Hey fam,
I've been having more and more discussions with comrades across different organizations, and I keep hitting this wall when it comes to AI and robotics.
Simply put, most people just don't understand the capitalist/imperial consequences let alone the communist opportunities that these innovations entail
Keeping in line with a Lenin-esque analysis of understanding the various material inputs (energy, agriculture, steel, etc), I'm hoping to begin brainstorming collective solutions that we can begin to circulate in our respective fields and orgs
Starting with some founding principles
- Avoiding dependence on any foundational model given the ability to surveil users (but keeping their usage as an option because all current llms are known to have publicly available jailbreaking methods)
- Targeting and elevating use cases which can be implemented with open source, local, and offline models to avoid surveillance, enhance portability, and also reduce the climate impacts of this tech
- Using this tech to enhance sociality between people and the planet. None of the use cases should be to replace people/workers or reduce the reliance on our communities
I don't have much at this moment, but so far
- Real time, multilingual translation, we are increasingly organizing across different communities, and we don't always have translators available. Everyone should be included at the table, and this is one step to lowering that barrier of entry
- Using AI to vet protest plans, especially if you have access to your local police, national guard, etc. training and operating manuals. Obviously needs to be done offline, but a second pair of eyes goes a long way
- Contingency planning, especially in understanding how the police will react and mobilize force
- Learning how to make wireless jammers and tuning them to the spectrum used by police and military drones
- Coming back to the jailbreaking vulnerabilities of all current llms, you can use them for more "illegal" endeavors to pretty accurate ends. Not advocating for such, but it's an option
- Liberation companions, as we move more into agentic ai, finding ways to embody the knowledge of our liberatory elders to educate and reflect on current methodologies. Everything from a study companion/group to an llm tuned towards modernizing their perspectives to our modern context
None of this is meant to be prescriptive, but rather the beginning of an ongoing discussion
Also drop links to other discussions if this has already been addressed elsewhere
Hard to say how chatbot responses will be viewed in the near future as they become (even) more common, but this sounds like a bad idea. Right now we can call out people who have the "everyone who disagrees with me is a bot" mentality, but that's going to get harder if we actually start using bots.
Chatbots are also terrible at accurately sourcing their claims (see all the lawyers and academics who've been busted when their chatbot invented a citation). It's radicalizing to learn how many awful things capitalists have actually done and how many of the awful things attributed to socialism are taken out of context, exaggerated, or outright falsified. A chatbot that needlessly invents capitalist atrocities or falsely describes the real history of socialism undercuts all that.
Although the idea of having the bots automatically respond may not be the best solution for every case, having a more centralized knowledge database with up-to date responses against everything could be useful to the people commenting online and being able to give a very large amount of sources to anything not ground in reality.
There are ways to ground such knowledge in reality though, like having intermediary AIs/LLMs that can point to human checked sources and then having the computer copy the passages straight from there to the actual AIs that are going to make a response and to the checking AI or even humans who would help make sure the project is going well and improving on the shortcomings.
A possible middle ground solution would be to use the AIs to point to online comments/texts/scientific papers/books/ that properly debunk/explain things so that, at least people who aren't blindly believing everything, can check against and see another, actually different, point of view of matters.
This is my favorite idea so far, especially in regards to toppling the ideological hegemony that liberalism holds
For the nuts and bolts:
There are already large scale implementations of this like perplexity.ai or notebookllm that use explicitly retrieved resources to make their claims and enable you to verify their veracity
A first demo would be archiving something like Marxists.org or the prolewiki into a vector database for real time RAG lookups
Pull the text from the site itself or archive.ph and have the llm generate the critiques and additional content from there
The most seamless interface would likely be a browser extension vs a separate site, but baby steps and mvps ftw
TBH, I'm kind of surprised this hasn't been done already