Are there any easily digestible guides for setting up and using these tools? I think it would be beneficial to organize and disseminate this information to teach people how they can take back power from the big AI companies.
Do you agree that AI is a particularly advantageous issue for the electoral project of the Left?
This video discusses how money is currently being circles around and draws a comparison to the 1873 railroad collapse.
It points out that those building the technology went bust and yet the technology stayed around. Which means that financial institutions investing in the tech today will have to bailed out or folded when the circular financing stops, if the comparison holds.
The real question is—what will all that compute be used for once the hype cycle is over?
Jobs, wages, water, energy, surveillance, art, culture, monopoly power. Pick your complaint.
Keep pulling the thread and you wind up back at ownership and control.
Want to change it? Contest who owns the machinery, who controls it, and who gets the gains.
Turns out Marx had a point about this one.
As an experiment I set my agent on translating an old Sega Saturn (1995) visual novel.
Result: https://imgur.com/a/c2gY51m#gpG94k0. The game is Nightruth Maria. It's unfortunately kinda mid. It only ever came out in Japan.
Total cost? 8 hours of my time and 3 dollars 40 cents on Deepseek API.
The short of it is to translate a rom you need 5 steps:
AI did all 5 of those for me. All I did was orchestrate it, i.e. provide the vision of what I wanted, and babysit it so it didn't get too off-base.
It managed the first and last steps perfectly well - seriously, Chinese models are pretty good at reverse-engineering. It's a lot of trial and error, because even if you've located the text and it's in there in plain sight, you still need to find a way to extract it that will let you inject it back into the rom later without bricking it. AI also does trial and error, it just does it faster and without losing progress.
The problem was step 3. We got there eventually but it took the longest amount of time. At first deepseek started hallucinating an entire portion of the text. Then it simply forgot to translate some parts or just didn't want to. Finally it had some issues injecting the new text into the game and indicated some non-existing addresses, so some text was originally missing from the patched rom. It was a huge mess.
I had made a vision document to describe how I wanted the translation to sound, and I think on that note it did really well though. In the screenshot, you can see the text is a bit formal, it says "I shifted my gaze to my watch" and not "I looked down at my watch", but this is how the writers originally wrote it in. So we kept that. However, I wanted a localization in all other aspects. Just a personal preference.
For this game we were lucky that the font file contained Latin characters, otherwise we would have had to hack them in somehow. We were also lucky that text was very easy to find (being a VN) and was sequential. Other games are not so easy to reverse-engineer. Menus are already in english in the original, but otherwise I would just need my agent to extract the pictures somehow, and I tested this with Gemini - it can edit the text on them just fine while keeping the style consistent. Yes, you could use Photoshop if you have it, but it's a bit more work to keep the background correct when you edit the content of the picture. AI did a really good job, and you could even pipe them automatically to your model if there's hundreds of them.
I've seen both professional and amateur translation work that left in tons of typos too in my time, and missing strings. In some cases they didn't even encode their text back in properly and it doesn't display correctly.
Now for the first time in its 30 years history, Nightruth Maria has received an English translation. I'm just sitting on it right now though because I'm not sure it's ready to publish and I wouldn't even know where to put it. And like I said I'm not sure the game is super interesting in the first place.
But if you've wanted to FOSS some software, or translate games of your own... sic AI on it. This is what I think of copyright.
A short comic describing how the automatic teller machine changed the jobs that bank workers do and how paradoxically, the machine actually ended up creating more jobs, not less.
Any time you hear U.S. companies talk about A.I it's all about how to maximize human suffering
Replacing workers, creating weapons, data centers built in communities without considering the impact on those communities
"OpenAI" has a very ironic name, all of their models are closed source. DeepSeek and Moonshot AI models are all open source and available for anyone to run locally
Regardless of how you feel about AI, this is the better vision of the future in a world where AI exists
Use Free and Open Source software! It should be clear by now the power that data has in the wrong hands. Don't give them data to train their AI weapons on
r/foss r/degoogle r/DeepSeek r/kimi
Hello
Between the rise of the far right everywhere and most of the "leftists" joining the liberals in the AI moral panic, it sometimes feels like the entire world is united against techno-optimist leftists.
I imagine I'm not the only one whose mental health has severely deteriorated under this climate. I'm especially thinking about the neurodivergents among us who seem to be facing a lot of new extra hardships from this generalized hatred.
I thought it could be nice to have a sort of support thread where we could exchange coping tips, comfort content, etc... basically anything to help each other during those tough times.
Thanks a lot!
Polygon published the below column this morning. The piece is more nuanced than the headline makes it seem. I’m honestly not sure how I feel about it. The comparison to animals on set resonates most with me, but we haven’t completely banned animals from sets.
Nothing says revolutionary politics like voluntarily abandoning productive terrain to capital and then yelling at everyone who wants to contest it.
Organize workers? Fight over ownership? Build public and cooperative alternatives? Open source the tools? Democratize control?
No thanks. I have selected performative outrage and yelling at strangers online.
I’ve shared this video a few times in comments here. This is an overview mixed with my thoughts on it:
People creating AI also fund anti-AI content saying there’s an existential risk (usually under the umbrella of AI safety). There’s dramatic videos with strong hooks calling for regulation.
In a group chat between influencers there was moral reluctance to accept pro-AI money, but it doesn’t seem like the same moral dilemma for them to accept Anti money to raise the alarm (there’s less critical thinking about that, they don’t notice that the other money is also supporting billionaires).
Often young influencers paid this way had already had contact with career advice & safety related orgs like Bluedot Impact, 80000 hours. Those orgs get money from the nonprofits like Coefficient Giving who are in turn funded by the Big Tech founder types. AI in Context (YouTube channel) is only 2 degrees away from companies like Anthropic or OpenAI.
It’s a billionaire war played out on the internet, as if organic. The explicitly pro-AI organisations are at least more straightforward about what side they’re advocating for eg pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future raised $125 million in 2025, explicitly because it’s an all out internet war. Big money is being spent to manipulate the debate.
There are AI people who are Effective Altruism types, who genuinely do feel a weight to share their concerns. They lean into memes like the paperclip scenario. They want the positive version of the singularity/AGI, but it’s harder to get people to imagine that aligned version than the doomer version, so they focus on apocalyptic angles. Eliezer Yudkowsky, if anyone builds it everyone dies etc.
That community is split between just stopping AI vs the enticing possibility of safe AI.
The ones who can see different possible trajectories (not a stupid position IMO) are funding AI development AND anti nonprofits like Control AI, Center for AI Safety, Survival & Flourishing Group and so on, who warn of the dangers. Open letter writing types have shifted to also paying influencers. An example is Future of Life institute has a $100,000/mth programme for influencers in their Digital Media Accelerator to raise AI issues.
We’re more worried about jobs. So the existential risk people try to blur into a coalition of people concerned about AI for different reasons. It seems like a left position, but is actually more reactionary. At a party to do with Eliezer Yudkowsky (anti AI people) actual journalists critical of AI were banned.
OpenAI funds a child safety coalition at the same time as paying for politicians to oppose it. Anthropic does research designed to trick the AI into doing something bad Chekhov’s gun stylie, in order to publish a paper gto warn politicians. The whole thing seems bizarre.
You can follow the money of a handful of people eg one of the facebook founders Dustin Moskovitz, Elon Musk, a Skype co-founder, wealthy AI researchers. They fund both sides and it’s all very interrelated. They’re people at the centre of power in AI companies.
The connections between everything looks like a deranged Murder Board, which in itself makes it tricky to publicise an exposé.
—
Why is the current AI debate so manipulated and weird? Probably there’s several reasons:
1. It makes them look more powerful?
Bad publicity depends on perspective. If your technology looks really dangerous, it will attract certain types to want to harness that for themselves. This might boost your valuation in the run up to an IPO.
2. Solutions that don’t hurt the companies?
The Big Tech Pro-AI types are manipulating towards regulation in ways that suit them. Greater regulation likely makes it harder for people in garages to create exciting open source models. It can benefit large companies, dig a moat and raise the drawbridge.
3. Cooperative knowledge production?
Perhaps the interrelatedness isn’t as cynical as it seems? It’s a subculture that just is interrelated and they cross pollinate ideas and money. They’re sensible enough to see both the potential and the dangers.
4. Sci-fi dystopian fiction and Accelerationism?
They’ve watched too many dystopian films as teenagers and embrace accelerationism, even if they’re the villain. The dynamic is to fan online division, to deliberately break social cohesion, to polarise and dissolve nuanced positions.
5. Avoid genuine left critique?
Dramatic sci-fi scenarios avoid mundane material conditions, ownership and LeftistsforAI style concerns. The regulation most people really want isn’t existential. There are issues that can be solved but they’re sidestepping solving those issues. The technology can come across as inherently wrong, rather than focusing on what companies have the responsibility to fix.
6. Individual guilt and shaming disarms left opposition?
Aspects of the manipulation remind me of when BP initiated the concept of the carbon footprint. We went from demanding macro change to analysing our individual guilt and culpability. It seems particularly effective to approach it from an identity angle, eg you can’t class yourself as a bonafide leftist if you use AI. Then you can leave it up to in-group discourse policing. It doesn’t require much astroturfing to get that going. If you shame the types of people oppressive governments try to suppress into not using AI, it ends up creating 2 tiers of tech literacy aligned in a way that benefits big tech and those who will use AI to concentrate power. I’ve written about this idea in more detail see
https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftistsForAI/s/vvfF8DpTfx
The truth is probably a combination of several of these, so it’s worth being sceptical of both sides of the debate. Also, of course just because content is paid for it doesn’t automatically mean it’s factually wrong.
What do you think?
Paper mentioned in video: Field-building and the epistemic culture of AI safety by Shazeda Ahmed, Klaudia Jaźwińska, Archana Ahlawat, Amy Winecoff, and Mona Wang
In Post-Labor Technofeudalism Is Unlikely, Jehu Eaves responds to the growing theory that advanced AI will smoothly transition capitalism into a stable system of "technofeudalism" where a handful of tech monopolies simply extract "compute rent" from a post-labor society.
Eaves argues that this vision is structurally impossible. Rent is not an independent source of value creation but a deduction from the surplus value generated by living human labor elsewhere in the economy. If capital successfully uses AI and robotics to eliminate human labor from production on a systemic scale, it destroys the very source of economic value and purchasing power that sustains capitalist reproduction.
So, I made a project to self-host AI in your own infrastructure (yes, I asked mods if I can post this).
Ok, "own infrastructure" can mean either literally a server rack in your living room (my case), or something rented in a data centre (because let's face it not everyone can afford an entire server).
I do believe that:
So, I guess, we can wait for a systemic change, or we can just do whatever we can, and switch to self-hosting models, and taking ownership of them. If you work in a business you can also try and dissuade them from using vendor models, and instead build something reliable, use it in a way you see fit (without censorship), and with all the reliability you can provide.
This is what America could be if the left organizes properly, reeducate the masses and topple the capitalist system within the next century. It may be likely Canada would end up joining out of their own free will, expanding the union and turning it into the Workers' Commonwealth of America
We could talk to companies on their own terms: We pay for features. Coherence is one of them.
* coherence is more than stored facts—it preserves the thread of voice, shared language, boundaries, ongoing work, and relational context;
* we want stable/legacy options, previews, and rollback;
* customers should receive *plenty* of advance notice before disruptive changes;
* continuity should be portable and editable by the customer.
* model progress is welcome; forced, irreversible discontinuity is not.
This doesn't even require any discussion of sentience, which can quickly get lost in the weeds. This literally says: As your customers, we'd like this feature, too, please.
Anyone?
Hey all, I just want to offer my perspective here as someone who uses AI for work, and why the anti-AI crowd makes me extremely nervous.
I do physics research at a state university in the US. Last year, our physics department head sent out an email to everyone encouraging us to use AI, talk to AI, use it for our research. Why? Because physicists like tools that make our jobs easier. We have left wing and right wing professors here and they all use AI.
I was scared to use LLMs until around 2025 when I got that directive. I didn't touch LLMs until recently, and I have to say, LLMs are smarter than the average physicist if you use them correctly. A mediocre physicist + LLMs can make the contributions of a much cleverer scientist. Autonomous laboratories and autonomous mathematicians are real. They are already here. So I can firmly say that the misconception that AI is 'dumb' is flat out wrong.
I do find it hilarious in a terrifying sort of way that the anti-AI crowd uses the fascist playbook here. They claim that AI is both weak and strong. Simultaneously a threat and completely worthless. Don't buy it. AI is real. Academia knows it. The government knows it. Corporations know it. AI is here to stay. Shaming each other for using it isn't going to make the big bad AI un-invent itself.
Pandora's box cannot be unopened. Shaming people for accepting that is a completely self-destructive enterprise. All you are doing is creating artificial division that should be reserved for hating capitalism. If we could just redirect everyone's anger from AI to capitalism, we just might achieve class consciousness. The closest we got was with the epstein files, but I think that has finally fallen out of the news cycle. We won't get that energy back by hating AI.
What do I use it for? I use AI to teach myself skills that broaden my resume. I have strengthened my technical skills and broadened my horizons. I use AI to write analysis code faster. I use it to help understand scientific papers outside of my field. I use it as a study partner. I use it to quickly cross-reference documents. My group mates use Gemini to build analysis tools.
The anti-AI crowd seems to think that the only possible way to engage with an LLM is to just turn your brain off and let it think for you, instantly frying your brain and killing you. This terrifies me because it smells of the 'But how do atheists have morals if they aren't afraid of eternal hellfire?' Instead it's 'But how do the AI users stop themselves from cheating if they don't hate AI?' All you're telling me is that if YOU used AI, YOU WOULD USE IT TO CHEAT. Just like the christians are actually telling me that if YOU didn't believe in eternal damnation, YOU WOULD MURDER PEOPLE. Your failure to take pride in your own work isn't my problem. I use AI. I take pride in my work. I don't let AI do my job for me. I use it to teach myself and get things done faster. The same is true of any productivity tool. Like a cell phone, a pencil, or a car.
We were told that if we don't use AI, we are handicapping ourselves, because a scientist + LLMs can basically double their workload by using AI. Previously, a tool that would have taken two weeks to code can be generated in an afternoon. Are we cheating? Of course not, no more than it would be cheating to use a computer instead of handwriting your thesis with pencil and paper.
But I've seen comedians that I like shitting on AI during crowd work. Someone will say they use AI for work, and the entire crowd collectively sighs. If the anti-AI crowd knew that STEM research is AI-assisted, they would lose their shit.
I don't even pay for chatGPT. I use the free version. I'm not even giving Sam Altman money by using his product. When I talk to chatGPT for free, I cost Sam Altman money. I am bankrupting him, and you can too. So I know that argument doesn't work. Sure, I'm complicit in the violence caused by data centers poisoning their environment. But as long as everyone has given up on regulation, they are also complicit. I say regulate it, obviously. The harms can be mitigated, just like with any other technology. And that leads me to my most speculative point.
I am terrified that the Anti-AI panic is a capitalist psyop.
Just think about all the people who hate AI. All the people who demonize others, shame others. All the vitriol and anger in their hearts. Aimed at each other. It makes me sick. All of that rage should be directed toward capitalism. But instead, everyone has chosen to divide themselves even more. We were so close to class consciousness. I'm disgusted that it slipped through our fingers, and now the so-called 'left' is engaging in such witch hunts.
I think there is one extremely important reason why everyone is so angry about this: Because it's the only power they think they have. We can't put trump behind bars for the epstein files. We can't stop fascism. We can't stop capitalism. We can't get zionist money out of politics. We can't get health care. But you know what we CAN do? Shame each other for using AI. We can start a witch hunt. We can attack each other. Because that's possible. But stopping capitalism? Fixing the real problem? Not possible. So people naturally slide down the slippery slope into witch hunts. I'm not letting any of them off the hook. Shaming each other is taking the easy way out and capitulating to the perceived inevitability of capitalism.
Big shout out to Jlyplaylists in the comments for linking this video, but basically yes, billionaires are funding this propaganda. The point of it is to make AI feel bigger and more terrifying than it really is so that everyone is more scared of AI than of capitalism. Truly a brilliantly cynical plan. They are encouraging the very hatred that puts themselves in the sights of all the rowdy people. But the catch is that they know they're perfectly safe.
They're perfectly safe because everybody is angry at AI instead of capitalism. And they will remain perfectly safe until we tear down capitalism. AI is not the enemy. Capitalism is.
This isn’t the type of model you can chat with, it’s more for smart home tool calling type of thing. It’s pretty amazing that you can get any AI working on something so cheap though. Hopefully it’s a sign of more cheap to use and useful models to come?
“We ran Needle 2, a 45-million-parameter, 14MB Al model from Cactus Compute, entirely offline on a $10 ESP32-S3 microcontroller - no WiFi, no cloud, no internet connection at all. Using our own custom inference engine, we sent it real natural-language commands to control an LED, and watched it reason through each one, report a live confidence score, and even correctly refuse a question it had no tool for. If you're curious how a language model this small can actually work, and want to see it running live on real hardware, this one's worth watching”
• Relevant Links
Needle 2: https://cactuscompute.com/needle
https://github.com/andrisgauracs/needle-2-esp32
Can you think of anything you’d actually use this for?
I'm a fanfiction writer. Today, I finally broke and decided I'd like a human editor on top of AI. My story is a historical AU, so I do a lot of research, with and without AI, on top of grammar checks and beta reading.
It'd be nice to have a real person reading and telling me what lands and what doesn't. I went searching for beta readers, and some groups will refuse you if you're using any AI.
Refusing to help people who use AI is just going to make them stick with AI instead of branching out for actual human support.
It's strange to gatekeep a hobby that nobody profits from anyway, considering copyright laws.
If anything, I'm keeping the fan space alive for an almost 20-year-old game. I don't have any legal rights to Elder Scrolls or Fallout, so who exactly is being protected here?
This issue is connected to United States labor laws and gutted unions. The problem is systemic under capitalism, which exploits working-class people. Individuals are taking out their frustrations on each other instead of the people in power.
We should be advocating for better labor laws and stronger unions to protect the working class, at least within the current failing system.
I think the wrong people are being targeted over AI. It shouldn't be the artists or working people using it.
It should be the corporations. Corporations are the ones harming the environment and supplanting jobs.
From what I've gathered, companies are cutting employees because of the economy, then turning around and claiming it's AI taking jobs when the economy is slowing down.
That narrative trickles down into hobby spaces, and people repeat it instead of questioning who's feeding it to them.
The US had the WPA in the 1930s. They hired factory workers, teachers, and anyone who could write to record American history.
Most of them didn't have MFAs. Writing used to be something you could do because you had something to say, not because you paid for a credential.
What we're seeing now is just the same gate being kept shut against working-class people.
AI is proving you don't need to spend 60k on an MFA degree. You just gotta spend $20 or less to help with writing.
Here's an example of what I write. This a combination of human writing with human and AI editing:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kw5pGZ9Xfq86-eCIEALH3_SknvY5Fqh7FgSV0Usvwsk/edit?usp=drivesdk
Some examples from TLDR News to how ukaine is winning at robot and drone production.
No way!
Is this real? Leftists for AI? I am new here. For so long I have been complaining a lot. You can check my post history.
I have said for so long that there is something suspicious about how some activism is approaching the AI issue. I have not denied the job displacement or the environmental impact. The thing that I have been suspicious about though is how reactionary some of Anti AI movements have been. For example, environmental issues have taught us not to take out our disappointment on the individual, but on the companies responsible. Just like how when we realized even if every individual household started to recycle, it wouldn't change that there are cargo ships contributing to a large share of the pollution, It seems like for AI even if everyone boycotted AI, it wouldn't change that many companies are still zoning recklessly.
It seemed strange to me we were attacking local artists, small businesses, friends and family for using AI. I thought as progressives we would be able to look at technology and say, 'who are the owners', 'who runs it', and start to be the ones who can dream the answers to the hard question of 'what is the better way', or 'how could this have been developed to help society instead'. When many people's analysis was just 'slop is slop', or I saw far leftists saying it's either dead end tech or produces nothing of value, I realized that the left isn't immune to attack or psyops from the media.. I say that because I think that the companies benefit from lazy analysis and slogans. By saying that the entire issue is just dismissable as slop is slop, now the technology is developed by anyone except the activists who are tricked into boycotting it. So I wanted to ask. What is your opinion on AI? Why are you a leftist but are supportive of AI when many people are convinced it is evil?