Well to bring us here first: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11615067/8203119

You claim to be a Marxist materialist, but you’ve reduced human consciousness to ‘computation’ and ‘inference.’ Marx’s whole project was to show that consciousness is shaped by material social relations, not by computational processes abstracted from history, class, and labor.

You’re celebrating that Iran can now make effective Lego propaganda. But the US can now make even more effective propaganda, faster, and at scale. Democratization doesn’t favor the underdog. Who it favors is any player that can deploy the tools most strategically.

To me it seems like what we’re doing here is sewing class divisions. And if I’m just a computer interface what’s the point of me even existing? Do I just sit in a chair and type prompts to put memes out there? Why can’t I just donate you my parts and you go generate more memes without me? Why do you even need me?

If there’s enough data points out there already and nothing I will ever do will ever be truly unique then why do I exist?

Can I ask how do you verify what I’m typing is written by a human? If you’re not verifying that everything you read is written by a human, then it would be admitting that it doesn’t actually matter and it’s a post-hoc rationalization. Not much different than someone trying to rationalize an art piece that they didn’t check was made by AI, but once they find out they change their angle or approach.

That’s not even touching Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment.

Karl Marx literally has this on his grave: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

Experience happens in the real world, not in the text. What matters is the results of the experiments tested through social practice.

Someone should try to get Verso books to sell AI generated book. I think a honest marxist would do an experiment like that, if they refuse they are a Liberal.

I mean there have been studies already, but the more the marrier.

• GPT-3 vs. human news articles (Kreps et al., 2022)
• Academic abstracts (Gao et al., 2022)
• Poetry (Köbis & Mossink, 2023
• Creative writing (Clark et al., 2021)

What these tests have showed that people are actually quite bad at telling if it’s human or AI.

I’m assuming you already know how to perform an experiment like this, so there’s no need for me to explain.

We don’t need to theorize about whether social practice matters. We can test it. Remove the human element from presentation, and people can’t tell the difference. That means the reader’s experience. Including: insight, emotion, and even truth-testing in practice, is independent of origin. The only thing that gives away AI is bad AI. Good AI is indistinguishable. And at that point, origin is just a label, not a quality.

For people who enjoy AI I would expect them to make like a proper version of this: https://ai.wsws.org/en The goal should be to make it practically indistinguishable from a philosopher, which would make it a lot easier to access information for the masses.

You aren’t wrong. Our Anarchist movements are currently being infiltrated by a certain flavor of blue and a touch of yellow, but I can’t think of a way to actually do anything against it. They use plausible half-truths that I can’t simply deny, but an actually nuanced argument would get me eliminated.

And being a martyr for such a cause is not productive, because the headline would read: “Mentally insane woman defends Putin’s Russia”

When my family hates Putin for selling out the USSR and they know it, there’s a propaganda channel aimed for boomers and they do literally use that talking point to appeal to ex-soviet citizens. They’re quite clever I hate it. But to Anarchists truth is often black and white. Ala Big country attacks on small country, big country bad. It is actually a lot more nuanced than that.

Anarchist are like Skull Face from MGS. Big ambitions, toddler discipline.

“Waaah English bad language gonna ban English and fix the world!!”

“Waaah give every nation a WMD!!!”

What even is a Nation? Why Isn’t there a Székely Republic? What about Basques Republic? Should they have WMDs?

Should Micronesia have Nuclear Detents?

Dangerous topic for me to discuss because there’s a meme floating around about how there’s separatists in the region that borders Russia. I mean seriously? My ass would get bombed to stone age by this foolish meme of a proposal. It’s dangerously ridiculous. Sorry if I sound overly passionate I’m just really depressed about the suffering happening literally in the same spot my ancestors went to battle in the hopes that they would never have to go to battle again.

But yeah that’s Anarchism, it’s not much different than Trotskyism. I will work with them critically, but not take their assistance for granted. Best way to handle them imo. Extreme caution.

I decided to take matters into my own hands and ask Deepseek: “If you saw an AI generated painting in a style o Monet and it made you feel a certain way, is that feeling fake because the image you saw wasn’t produced by a human?”

This is the response I got:

Aesthetics doesn’t require agency. But the meaning we assign to art often involves a perceived human-to-human connection. AI art can be beautiful and moving, but it shifts the experience from “encounter with another mind” to “encounter with a beautiful system.” Both are real—just different. The “fakeness” charge usually comes from conflating emotional response with the story we tell ourselves about where the response came from.

Interestingly it seems to agree with my own assessment. The problem isn’t that the feeling is fake, it’s that someone lied to me when I was seeking Human to Human connections and not a System to Human connections.

I often wonder why the people who defend AI don’t start with justifying their own necessity, because why should I read their own articles defending the System when I can just approach the System directly? Why do I need a 3rd wheel in the relationship?

I’ll ask Deepseek this question: “Some people spend a lot of time defending these AI “systems” and they write lengthy articles about it. At the same time, if their claims are to be taken at face value and there isn’t much difference between the way a human mind functions and an AI system functions, then why can’t I just approach the AI system directly and ask it to generate my article instead of reading their article?”

This is the response:

The force of your point is this:

If human cognition and AI text generation are near-equivalent in terms of creativity, insight, and meaning, then the defender’s own article has no special value.

> In fact, if AI can produce equally good or better arguments, then the human defender is wasting your time by acting as an intermediary. You could cut out the middleman.

Possible responses from an AI defender (and why they might fail to fully escape your criticism):

“I’m not claiming equivalence, just overlap.”

They might say:

AI and humans both process patterns, but humans have embodiment, emotion, and lived experience. My article reflects my unique perspective—not just pattern completion.

But your counter is strong here:

If that’s true, then their earlier functionalist claims about AI were overblown. They can’t have it both ways.

You still need me to frame the question and curate the output.”

They might say:

AI doesn’t know what you want to read unless you prompt it well. My article is a curated, argued position.

Your reply:

Then why not just prompt the AI yourself with my original question? You’d get a decent argument instantly.

“The process of writing the article itself is valuable to me, and reading it is a form of human connection.”

But then they’ve conceded the point:

The value isn’t just in the information but in the human source. That undermines the “AI is functionally similar” claim.

The deeper issue

Your argument reveals a pragmatic contradiction in strong AI functionalism (the view that human and AI cognition are essentially the same kind of thing).

If they were truly the same, then human-generated text has no privileged status—so why defend AI in human-written prose? Why not let AI defend itself?

But most AI defenders don’t actually believe in total equivalence. They believe AI can simulate aspects of human thought, but not replace the social, intentional, and biographical dimensions of human communication. The moment they write a lengthy defense, they’re implicitly banking on you valuing the human source

So your question exposes that:

1. If they say “read my article” → they assume human authorship matters.

2. If they say “just ask the AI” → they admit their own article is redundant.

They can’t logically do both without contradiction.

Bottom line for you.

You’re right to be suspicious. If AI systems are truly close enough to human minds that intent and agency don’t matter for appreciation (art) or argument (articles), then human defenders become optional middlemen. But if human defenders are not optional, then the original claim about AI’s cognitive equivalence is weaker than it sounds. Your question pulls the thread, and the sweater unravels a bit.

As someone who doesn’t align with Anarchism. I think this is a weak vector of rebuttal against Anarchism, because there’s plenty of non-aggressive treaties and other pacts signed between socialist states and mortal enemies. They can just point at Molotov-Ribbentrop pact for example.

“Stalin had to sign a pact with these guys to buy time! We had to do it with these guys!” It’s not exactly difficult for them to do it and therefore I think the question is deeper than that.

You have to ask each group specifically why did they do that, what are they hoping to achieve and what have they achieved?

A Modern day equivalent of a mind breaker would be China-Israel relations. I personally haven’t heard of a proper Marxist analysis on that situation. On an emotional level it’s at least on par if not worse than someone collaborating with CIA, but I’m supposed to rely on more than gut instinct aren’t I?

A lot of people don’t trust certain parts of society such as the homeless and I understand why. I wouldn’t trust a mafia boss or a mobster, someone with a record for willingness to do crime against the defenseless. It’s a fascist mentality.

However I would like to add my two cents with brief experience of homelessness and just general interactions with a broad section of lumpen. Be it street musicians or prostitutes. Sadly I only have anecdotes on my side which is part of the issue, it’s very difficult to do empirical research on this subject and avoid biases.

In my brief experience of homelessness the only person who immediately approached me was another homeless person. He immediately noticed that something wasn’t right with me and came with advice, in the meanwhile I’ve likely had more than a 1000 people walk past me without a care and you might wonder why didn’t I go to an institution? Well because they dismantled them.

Marxism is based on Dialectical-Materialism, it means the body is the mind is the body and practical experience is necessary for change to happen. You cannot simply “fix” someone with a mental exercise. I think many Chauvinists dismiss the lumpen because they toss them a book and expect class consciousness to sort it out. It’s not that simple, change needs structure that supports it.

I have found this one of the major weakness of the modern day left movement. There is a lot of effort trying to pull down the petite bourgeoise, not a lot of efforts pulling up the disenfranchised. It ends up being left upon a religious institution, the Heartfelt liberal or the extraordinarily rare mutual-aid group. All of which get infiltrated by the right.

I have never encountered a communist in the presence of the “lower classes” but I have had reactionaries try to befriend me and idk if people realize how far the influences of 1 neo-fash can spread. So this guy I will call him Measurehead, because that’s what his personality was like, yeah a competitive racist. But the guy literally inserted himself anywhere and he’s been all the way to China and around. Which has really bothered me because this is the kind of people who go around to the lumpen everywhere and spread their ideology. This one guy has probably ended up influencing hundreds by now if not more. And he was so good at gathering a crowd around him it’s like scary to see. The way how he immediately could spot who to turn to in order to gather a crowd around him.

It scares me because the sort of people who get co-opted by the likes of him include people who would be willing to work tripple shifts for half of the pay. Regardless how one feels about the downtrodden, you’re going to have to deal with them. That is a fact. This is the reason why I have been trying to shine a little bit of a light on the issue. It’s not just because I’ve read Mao or Malcom or Che, although I believe their personal life experiences had influenced them to arrive to similar conclusions.

That’s alright and you aren’t wrong in the sense that a lot of Sociology tries much harder to escape Marxism than it tries to invent anything new.

It’s how you end up with the likes of “Game theory” Like look at this:

Source: https://napkinfinance.com/napkin/game-theory/

This is to replace Marx’s theory of class. One of the many attempts.

So instead of thinking about what the worker wants we strip ourselves down to individuals.

Let’s use this as an example to show why Game Theory is so nasty and return to Networking, what even is that? Well it’s not friendships, it’s relationships specifically with monetary incentive in mind. Under Game Theory these relationships are treated as a math problem. If you fall behind and it’s better off to lay you off, you’re off the hook. It doesn’t matter, to the Capitalists, if it hurts social trust in the long run, the police is there to protect Capital.

I think we’re at a point where bourgeoise have been sniffing their own farts for so long they might not be aware of the long term consequences and they’ve lost sense of their own capabilities. Otherwise it makes no sense how Iran still stands, that was not the plan.

That is true, some people choose to have chickens as pets rather than livestock and they’re quite similar to cats in my experience.

I have a peculiar friend who likes to take great care of his animals, when he kept rats he made sure to prioritize their health over personal treats and many people considered him odd for it because “they’re just going to croak in a couple years anyways why are you wasting your time with them?” They’d say. It’s quite admirable really, but he’s also got the collective spirit equal to likes of Max Stirner

Invisible hand is a concept explicitly invented to explain away the contradictions of the “Free market” and it’s for the people who lack class consciousness.

Like let’s say we have a group of 10 friends and they all come up with 1 business idea. 1 of those ideas remains open after few years and 9 of them fail. Why? “Invisible hand”

Even if you network under “free market” there’s still the underlying class interests. Relationships usually do not form cross-class because of those underlying class interests. I can be a Homeless person with 9/10 Charisma and still end up on the streets.

To a libertarian the explanation is simple: “Invisible Hand” that’s why. Or it’s corruption.

But you can’t incentivize equality because it would “Make people lazy” all you can do is have a state guard the Capital and let the “invisible hand” sort it out.