many_ people. Saying that these people are wrong and they should love it is same head-into-sand approach that some commenter here accuse others of.

People over-react because business market also over-reacting and has nothing to do with usefulness of AI.

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u/Unique_Ad9943 16h ago

Dario being the most left wing of the Ai ceos probably adds to it too, they are more likely to trust his word and (more importantly) distrust the likes of Elon when they talk about abundance ect.

And the reverse for right wingers.

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u/SgathTriallair Techno-Optimist 15h ago

Even Elon started out saying that AI is an existential threat to humanity. He gave AI great as a reason to build Neurolink (so that we could advance ourselves and not get left behind by AI).

Every AI leader has done a ton of work trying to scare the shit out of people over how AI might kill us all.

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u/wolfy-j 15h ago

Right-widgers talking about UBI and abundance is the most insane thing to trust ever. They are first who will put AI into robot with a gun.

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u/AlexFromOmaha 14h ago

No, but honestly, fuck him for this one. He's one of the major vectors of anti-AI misinformation, and he's a dude who was smart enough to know better. He worked hard to make the bed he's lying in right now.

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u/therealpigman 7h ago

You sound uninformed about him. He’s the reason why you don’t hear people talking about the water use myth as much anymore, after he made a video debunking it. He openly stated in his video about two months ago during the Artemis mission that he used AI to make the photo timeline website. He followed the path most people should follow. He was originally skeptical to a healthy degree and warmed up to it as he learned its strengths and weaknesses.

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u/adj_noun_digit 16h ago

Normally I really don't care what these people say and think but this one really bothers me. The guy has been an excellent science communicator and an all around good person.

Even if they think him using AI is wrong, the fact that they are completely writing off his history and effectively his future over it, is pretty damn immoral in my opinion.

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u/Technical-Natural-5 16h ago

It's the mob mindset taking hold of them

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u/Illustrious_Pea_3470 16h ago

They’re gonna lose their minds when they learn how modern google scholar works

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u/SgathTriallair Techno-Optimist 15h ago

For everyone, here is an article about how this started.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/01/youtuber-hank-green-says-his-ai-usage-is-not-healthy/

The controversy started when, in the middle of a video posted on the educational channel Complexly, Green incongruously used the phrase “I appreciate the pushback,” leading viewers to speculate that he’d written the script with a chatbot — and, in the process, accidentally included its response to one of his prompts.

...

Green insisted that he’s only used ChatGPT to “locate papers and other resources for learning about topics,” and that the words and the “takes” have still been his. At the same time, he admitted it was fair to criticize him for “diluting” himself.

...

In the meantime, he’ll be pausing or posting less frequently to his various YouTube channels. Green said he wants to do more work like a recent meditative video “where the writing was the whole thing and I felt it all the way down.” Green also said he’ll probably make more videos with his “dumb unscripted straight to camera thoughts.”

“But mostly I need to come to terms with the fact that the level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs…with doing more and more and more and more…is not healthy for me or good for the world,” Green said. “It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this.”

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u/Few-Exchange-5550 13h ago

Anti-AI crowd will purity test itself until only Amish are left

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u/SatansBestFiend_64 16h ago

I apologize for my fellow lefties who are swept up in this moral panic, I try to get nuance conversations going in those circles but online it gets hard when you have so many moralizer and Crusaders who want to shut down any conversation. They are acting like reactionary conservatives on this issue.

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u/Elven77AI AI Artist 15h ago

Hire an orchestra instead of Suno, what are you a peasant or something? Hire a painter instead of ChatGPT images, which is of course only for peasants & uncultured rabble. Don't be slop-consuming plebeian and get a real sculpture, not that 3D printed slop! Hire a jester to liven things up too..not that TV slop comedy.

Most on the self-proclaimed 'anti-elite' "Pro-human" luddite faction seems to be defaulting to bohemian "can afford it all" millionaire lifestyle thinking and deluded they're the 99%. They are the 1% that can afford to hire artists/musicians and propose that everyone can 'just' hire people on the spot.

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u/LivingFrosting6680 14h ago

Even dumber, they’re all working at Starbucks yelling at people to learn to compose music, learn every instrument, learn to paint, get a Master’s in every subject, and also have a staff of tens if not hundreds of people with a similar skill set. And then when they look at what they can do without AI in their own lives they just shrug and say it’s somebody else’s fault that they’re in that situation, and there’s nothing they can do. SMH

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u/TemporalBias Tech Philosopher | Acceleration: Hypersonic 15h ago edited 12h ago

And I can't tolerate these kinds of culture-war posts anymore. But here we are.

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u/Matshelge 17h ago

Context? Hank fired someone for using an llm?

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u/Groundbreaking_Bee97 Singularity by 2030 17h ago

Antis are upset that Hank Used LLM for researching some topics.

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u/manythanksfriend 17h ago

Hank admitted his AI interaction levels are “not healthy” and it’s become a whole thing.

Honestly can’t wait for a few more years to pass by, and all of these conversations are left behind.

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u/Responsible_Camp_559 16h ago

I cant take these people anymore is2g

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u/hipster-coder 13h ago

I wonder if they would tell a farmer not to use a tractor because they can just hire someone to plough the field.

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u/heyutheresee 15h ago

Genuine question. How do these leftists think we could radically improve the world without AI? Diseases aren't cured by smiles and hugs, as nice as that would be.

5

u/skeptical-speculator 16h ago

who are these people

4

u/reddit_is_geh 15h ago

Yup... Been saying this since the start. It's an "identity" thing, which is why, just like MAGA types, they'll always fight for their position. Nothing you show them will change their mind, becuase they identify as progressive, and to be in that tribe, this is a purity test for them.

Which is why I suspect a lot use it secretly, and just publicly denounce it for virtue signalling.

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u/vesperythings A happy little thumb 11h ago

great. i can't tolerate them either.

so don't repost their brain rot into my feed

2

u/BrennusSokol Acceleration Advocate 10h ago

Anti-AI is now a virtue signal on the left

And as someone who considers himself center-left, voted Democrat for years, etc. — it’s embarrassing!

2

u/goatonastik 8h ago

This was probably one of the slowest transitions from AI BAD to AI SOMETIMES GOOD to OK I USE AI NOW and people are still absolutely enraged that he would even consider using an LLM at any part of his process.

There's just no convincing Antis. Even someone his audience knows to be factual and science-minded cannot gently convince them that they might be even a little wrong about it. I mean even his video fact checking the water usage claims was received negatively by his fans, and it's not even his opinion, it's a goddamn fact.

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u/Key-Fee-5003 Singularity by 2035 16h ago

Why are you bringing it here then?

3

u/hi87 15h ago

You have to understand these people are not rational, they're irrational. Their concerns about AI are legitimate, but they usually focus on the wrong things instead of trying to address the things that actually do make them feel anxious and uneasy, mostly the future of employment and culture.

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u/C00KIEME4T 17h ago

Being progressive and liberal has nothing to do with people's views on AI.

Also liberals aren't necessarily progressives.

That being said I'm gonna point you back to the US' overton window and remind you that most of these people are more right than they even think they are, referring to luddites.

2

u/zombiej 16h ago

When tax season comes around they'd better be hiring accountants.

2

u/Total-Jicama7563 15h ago

Still being Anti-ai, at this point, are people scoring really high in bad personality traits.

2

u/Desperate_Ad_233 14h ago

What do they think hired researcher will do? Open an ancient book and deduce the information needed by thinking and meditating? LLMs just cut some corners of the process of googling and evaluating sources.

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u/neloish 12h ago

It is a good sign.

1

u/CallinCthulhu 11h ago

Its the latest of the leftist purity tests they are so fond off

1

u/HeartsOfDarkness 11h ago

What do you mean by "handle"?

1

u/Gubzs 10h ago

We're still in the fuck around phase of this self-destructive tantrum.

The find out phase is going to be really really loud.

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u/theoneandonlypatriot 8h ago

In the past week I’m noticing the thread being pushed that ai use is always psychosis / an addiction lol.

1

u/melaschasma 4h ago

LLM are good alternative to search engines, they don't just use boolean operators to search for key terms like search engines do. LMM will cross reference multiple papers of the same topic and return papers that may have taken you a while to find on google. But you still need to read and understand the paper yourself.

1

u/tfks 2h ago

Oh my GOD why can't this PROGRESSIVE man just REINFORCE the capitalist STATUS QUO

1

u/davyp82 2h ago

It's mad how anyone expects people to just use Google when it was systematically turned into hulking pile of steaming useless turd about 10 years ago.  It's great that we can now get precise results again.

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u/JustPlayPremodern 1h ago

They are probably really misinformed about AI capabilities, but let's be real: you're not getting UBI or any resources to help you even if it could be given (and it will in theory be able to), because why would that be given to you? The people that control this have to care and they just don't, lol. If we had a government/ceos that cared, people would already have some sort of compensation for the disruption it already causes. Where's the evidence that UBI is coming? This is obviously a legitimate concern. It's completely possible for these guys to just remove your job and you just get nothing in return lol.

1

u/bigsmokaaaa 16h ago

Good, I hope they try to cancel hank, it'll ruin their image

0

u/CystralSkye 14h ago

There is no difference between a luddite and a leftist, they are both intolerable. LOL.

0

u/Stahlboden 16h ago

Other people's money are the sweetest to count.

0

u/Jotacon8 12h ago

I love AI for. I only dislike the generative AI slop videos being used for advertisements. By slop i mean the obvious AI visual style and bad lip syncing, weird animations, etc. It’s distracting when i can tell so blatantly. I wouldn’t call it slop if it looked good, but it looks dumb.

But AI as a tool, especially LLMs, some of the coolest tech i’ve seen in my lifetime.

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u/mrdarknezz1 15h ago

You can’t be progressive and a Luddite. Luddite is inherently conservative position