Greetings Hexbears!
I just pounded out this long ass comment in a thread inquiring about why leftists tend to oppose GenAI and LLMs, when I realized the post was already over a week old and no one will probably read it. Thought it was insightful enough to reshare and, given your reputation, figured people here would find it interesting to read.
I recently finished reading Capital, and many of these thoughts jumped out at me during my reading. Interested in hearing what you think or if you have any critiques or addendums.
Anyways, here's the text:
I haven’t seen any comments here that adequately address the core of the issue from a leftist perspective, so I will indulge.
LLMs are fundamentally a tool to empower capital and stack the deck against workers. This is a structural problem, and as such, is one that community efforts like FOSS are ill-equipped to solve.
Given that training LLMs from scratch requires massive computational power, you must control some means of production. i.e. You must own a server farm to scrape publicly accessible data or collect data from hosting user services. Then you must also own a server farm equipped with large arrays of GPUs or TPUs to carry out the training and most types of inference.
So the proletariat cannot simply wield these tools for their own purposes, they must use the products that capital allows to be made available (i.e. proprietary services or pre-trained “open source” models)
Then comes the fact that the core market for these “AI” products is not end users; it is capitalists. Capitalists who hope their investments will massively pay off by cutting labor costs on the most expensive portion of the proletariat: engineers, creatives, and analysts.
Even if “AI” can never truly replace most of these workers, it can convince capitalists and their manager servants to lay off workers, and it can convince workers that their position is more precarious due to pressure from the threat of replacement, discouraging workers for fighting for increased pay and benefits and better working conditions.
As is the case with all private private property, profits made by “AI” and LLM models will never reach the workers that built those models, nor the users who provided the training data. It will be repackaged as a product owned by capital and resold to the workers, either through subscription fees, token pricing, or through forfeiture of private data.
Make no mistake, once the models are sufficiently advanced, tools sufficiently embedded into workflows, and the market sufficiently saturated, the rug will be pulled, and “enshittification” will begin. Forcing workers to pay exorbitant prices for these tools in a market where experience and skills are highly commoditized and increasingly difficult to acquire.
The cherry on top is that “AI” is the ultimate capital. The promise of “AI” is that capitalists will be able to use the stolen surplus value from workers to eliminate the need for variable capital (i.e. workers) entirely. The end goal is to convert the whole of the proletariat into maximally unskilled labor, i.e. a commodity, so they can be maximally exploited, with the only recourse being a product they control the distribution of. AI was never going to be our savior, as it is built with the intent of being our enslaver.