a founder of ArtCraft used Claude to replace the entire adobe software suite, legally. because it’s ai generated, it’s also in the public domain and absolutely free forever. this would be the first case of ai undermining techno feudalism.
I ask this because it seems leftist theory is all about the conflicts between workers and those who own the means of production. and this might be part of the reason so many think that to be left is to be anti ai, because everything gets framed exclusively as a labor issue. this leaves out the one front where ai development is unambiguously good, and that is the demand side. in particular, ai has done more to put things like art production and education(theoretically) in reach of ordinary people, more to actually get ordinary people into art production, than basically all professional artists combined. but to someone who doesn’t consider consumers, that would never occur to them. in fact many it seems would rather that didn’t happen and would go to great lengths to stop it. but for us there is something different. what is it? is there a leftist conception of consumer welfare and rights? where does it get applied if at all?
exactly one of each of the choices for these questions is correct.
question 1: according to the rivalry theory of property, which of the following can be stolen?
your house
art per se
labor
ideas
question 2: which of the following is copyrighted?
a large scale painting that imitated a slightly rearranged comic page to the level of bindet dots
a selfie that happened to be taken by a baboon
an image that went through thousands of prompt iterations with minor hands-on edits afterward by the person who produced it
an image that went through extensive, targeted inpainting by a person, with ai, to specifically add a melted slice of cheese on the head of a character depicted in the style of stained glass
question 3: which of the following is not universally considered by academics to be art?
the pillars of creation(the actual nebula not the telescope photographs of it)
a urinal signed by a certain Marcel duchamp
a banana taped to a wall
merda d’artista (an actual piece of crap in a can)
a hollow glass cube with a pool of water inside that refluxes on its inner walls and specifically the condensation patterns that form there. (this is an example of nondeterministic/chaotic art, where the person is largely not and cannnot be responsible for the details)
the iterated fractal renderings that come from the distributed computing project electric sheep.
question 4: which of the following is illegal?
downloading and/or making copies of copyrighted, publicly available material for personal noncommercial use
training ai with copyrighted data for which no known opt out has been submitted, without permission, payment or license
using said ai honestly without criminal intent
telling people not to do something very specific that would be detrimental to a data center
question 5: which of the following was embraced most as an art form upon its earliest availabilty?
photography
recorded music
synthesizers
cgi
digital art
ai image generators.
question 6: which of the following uses the most water total in the us?
corn irrigation
people(drinking)
the societe des produits nestle
the ai industry
the meat supply chain
question 7: what is the longest any bubble (that collapsed) so far has ever lasted?
6 months
1 year
2 years
3 years
Question 8: if something you produced is copyrighted, which of the following can you legally sue anyone for?
making and selling narrowly derivative/barely distinguishable works passing them off as their own
Parodying or satirizing them
training ai/loras
imitating your style with a different subject or message you never would use without intent to defame you
question 9: which of the following software absolutely requires an internet connection to function properly?
a browser game
the Pinterest app
stable diffusion
Local language models like deepseek, gpt-oss, Gemma, glm, etc.
question 10: what was the first generative ai model
deepdream
dall-e 1
gpt 1
tay
even I’m not sure what all the correct answers to these are. But you can pretty much infer at least one wrong answer for all of them.
When certain figures say ai will either ‘make money irrelevant’, ‘make work optional’, ‘cause prices to go to zero’, or some combination thereof, people who are anti ai must think one of the following:
there is some sort of catch
they are lying
or, what they mean is not what they said, in some way that makes it a bad thing.
and I’m curious. Which is it?
now I understand the impulse to view anything said about the future by certain rich people with suspicion, especially when on the face of it it’s something though sounds great. Prices going to zero sounds great, making work optional sounds great, so how other than ‘that doesn’t mean what you think it means’ could people on the ‘left‘ oppose it?
since having the government acquire stock in corporations and government run grocery stores are on the table now, it has gotten me thinking(and this has more to do with the leftism than with ai), surely the government could also peacefully acquire and also build other means of production and distribution and use the profits that could be obtained from that to fund things as well, or just directly provide services that otherwise don’t happen/routinely get cut because they are so costly. I’m thinking, creating mostly automated food production that could feed the unemployed, taking control of abandoned retail and commercial spaces and letting the local population vote on what they will set up in them, building new tracks so that Amtrak wouldn’t have to ‘borrow’ freight company owned rails or even to bypass them so one need not wait for a freight train to pass. So far the only state run companies are not profit making, such as the CPB(pbs and npr), the bbc, Amtrak, (and more state run media from other countries as well), and of course various nationalized industries in different countries.
now I’m not proposing nationalization or running government like a business, but rather the government could set up profit making ventures of its own.
Dave Shapiro reacts to Bernie Sanders’s proposal for the creation of a sovereign wealth fund and shares his issues with it and how he would prefer it be done.
the proposal is at once overly aggressive and insufficient, could give the government power we can’t trust it with, and has no clear design for distributing the dividends if any.
he should instead try to get up to ten percent of each major American company and have a clear split of where the dividends will go.
Abundance and progressives can form a sub coalition in the Democratic Party. Should they choose to team up and combine messages it would give us a coherent agenda that gets us as close to socialism as current sociopolitical conditions will allow, after taking over the party of course. The progressives embrace the label of socialist though the consensus is they aren’t because they don’t plan to end capitalism per se. Yet the path is already indistinguishable to anyone who isn’t a pedant steeped in theory. Including me. And the ai ceos themselves.
I put this here because, for such a thing to occur, the progressives would have to at some point not hitch their wagon to anti ai nimbyism, among other things. But, reasonable ai regulations need to be in place nationwide first.
If something produced entirely autonomously is automatically in the public domain, and there are now installable models that can code for hours at a time, someone could set up an agent/agent swarm to develop a software constantly, specifically so that it is in the public domain. They wouldn’t have to worry about which open source license to put it under, one never has to wait for a person to get around to addressing a GitHub issue, and it could be absolutely free.
If the system incentivizes capitalists so strongly to prevent ubi, why then are a growing number of them proposing both it and mechanisms to fund it? The fact is everyone knows ubi would solve a bunch of problems and relieve many tensions if implemented properly, along with a few other things, but wouldnt immediately end capitalism. which is why so many leftists look at it with such suspicion, but in my view it might be fine anyway. Eventually capitalism will end, but in a future with ubi it might not coincide with a bunch of death and civil war/human extinction. most people might barely even notice when it happens. In every other scenario it ends violently. And yet so many people who could, refuse to consider it because they dont think it will pass or they don’t think the rich will contribute. For the former, musk is in favor of it so trump is likely to sign it, and the latter, the requisite tax need not be subject to deductions.