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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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.