this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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I scanned the thread and am not sure if anyone else has mentioned that GenAI is obliterating the value of creators' (i.e., visual artists, musicians, writers, etc.) labor. This is ruining people's livelihoods and will drastically reduce the amount of new human artistic output.
This is on top of the various other economic, environmental, ethical, and inaccuracy issues with it. This is all why I won't touch the stuff.
Meh, if your art is matched by genAI, it's time to do something else. Also genAI could at the same time that it destroys the livelihood of certain people, also increases the livelihood of other people, think of someone that recently started selling a tomato sauce, with genAI they don't have to pay thousands of dollars to a graphic designer for a brand logo or a label.
I must be missing something and would like to understand this line of thinking. Do communists really think that the availability of easy knock-off logos and labels outweighs artists getting paid for their labor?
Yes? I certainly prefer abundance of stuff over scarcity. If you had asked me that the availability of mass produced furniture outweighs artisan carpenters getting paid for their labor i also would've said yes.
GenAI can be used to generate the boring art that no one wants to do so artists can dedicate themselves to making novel art.
Fair enough, I get your point.
That's a loaded question; 'knock-off' is a value judgment.
Artists don't form a class - no profession does. Between artists, you will find proletariat, bourgeois and petit-bourgeois artists. So we must first ask, which artists are we talking about protecting exactly?
Artistry is also not the first job/skill that's being automated. If the only problem was 'livelihood' (that is, per your usage of the word not the labor-power one is able to provide but the current work for which they are paid) then we might as well destroy any piece of technology that makes a job more accessible so that people can remain experts in their field and ensure they keep a job in their very specialized skill, and that would immediately revert us back to the feudal period where everyone worked the fields and the women also mended clothes on the side for some petty cash. And you died at 30 of dysentery.
But that's not how capitalism works; capitalism tends towards monopolization. None of what AI is doing right now is entirely new or unique. Capitalism itself started by obliterating many jobs (proletarianizing people in the process, getting them from their subsistence* farms and looms and into factories working for a wage), and yet we still consider it progressive because it lays the conditions down for socialism and then communism. It created a proletariat for which the ideology could be laid down: marxism.
I think the question no one has asked yet is what would people who don't like AI want to see done about AI? You can certainly try to legislate, but we know how laws go. Get another party in at the next elections and the laws change entirely. You can try to ban AI, but other countries will keep using it and something else will eventually pop up and spark the same debate. The mechanical loom and the steam machine are just two historical examples. Internet was considered a novelty in the early 90s and people thought it wouldn't last.
But you can't undo the contradictions, and the wheel keeps turning. Whether AI will endure is something that is not dependent on our arguments, whether pro or against. As communists we understand automation will make communism possible, and it's only under capitalism that it leads to the destruction of jobs (AI hasn't really led to job destruction but that's not the main point here). Under communism automation replacing your job means you still get the result of this automation and also you don't have to work anymore, in a nutshell.
These are all contradictions of capitalism Marx highlighted before and this is why the solution is socialism.
I also highly recommend this essay which is easy to follow and highlights these contradictions about AI, artists and capitalism: https://polclarissou.com/boudoir/posts/2023-02-03-Artisanal-Intelligence.html
There is certainly a lot to say about AI (and technological advancements) in capitalism, but our sights are on socialism.
Thanks for the explanation and for the link.
Regarding this question, one possible answer for me is that I would like AI to pay its own way. Right now, AI is losing money hand over fist despite massive subsidies in the form of "free" source content and shared energy expenses, so in its current state it's completely unsustainable and leading toward a major rug pull from under everyone.
I can definitely agree to that, and I also think these are important questions to ask but a lot of the discussion I see revolves around artists specifically (and specifically illustrative artists), leaving little space for other stuff. So thanks for answering sincerely.
The function of the state is to reconcile class differences, but class differences are irreconcilable. How can you make a proletarian rationally agree that they should be paid less and the bourgeois more? All history of civilization is the history of the class struggle; in capitalism the state works for the bourgeoisie, and in socialism it works for the proletariat. So while I would also like for AI companies to struggle their own way on the market (they couldn't compete against China anyway), they wield enormous power over the state, especially the legacy companies, and get whatever they ask for. In the same way Musk gets tons of subsidies for SpaceX and Tesla - the point is to funnel money to the bourgeoisie.
Therefore objectively speaking I think China is the single major factor for destroying the oversized western AI industry. Project Stargate was announced (500 billion for AI over the next years), and literally a week later Deepseek came out and completely demolished that idea before it even took off. It was built for a fraction of the cost of GPT with a fraction of the hardware, and suddenly a 500 billion investment didn't seem like such a good idea anymore. In fact chinese models are largely open source and they are so cheap to run, they don't even charge anything. It's hard to compete against free.
What we'll see soon enough in the west however is monopolization of AI; fewer companies will remain and it will be mostly controlled by 1 or 2 company (probably microsoft and google, maybe meta). I can't really say what the consequences of this monopolization will be yet.
It's not like there's a lot of novel model creators currently either - the costs are too prohibitive and companies like openAI are hemorrhaging money and their 20$/month subscription tier is never going to fill in that massive bottomless hole (they'd need 35 million subscribers for it to break even), so they rely on both private and public funding. Even after releasing the semi open source gpt-oss which boasts 200 billion parameters, the most popular open source models remain z.ai, deepseek and qwen - all chinese models, and you can run a 20B model at most on consumer hardware (with a 1500$ GPU). So even that bet didn't take off, nobody is even using oss beyond the novelty it seems.
Thanks again for the additional analysis. There's a lot to think about. I really need to study AI more so I can understand it better and make better critiques as well as know where it's actually most useful.
no problem, thanks for reading.
I appreciate it.
One would have to explain why it is not capitalism but the technology itself that is at fault. Marxists should be for the socialisation and automation of all labour; under capitalism this may mean unemployment so for artisans that leaves only one source of income which is the defense of proprietorship which is again reactionary.
For marxists the above should be relatively straight forward but for the uninitiated it may take more reading around. In practice, though, our opinions often reflect our relative class positions or aspirations ie under capitalism often "emancipation" or just protection of income in the long-run often ends up being seeking to become a labour aristocrat (which here could involve gatekeeping skilled labour) or bourgoisie aspiration (protection of intellectual property).
One should not lament the weaver for the loom; society should advance to give each person freedom to enjoy non-paid activities and should increasingly advance so that we should not have to be paid in order to survive ie working towards the abolishment of wage slavery. However, under capital there is no mechanism for this so results in the increasing contradictions and immiseration of society.
(Marxism is a science, and in the above context it is the understanding of the mechanisms of capital and how we could potentially build socialism from that understanding)
Edited to add, in case you are not aware-
Thanks for the explanation.
One problem I see with comparing GenAI with earlier automation like the loom, etc. is that GenAI is in no way paying for itself so far or any time in the forseeable future. It currently loses money hand over fist despite massive breaks in the form of "free" source content and subsidized electricity. I imagine that those previous forms of automation were self-sustaining financially from fairly early after their invention.
Thank you!
There is an economic phenomenon called the Tendancy of the rate of profit to fall (https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall) which correlates with what you are saying; under capitalism there is no clean way out of this which is why you see AI market bubbles in the west that you don't see it in a socialist country like China.
And it is also, as you have rightly pointed out, why the return on investment is generally signifcantly worse than it was before (as a general trend). If one does a course in business administration in the west they do mental gymnastics why the rate of operational profit (ie not fictious capital of share price inflation) in the IT sector as a whole is so abysmal and have ad-hoc theories with no predictive value to explain the phenomenon (ie they don't have a scientific approach).
You'll find, and pretty much every marxist will testify to this, that seemingly puzzling politico-economical phenomenon/contradictions under liberal economics not only have robust explanations in marxism but also very good predictive powers - as a science does, and continually refines theory to reflect better observations seen as a science should.
Edited to add - some further reading just in case you need them if you read the article in the above link:
Thank you for the additional analysis and readings! I need to read a lot more about all this and other relevant topics and theory.
🫡