What's the Marxist analysis of "generative AI"?
What's the Marxist analysis of "generative AI"?
- Is using generative AI ethical?
- Is contributing to its development ethical?
- Why does the Hexbear search function return every single post with "ai" as a substring?
It's a form of productive capital, and its ethicality depends entirely on the conditions and reasons for its use, same as any other. Renting time on a proprietary model is unethical, because that represents a modern enclosure of the cultural commons. Capital replacing skilled workers with generative slop is unethical, because it's yet another step in automating away productive workers with inferior machines.
Hobbyists and yeoman artists using non-proprietary local models to amplify their own labor is ethical, because that's just a worker using a tool to be able to accomplish more, while existing as much as possible outside of the cultural enclosure techbros are trying to make.
The question of whether training data has to be properly licensed from someone who claims the rights to do so is a red herring meant to favor huge corporations that either own massive amounts of IP (like Disney and other media companies) or which claim licensing rights over massive amounts of user-provided IP (like
, imgur, instagram, etc) and who can negotiate licensing fees out of the big tech companies like what got from google. The property angle will never come out in favor of small yeoman artists and their meager holdings any more than property rights came out in favor of yeoman farmers over huge agricorps, and thus should be disregarded.That said, the hobbyist AI community is at least 95% irredeemable and better off in
, from the grifters, to the nazis, to the nonces, to the people whose only crime is just being too cringe.
Freelance artists hold the contradictory position of being semi-autonomous wage-earners. I find this diagram helpful for understanding why they tend to hold certain positions. Also explains why they ally with big companies using IP law against LLM companies. Because they don't want to become proletarianized.
So as a force of proletarianization, wouldn't the technology be historically progressive in a Marxist sense? I still hate it though.
Its historically progressive when ran locally, when not ran locally it is just rent seeking again
There is no "ethical" evaluation of AI under Marxism. It's clear that AI is merely a tool, like all other forms of automation, to displace workers for the sake of profits. AI isn't "Good" or "Bad" in this context. Under the constraints of capitalism, it will be used for "Bad" things, meaning "non-productive" things. Sold as a toy to users to perform whatever they desire, creating nonsense text and images that ultimately have no value. AI could be a truly transformative technology if it was confined to a more socially responsible system. It's use in protein identification, for example, is a real leap forward.
Also, like so many "revolutionary" technologies, you'll see capitalists bend over backwards to add "AI" to whatever it is they produce. That's how you get bullshit like the "AI" mouse, or the "AI" tooth brush. It is also a smoke screen for ACTUAL intelligence that is being exploited through Capital's imperialist tendencies. Those little coolers that use AI to drive a subway sandwich to your apartment? It's "AI" is probably named José and José gets paid $0.10 an hour to drive that little cooler to your house. LIFT or Uber (I forget which) uses "AI" to identify the driver based on a photograph to ensure people are not "sharing" the account (and thus able to be on the road for longer than a single person could). Again, that "AI" is probably named Isabella, and she was paid $0.05 from a microwork platform, and did the "computations" to decide if today you looked like that photo of took when you signed up for LIFT/Uber.
Like all things under capitalism, these automation tools are used in ways that harm workers. This does not make the underlying algorithms and their many applications inherently "unethical". It's the actions of the capitalists, that are ultimately unethical.
Good answer.
Read the Communist Manifesto. It's been a while, but iirc, a significant chunk of it is about Intellectual Property and automation.
The communist manifesto was published in 1848. Our modern understanding of Intellectual Property didn't really start until the Berne Convention of 1886, 3 years after Marx's death. Also the concept of intellectual property changed many times since then. Music was not even copyrightable until 1906. Copyrighted software did not exist until 1976. Pre-1976 software is considered public domain. During Marx's life time, he did not experience the modern concept of Intellectual Property, it was not a thing yet.
Kind of a side note, but I think it's important to point out that while they didn't write about intellectual property and automation, Marx clearly defined the basis from which they came to develop, and that is essential to understanding both.
Laws are a manifestation of property relations, not the other way around. Intellectual property is a specific manifestation of the general private property that dictates capitalism. The phenomenon of music as commodity wasn't as developed then, but the analysis of private property in general, which then dictates the specific forms of property, is all there.
Regarding automation, Capital Vol. 1 deals with the atomization of the work process leading into increasingly simplistic and specific actions, which lead to the creation of increasingly specific tools as we get to understand the processes better through practice and science. While this isn't specifically about automation, it defines the process through which human development managed to substitute physical labor for machine labor over time. Machines were a specific form of it, automation is another, and AI might be a new one (that is particularly applicable to creative labor/commodity production).
I'm only pointing this out because your comment may read like "don't bother reading Marx to understand these phenomena" for some
Due to my own background, I may be remembering more discussed on the topic than there actually is, but the translation on Marxism.org uses the phrase intellectual production multiple times to discuss what is clearly a form of intellectual property. The concept of The Commons, including it's form as a well from which ideas are drawn, goes back thousands of years. And while it may not be an exact 1 to 1 of our present day, Marx was definitely familiar with the enclosure of The Commons. I doubt he would have that much of a problem extrapolating a scenario resembling our present day.
- Probably not, I'm not gonna complain if people use ChatGPT. But maybe someone has more knowledge than I do. I'd try not to pay for AI, if possible. If you're a company and you're profiting off of AI, then you're stealing the work that was used to try AI.
- Do you mean as an engineer? Sometimes giving up work is hard.
- You don't mean "all" that comes up in the URL?
