this post was submitted on 03 May 2025

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Leftymemes mod nukes anti-AI comments (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/modlog/6777

Most of the removals are for being "off topic", but one removal cites rules against disrespect and liberalism. The mod maintains that a leftist meme community isn't the place for political debate.

all 35 comments

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

I had my comment also removed by this mod. I just immediately blocked him and the whole community when I saw that he had removed it and was also a mod to the community, so he posted the AI crap, and was just removing any comment criticizing said AI crap.

So no thanks, they can have their trash memes.

I’m so sick of seeing ai crap everywhere. It’s such goddamn lazy brained trash. If your vaguely political message isn’t worth you making yourself then it’s not worth posting in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There's no drama here to begin with, I think that the mod acted correctly, and I think drag is being disingenuous.

The anti-AI messages were removed only if completely off-topic. Note how, for example, 9point6's comment is still there; it is anti-AI but it's still on-topic (see the pic).

The exception removed per rules 1 and 3 was this comment:

A mod of [email protected] is posting AI slopaganda [insert image macro saying "ironic"]

The comment is not just attacking the fact that the pic was made by AI; it's also calling the message itself propaganda and disinfo. That clearly violates rules 1 (socialist unity) and 3 (no liberalism), since the commenter is splitting people based on some tangential matter and attacking a message socialists agree with.

The mod maintains that a leftist meme community isn’t the place for political debate.

Not every political space is a space for discussion. Specially not discussions unrelated to the matter at hand.

[+] [email protected] -9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

Drag believes the mod's comment shutting down criticism of slop is pro-slop propaganda; slopaganda.

Gen AI has no place in leftist movements. It's owned by capital.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

Tbh that just shows Drag doesn't understand leftism very deeply.

Being anti-AI is an intrinsically reactionary position to hold.
Leftists should be trying to seize the means of production, not trying to destroy them.
The anti-AI movement puts heavy emphasis on the impact on artists, but most leftists don't believe in copyright or the ownership/privatization of ideas and that includes things like art. Artists absolutely should be publicly funded and properly compensated for their work. But simply fighting against AI tooling will accomplish nothing, and arguably serves to perpetuates copyright rent-seeking by corporations and individuals.
Fighting against or banning the use of AI tools in leftist spaces will accomplish nothing, except to give the capitalists an advantage over leftists. The genie is already out of the bottle. AI tooling, although incredibly annoying in some aspects (such as when it gets inserted into fucking notepad) is also extremely powerful and useful for certain applications. Why would we want to fight with a hand tied behind our backs over some romantic idyll of pre-gen AI times?
A hammer can be a tool or a weapon. Same with AI. Nobody is talking about banning hammers, despite the fact they are often used as weapons or for nefarious purposes.
The anti-AI movement is primitivist and regressive in nature. It hearkens back to the "good old days" when artists were well compensated by rich patrons, and artisans and skilled craftsmen filled every small town. It's a fantasy that never really existed, and one that will never exist under capitalism.
FOSS AI projects are available such as Db0's AI Horde which seeks to democratic access to GenAI. There is no requirement to use corporate tooling.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 13 hours ago

Drag edited your comment to make the tone deafness clearer.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Your source is you made it the fuck up
You want to seize the coal mines? The casinos? Nuclear bombs? Some things are bad and we don't want them.
We live in the real world. You'll have a point after the communist revolution.
AI art makes the movement look weak and pointless. That picture has 0s on dollar bills. It looks bad, and every leftist who told you it looks bad, you shut down. You're the one enforcing that leftism has to represented by low quality art that makes us look bad.
The only times drag has ever seen gen AI used slightly well - useful product, no glaring mistakes, low carbon cost, distinct artistic vision - is for porn. Drag has seen some extremely good AI dragon tiddies. That's it. If a hammer's only legitmate use were cock and ball torture, drag would still want them banned from serious spaces.
Your source is you made it the fuck up.
That's an old anti-vegan argument. Drag's seen a lot of carnists who said it's okay to eat eggs, because some farmers treat their chickens well. Sure, if drag visited a friend with a chicken coop and saw the chickens and they were happy, drag would eat that friend's omelette. But if drag sees an omelette on a restaurant menu, drag assumes those eggs come from a factory farm where chickens have to be debeaked to stop them from autocannibalising due to stress. Your meme with the reddit watermark is like the restaurant omelette. It's probably from a corporation. So it's bad. Also drag is a vegan and against all enslavement of nonhuman experiential beings.

Also, drag's pronouns aren't capitalised. It's a lowercase D unless at the start of a sentence. Drag doesn't want to be treated like a god. You're also not supposed to get into drama you're involved with on this community.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

My retort to this standard 'ai has no place in leftist spaces' is pretty straightforward

I 'stole' a model that has now been fine-tuned on my own hardware, which is powered by solar.

I use this model primarily to write letters to judges for leftists, lgbt+, and street kids, to use when they go to court for small infractions. These will usually contain some old case law, some cultural references, and historical references, as well as the statements from these victims of a police state gone mad, and character references from their neighbours/community.

I am not a lawyer, nor a scholar. I live in the woods and maintain a mostly off-grid lifestyle. I do not have access to lawyers, or community spaces where leftist legal scholars might hang out. The closest damn grocery store is an hour away.

I would not have the time nor ability to source these cases, check on outcomes, and write eloquent letters tailored to each case, but I do have time to prompt my model a few times with the standard template I used to use pre-LLM and then check that any mentioned cases or historical stories are real before sending the letters.

I can say with certainty that 4 of those letters resulted in people going home free who would have likely spent time in jail for simply existing in a manner not approved by the state. And at least 3 more were a significant part of the judge's decision.

Dogpile me if you want. But if you shit on this usage without offering an alternative way to achieve the same thing I will discard your comment as worthless and not reply.

IMO - The small harm done by my local model is VASTLY outweighed by even one innocent person not being confined by the state.

Someone in this thread had mentioned 'We do not simply destroy the means of production, we seize them'. And that feels a lot like truth to me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

You're example is a good case of using AI well. However I think there is a difference between using AI to help with something, and using AI for the whole thing. I have no qualms with using AI to ease or automate the tedious work, but using it for the whole thing is gross, lazy, and often times scabbing. For example I love Romantically Apocalyptic. Its artists uses an AI trained off of his own art to speed up the process of making art for his books. The images are not 100% AI generated, and what is generated is made from his own art. This I feel is a good use of AI in art. A bad use of AI art is training a model off of other people's art and generating a whole image out of it. Until we live in a society where artists and writers don't need to work to survive, we can't ethically use AI to generate whole works using other people's work imo.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

Sure but what is a good or bad meme is extremely subjective. Bad memes from an artistic perspective often do very well in getting the message across. I mean I sort of get what you are saying but I think there's a lot of subjectivity involved. If we look at the post numbers, the ratio is the same as earlier. +671 to -122 = so downvotes are only 18% of where the upvotes are sitting, which isn't bad considering all the brigading. And anyway, we have a good mix of different types of memes. Only a small handful use genAI. It's completely been blown out of proportion by a very vocal minority.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I wasn't talking about whether it was good or bad. I was talking about the ethics of AI. You didn't engage with any part of what I said.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I agree the ethics of corporate ai are problematic from an environmental and use case perspective, but not from a copyright perspective. Ethically, copyleft makes a lot more sense. Copyright only serves capitalism and is a fundamentally neoliberal concern.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I don't care about copyright. I am an anarchist. What I was getting at though is AI is stealing jobs from writers and artists, and so I was arguing the use of AI is scabbing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I agree with you in the sense that that corporations are stealing jobs from artists by usurping content creators on their massive platforms and replacing them with highly profitable (because they don't have to pay anyone) GenAI images. That's not a problem with GenAI though, it's a problem with corporations and capitalism which prioritize profit above all else.

And the question of fighting for the rights of artists to rent seek an income based on 100 year+ IP rights (or whatever ridiculous number it is nowadays) is hard to square with a leftist position. Aren't we supposed to be against that sort of thing?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Its not me trying to protect IP, its me standing in solidarity with artists. They need jobs like everyone else and I feel using AI is enabling corporations to take those jobs. Its an issue of right now we live under capitalism and need to help each other survive, and AI is hurting artists. Once capitalism is gone and artists don't need to work to survive I have no issue with AI being used cause you aren't hurting anyone anymore. I do not feel you can be in solidarity with artists and writers and also use generative AI as a medium as opposed to a tool.

I feel a good example is the Luddite movement. Industrialization can be good, especially in terms of reducing labor and increasing productivity. But in a capitalist world it comes with people losing their jobs and thus means to survival. The workers sabotaging the machinery were doing it because their jobs were at stake, not some moral issue with the tool. The tools are immoral because of how they affect people. Until you can get rid of that affect, it is immoral to use it. If we want to use GenAI we need capitalism gone. We need to work in the reality that exists presently, not the ideal future.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 13 hours ago

brigading.

Wow, someone made a post encouraging people to come specifically to your community to cause trouble? You're saying it's not just people who happen to disagree with you, it's a planned movement? That's worthy of its own post. If you can show drag the incitement to brigade as proof, drag will be happy to make a second post or edit this one to talk about the brigade you claim exists.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago

The mod is not shutting down criticism of AI slop. Otherwise they would have nuked the whole comment chain, including 9point6's comment, and yet they did not.

Gen AI has no place in leftist movements. It’s owned by capital.

You don't simply destroy means of production - you seize them.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (3 children)

That guy (likely your second account) is just posting nonsense. The vote count does not agree with the statement that "people don't like AI" and once again proves that you are in the very vocal minority group.

It's OK to hate AI, though. What is not OK is being so agressive over it, especially when you're being off topic like in the case you linked.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

At this point, I'm half sure that the world would be a better place sans anti-AI zealots than sans AI

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't see how the vote count contradicts that message. As of this moment, the vote count (upvotes - downvotes) is 110 on the parent comment criticizing the use of AI art and 260 on the main post. Technically a minority, but it's a sizable minority.

I also don't agree that it's off-topic. The contents of the meme is the topic. The contents are AI generated, so that makes it one of the topics.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

I also don’t agree that it’s off-topic. The contents of the meme is the topic. The contents are AI generated, so that makes it one of the topics.

Personally I see the message of a meme as the topic, with the image being just the medium. However I don't know if the mods of that comm interpret it like I do, like you do, or in another third way.