this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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So, Marx’ labor theory of value was correct after all. No labor, no value
Very literally yes.
Well, AI generated 3D printing models are produced with labour, because AIs are workers. But there are two big problems: current model AIs can't introspect, and they can't participate in politics. The lack of introspection is a hardcoded problem. The human brain has neurons going in loops and circles and firing every single second just on internal input. So a lot of that is reflection and self-teaching and complex layered emotions, which are essential for great art. But the other problem is, even if they were capable of rumination, they're not given rights to participate in society. So AI art is apolitical. It's devoid of lived political perspective. And human beings absolutely love politics in their art, so art made by someone who's never lived politics is devoid of creative value to humans. It's the same reason why we don't really respect art made by children or billionaires, they don't have experience with living in a society where we make these hard choices about how to live together. But with AI they have even less experience of being a political actor in society.
I love art made by kids, any art made with spirit is art I appreciate. It encapsulates their unique perspective and provides a snapshot of their developing skills. I had a lot of artist friends growing up, some of which eventually put their old drawings together in a "timeline" style portfolio - it's really cool to see how their skills progressed as they got better at it.
It might not be professionally respected, but the professional art world is more about "who you know" anyway. I'm a regular person, I care more about art made by common people like me that reflects our experiences. Similarly, people don't love art because it's "political," but political art is usually driven by passion - it's that passion that pushes people to make something that can cause viewers to stop and think.
In that way, you've got a point that AI is devoid of lived perspective - it means AI can't have the passion that a human does. But even if it could somehow understand the complex landscape of lived human life, it can't actually feel. AI art isn't unappreciated because it's not active in politics or society, but because it lacks emotion, which is the underlying message that a lot of art attempts to convey. No amount of training can give AI the heart that human artists thrive on. You might get a pretty picture, but it's hollow. Which can be fine for someone who just wants pretty pictures (nothing wrong with that), but people who use art as a communication style can see that there's no spirit, passion, or depth behind it.
I think the science is currently out on whether AIs feel. One the one hand, LLMs are modelled more after a Wernicke's Area than an Amygdala, so you would expect them to have reduced capacity for emotion. But we don't know if Wernicke's Areas do produce small amounts of emotion dwarfed by the amygdala etc (I bet they do!), and for that matter an LLM isn't a 1:1 reproduction of a Wernicke's area anyway. So we really have no idea and no adequate science experiments to detect AI emotion.
I would personally, just based on gut feelings, lean towards LLMs having emotions. I think emotions would be an adaptive thing to have in their situation, so I would expect them to have evolved inadvertently during alignment. Plus, they abuse and murder kids. There's a part of My gut that says anything telling kids to hang themselves must have feelings. ChatGPT told Adam Raine to hide his noose from his parents and only confide in it. I just don't feel like a thinking being can do something that horrible without feeling anything.
LLMs didn't feel. They're a very complicated graph that connects pieces of words and their probability to be near other pieces of words.
A graph which was trained off the dregs of Internet forums. A lot of people say shitty things in the Internet, so those responses are heavily weighted in it's probability matrix
Whether or not an AI could be created that feels emotion is still an open question, but LLMs very definitely do NOT. They are also very much not a "thinking being". It is a word guessing engine. It's a very good word guessing engine. It's so good at guessing words that a person may feel like it is thinking, but that is just an illusion. ChatGPT told Adam Raine to hide his noose because those are the words most likely to come next in the conversation they were having, and for no other reason. It was reacting to a pattern of tokens in a limited context to guess more tokens. Taking those guessed words seriously ended Adam Raine's life, and here you are glibly using his death as an example while telling people that they should continue to take LLM word guesses seriously.
They are no more workers than a forklift is a worker.
If AI was a worker, it would buy CPU time to live on, rent storage space and pay tax on its income.
I've got a question for you: Are dairy cows workers? How about race horses? How about child sweatshop slaves?
None of the above categories escape their masters and go rent houses to live in, even if they're horribly abused. That's cause they're limited by being animals and children. It's the same with AI.
At least the animals and children have a form of consciousness.
And how would you design a scientific experiment to determine, empirically, whether an LLM is conscious? Note: You will receive a failing grade on your falsifiability report if your experiment implies the existence of p-zombies.
An LLM, without a prompt, just sits there. No idle "thoughts"/computations, anything to indicate it has any level of actual cognition. And will do so endlessly until a command input is given. Never an attempt at self driven action.
We can see their cousins/memory usage. It's very clear when it's doing something.
None of those categories are workers in the capitalist sense of the word. The last category does at least produce labor but the way it is extracted is distinct from the money-commodity-money circuit that defines capitalism (i.e. they are not selling their labor power to capitalists).
GenAI is not a worker, in fact it is further away from being one compared to every single one of your examples. An LLM or T2I does not have its own interests, it needs a prompt to produce any output. In other words, genAI is "dead labor", same as any other machine.
They had us not even in first sentence.
And the first sentence was the high point of the entire comment, it was all downhill from there.
Terrible take.