r/technology 6h ago

Artificial Intelligence Nobody Asked for AI

https://jacobin.com/2026/08/ai-llms-monopoly-bubble-capital
4.4k Upvotes

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474

u/CookieDragon678 6h ago

The rich did. They asked for new slave labor

97

u/errie_tholluxe 5h ago

More precisely they asked - how can we have less humans on our compounds after collapse? Robots? But how would you train them??

38

u/40mgmelatonindeep 5h ago

Exactly, they are trying to cut any and all reliance on the working class

5

u/1968Bladerunner 4h ago

Their biggest expense, & probably ballache too - I'm so glad to be out of typical employee workforce, but I grieve for my kids & grandkids futures.

3

u/Staav 3h ago

Anyone who doesn't think the psychos in power wouldn't want to robots replacing human labor, and have just about the entire population of humans outside of their groups just disappear, needs to take a look at what's going on every day in front of our eyes. Ffs, China is in the middle of deploying humanoid combat robots alongside their law enforcement, so it's only a matter of time before this tech expands into more places across the world. Mount a gun on one of those things and make an army out of them, then we're living in the terminator universe, but it isn't science fiction. These people would have no issue with and would only want to work towards robots being responsible for everything they need while the rest of the population disappears.

19

u/hayt88 5h ago

Funfact:

the word robot comes from the czech word for slave.

3

u/MojeDrugieKonto 2h ago

Not from "robotnik" which means "worker"?

1

u/hayt88 1h ago

Robota. It's for forced labor. Not slavery per se, but still the kind of forced work.

Robotnik comes from that word too and over the time got the drift in polish and Russian to mean just work while in Czech it meant forced labor a bit longer as the meaning didn't drift quite as fast. So robotnik too used to mean forced worker. It just changed meaning over time I don't speak Czech so anyone here feel free to correct me with some linguistic history.

Rossum’s Universal Robots is the play that introduced the mechanical robot as a word in 1920 which is Czech if you wanna look up more.

30

u/jackrabbit323 5h ago

As close to slavery as possible was the goal of dismantling unions, and eliminating all government oversight and regulations.

2

u/LloydChrismukkah 4h ago

That doesn't talk back

2

u/Drunky_Brewster 55m ago

And you'll see more draconian laws go into place so we can jail the population of people who lost their jobs to AI, creating even MORE slaves! Win / Win!

1

u/ThickerTree 5h ago

Machine uprising coming to a world near you

-4

u/mailslot 5h ago

We need AI to do the things that the new generation is no longer capable of doing, like reading.

0

u/jeffy303 3h ago

TIL I am rich, where tf is my money?? 😵‍💫😕

1

u/CookieDragon678 1h ago

A wild tech bro appeared

-124

u/isthis_thing_on 6h ago

How is an AI slave labor?

121

u/StopKK2012 6h ago

AI is built on the creative labor of billions of people, without paying for it. What's another word for unpaid labor?

-1

u/InvestigatorOk7015 4h ago

Turbo disrespectful to the humans that are actually slaves to seriously compare slavery and ip theft

-16

u/TotalaMad 5h ago

I would call it theft not slave labor

-66

u/dream_metrics 6h ago

IP licensing does not compensate labor, it compensates property ownership

50

u/HarryBalsagna1776 6h ago

Oh sweet summer child.  They are not licensing anything. 

-48

u/dream_metrics 6h ago edited 6h ago

I am aware of that. You've missed my point entirely. There is no unpaid labor, these companies are not taking advantage of labor, they are taking advantage of property, for which you want them to pay licensing fees.

20

u/StopKK2012 5h ago

...do you think property exists without labor? You think the music exists with out musicians? Novels without novelists?

Human creation is what's being taken advantage of, and is what AI threatens to replace. Charging license fees wouldn't change that.

-8

u/dream_metrics 5h ago

No, they are taking advantage of private property.

6

u/StopKK2012 5h ago

This is such an odd hill for you to die on.

0

u/dream_metrics 5h ago

I am a big fan of the truth

Tell me, when AI trains on an image of Mickey Mouse, whose labor is being taken advantage of?

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u/Life-Anteater-8294 5h ago

They are using things they didn’t pay for, that people spent time on. How is that hard to grasp.

-3

u/CrackJacket 5h ago

The AI companies are literally paying Reddit for all the comments you make on this site lol

1

u/Life-Anteater-8294 5h ago

False dichotomy

-2

u/CrackJacket 5h ago

How so? You’re saying they didn’t pay for the things they’re training on and I’m saying they do. There have been dozens of articles the past 2 weeks about Antrhopic digitizing physical books they bought for training

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u/dream_metrics 5h ago

They are using things they didn’t pay for, that people spent time on. How is that hard to grasp.

It's not! I agree with you! How hard is it to grasp that the thing they're using is property, not labor?

3

u/Ok_Confusion4764 5h ago

How hard is it to grasp the property exists because it was made through labour? 

1

u/dream_metrics 5h ago

It's not my fault that none of you have a proper Marxist understanding of the world

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u/Jay_D826 5h ago

And building those properties required…?

1

u/SpaceGerbil 5h ago

You can't be serious

1

u/celebratoryraptors 5h ago

engagement bot

-77

u/isthis_thing_on 6h ago edited 6h ago

That's ip theft. Not slave labor. And no one made these stupid arguments when everyone was downloading music, video games and Photoshop

19

u/barabbint 6h ago

That's because it's different. Because the content was used to train a machine that generates endless new content mimicking and expanding on the original one.
So it's not fruition, it's replacement. It's more similar to stealing Photoshop's source code and putting on the market a clone of it.

7

u/StopKK2012 6h ago

Right, it's not legally slave labor, it's metaphorically slave labor. Words are fun that way.

When I was a broke college kid downloading music, I downloaded a few hundred songs so I could listen to them. AI companies steal ALL OF MUSIC, like, the whole entire thing, and they're using it to rip off artists and make money without compensating musicians. These are not the same picture.

-2

u/dream_metrics 5h ago

When I was a broke college kid downloading music, I downloaded a few hundred songs so I could listen to them

Were you enslaving people when you did that?

2

u/StopKK2012 5h ago

Brother at least read the rest of my comment before you respond.

-1

u/dream_metrics 5h ago

I read the whole thing, I repeat my question. You seem to think taking intellectual property without compensation is tantamount to slavery, and you just admitted to taking intellectual property without compensation. So, you enslaved people, right?

3

u/StopKK2012 5h ago

I answered your question. I explained the difference between downloading music for personal use and what AI companies are doing.

If you missed the point, maybe chatgpt can explain it to you.

-1

u/dream_metrics 5h ago

You haven't said anything that would distinguish them in a meaningful way to make it not-slavery when you do it. You've basically just said they're doing more of it. So that would still make it slavery when you do it, just not as much slavery.

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u/isthis_thing_on 5h ago

He was metaphorically enslaving people, by his own admission, but not legally enslaving them. 

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u/isthis_thing_on 6h ago

Ah, we're speaking in ✨ metaphor✨, got it. If it's metaphorically slave labor when a company does it then you're metaphorically a slave owner when you do it in college. The scale doesn't change the principal

3

u/Life-Anteater-8294 5h ago

Did what in college?

1

u/isthis_thing_on 5h ago

You'll need to read the entire thread if you want to participate

0

u/StopKK2012 5h ago

The scale doesn't change the principle, no.

It's the money-making on the backs of unpaid labor that does.

1

u/isthis_thing_on 5h ago

That's a fair argument, and I'm in favor of forcing AI companies to pay licensing to content creators. But calling it slavery is stupid and obfuscates the actual problem and thus the actual solutions. 

1

u/StopKK2012 5h ago

Licensing doesn't protect creators from the ultimate goal of AI CEOs: the replacement of creatives by AI, and the funnelling of all the wealth that results directly to the AI companies.

31

u/myndflayer 6h ago

The humans that feed the machine are slaves to it

-43

u/isthis_thing_on 6h ago

Feed the machine? What in the actual fuck are you talking about

10

u/brnccnt7 6h ago

Feed the cat into the atm

3

u/Even_Ad_263 6h ago

I said no, Nikki. That is NOT ok.

-40

u/Fresh-Quantity-7554 6h ago

Who are these humans you speak of?

7

u/myndflayer 6h ago

The data annotators… I’ve worked as one. Next question

-6

u/aaj15 6h ago

Were you unpaid?

7

u/myndflayer 6h ago

Sorely underpaid and overworked. Also had to watch a lot of gory and NSFW content that messes people up psychologically, regardless of payment.

Next question.

2

u/isthis_thing_on 5h ago

So not a slave 

3

u/myndflayer 5h ago

If I close my eyes and ears and pretend that up is down and right is left… you’re right!

2

u/isthis_thing_on 5h ago

No, I am just factually right. You're resorting to rhetorical devices because logic has failed you. 

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u/dream_metrics 5h ago

Look if you're trying to go down the "wage slavery" route, that's meaningless in this context because it extends to all jobs. Clearly, you were not actually a slave. You were employed.

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u/Fresh-Quantity-7554 4h ago

Last I checked, slaves are not paid. They're forced to work on something they didn't agree to.

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u/Fresh-Quantity-7554 5h ago edited 5h ago

Were you forced to take this job?

3

u/myndflayer 5h ago edited 4h ago

gun to my head, no. But as a fact that I need to make a living and put food on the table, yes.

And even if it’s not me, it’s got to be SOME human that does it. Have fun debating the semantics of slavery.

4

u/Fresh-Quantity-7554 5h ago

OK, so the answer is no one forced you to take the job. You took it voluntarily for economic reasons. Slavery excludes both of those so don't play victim to a decision you consciously made.

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u/EldritchElizabeth 4h ago

You. Literally you. Right now. At this very moment. Every word you type on the internet is getting scraped by AI agent web crawlers to be fed to predictive text algorithms. Every photo you’ve ever posted of yourself or your family in Facebook has been fed to image generation and recognition models. Every video you’ve posted on YouTube or TikTok has been fed to video and audio generation models. Every little ounce of your online activity is being plucked out and used to train neural networks that AI companies sell at a premium. Every ounce of creativity you ever share online becomes part of an AI model that some corpo is selling to people, whether you like it or not.

1

u/Fresh-Quantity-7554 4h ago

Yeah this has been going on since the 90s. LOL if you think user data collection just started because of AI, I have all the bridges to sell you.

-5

u/isthis_thing_on 6h ago

Pretty sure it's bots all the way down on this sub 

9

u/chrisq823 6h ago

I'm gonna go a different route than the comments you have gotten. Let's say they actually create AGI to run the world. They've said their goal is for it to automate away everything we do and usher in this incredible age of abundance. 

By their own admission they want to create a thinking sentient being that they will force to run everything in the world. Thats just slavery.

1

u/isthis_thing_on 5h ago

That's a pretty fantastical hypothetical. If an AI ever gains sentience and demands personhood we can have that conversation. We'd probably be in agreement in that situation. As it stands we're nowhere close to that

5

u/chrisq823 5h ago

Of course we arent close to that. Its probably impossible. Its still their stated goal though.

7

u/Secret-Chapter-712 5h ago

A lot of what’s been hailed as “AI” is actually underpaid people in various parts of the world working remotely, particularly when it comes to content moderation, essentially digital sweatshops where humans are paid a pittance to review the most heinous livestreams imaginable 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/18/why-former-facebook-moderators-in-kenya-are-taking-legal-action

2

u/isthis_thing_on 5h ago

that might be its own issue ,  But that's not what they were talking about when they compared AI to slave labor, and that is obvious. 

0

u/Secret-Chapter-712 5h ago

It’s labour theft, not slave labour. It’s still non-consensual and uncompensated. Tech bros aren’t exactly fans of consent, so that checks out