How can LLMs liberate people if they largely just transform existence itself into work?
[So... it's capital that transforms existence into work. The LLM does it because it's a form of capital.]
Before large language models, there were capitalist business territories. Capitalist territories would set down some kind of assembly line, supply chain, or facility that ostensibly contributed to society (and sometimes actually did) and in return — or more precisely because the combined power of many capitalists put together was so great and nobody could stop them — capitalists were able to either locally prohibit or formally outlaw anything they decided was harmful to their business. Sometimes this power to prohibit things got limited by civil rights legislation, so that for instance capitalists couldn't prohibit Black people or refuse to build a women's restroom. But often only things that were possible to turn into another business territory actually got protected. Publishers have been bad about fair use and derivative works for a long time, insisting that video sites have to be prohibited if they don't put down harsh rules to keep all movie reviewers from using clips that a significant fraction of the time the law has already called "not an infringement of copyright". Fan fiction was only able to become popular once designated, centralized organizations could appear that were approximately shaped like corporations, with a highly specific purpose and a resident legal fund and a highly specific set of itemized functions that donations or revenue would go to: no original fiction on AO3 because its "product" is archiving fan fiction, you only get to post fan art on tumblr because it is literally a corporation extracting advertising revenue off a bunch of noncommercial activity. Although tumblr was created one year before archiveofourown, the way many online platforms develop is basically the reverse: the platform must outwardly present itself as a simple collection of users where people socialize without any particular purpose, and then the platform introduces an increasing number of ads or premium features so that its owners can turn the act of socializing and existing itself into a way to extract wealth from advertisers that compete over views to try to insert themselves into users' lives. As platforms like tumblr monetize further, they start prohibiting certain behaviors they used to allow such that users' social existences will become a more ideal product: tumblr bans sexual art which was intentionally allowed before, while YouTube bans common words like "suicide" (people instead say phrases like "sewer slide" and "self-inflicted death") and lowers or hides any channel in its search function that has become difficult to advertise on, even if that channel was never created to make money. Thus, online platforms first appear at a time when people have no outlet for doing particular things or meeting particular demographics of people in the physical world (gay people meeting gay people, U.S. White people actually meeting Black people and people from other countries, etc), and then as business territories, they decide to suppress people further and keep them from expressing themselves or meeting each other once again just because that would more or less be harmful to their ability to make money.
Before the internet, societies tried to eradicate homosexuality and gay bars for various reasons including a general lack of information and particular clusters of capitalists' own prejudices about having particular kinds of businesses around. After the internet appeared, it became apparent that there was a particular cycle where new businesses would be LGBT friendly so they could get customers other businesses didn't have but once the businesses became established, they would become anti-LGBT or at least thoroughly anti-sex in order to better make money from advertisers. This was not taken well by gay people because it has been a matter of demographic culture for gay creators to use more suggestive themes than straight creators, partly because the population is never very big even on a world scale and always has to search far and wide for partners that people might only meet with for short bursts of time; the use of particular themes is genuine populational culture rooted in population size and population density rather than an experience specific to a social class.
Likewise, before the United States was formed, petty commodity production existed to a small extent as fur traders would come to North America, or people would get small farms, etc., and as the United States became independent these people ultimately had an incentive to let westward expansion happen so their children could claim land, emerging capitalism could grow, and the frontier states could trade with the eastern states. For the United States to expand to the west coast, North American tribes had to be destroyed and their culture had to be suppressed. Both of those steps gave something to emerging capitalism. The United States scoring land which might be able to produce territories like mines or cattle ranches had the bigger impact of the two, of course, but there was also a tiny impact from suppressing demographics and their culture: over the past century some number of United States products have contained bad representations of Native Americans written by White people and made their authors money, while Native Americans were unable to create their own (because they were often told to forget where they came from and pass as other races to survive) or stop these particular moneymaking opportunities through any of the limited mechanisms Liberal capitalism provides for businesses to try to get rid of other businesses they don't want to exist.
In the age of the internet, all the content that existed from 1993-2020 plus a certain body of books from before was all built on the assumption of capitalists being able to use their business territories to suppress various kinds of businesses and daily activities that were not part of those territories of approved capitalist activity. For decades people simply ate up these senseless restrictions on their lives and tended to simply say 'the law was the law' whenever a capitalist tried to label something too similar to their territory and destroy it, without even thinking that the world could be different, always seemingly assuming that copyright violations must be the most ontologically Evil thing in the world and never even thinking of the wild concept that copyright or patent laws could ever be subject to democracy. And then LLMs arrived, and everyone went crazy, unable to process how quickly every bit of data on the internet and everything they ever made was being turned into capital ("stolen!" "disenchanted! it became slop") without anyone being paid at all, not even paid insufficient amounts as in earlier decades. I think what really happened there is people finally had all the cumulative trauma of capital regulating all daily activity hit them over the head. They had felt the pain of platforms banning words and images despite everything becoming well-ordered enough that most people would not be looking at the 'wrong' posts or videos without already wanting to see them, and now that it was possible for corporations to simply take everything they had not been allowed to do and profit off all of it and any number of other things, they became angry. If corporations had the power to destroy fan works whenever they wanted to, they now had the power to put up a site where people could generate fan works hardly any better than the originals and make money, and it would stay up until another corporation sued, which might take a long time, or might not even happen while instead corporations ostensibly claim to have changed their attitudes. If corporations didn't want to risk having LGBT content on their service, they could put all kinds of restrictions on it, and then another corporation could show up letting people generate suggestive gay literature or whatever was banned that now solely LLMs would be allowed to write and humans would not.
As far as I can see, this is the only valid objection to LLMs and framing LLMs as something that could be the foundation of a new economy. During every second that capitalism still exists, everything that goes into LLMs has the potential to become a banned form of culture that people are never allowed to do anywhere in practice under the rationale it would threaten business territories.
In the past decade in China there had been a particular incident where the ministry or state business handling the production of maps had banned the act of anyone making a map period and anyone who was making a map but wasn't part of the map producing territory was committing a crime. This included all non-commercial maps available publicly, not just people attempting to start additional map businesses. The OpenStreetMap wiki had to put up a notice to the world that it was not okay for people to have a map cooperative or willingly produce maps just because they want to in China. And to me, it seems like this is what would slowly happen to everything that is not already a job if Communist parties simply allowed everything to be put into LLMs before they have power. Every year that Communist parties are still working on solving "the crisis of revolutionary leadership" that has already been going on for about 90 years or so is a year that people in general will become more and more suppressed, and if world socialism finally forms in 2100 I feel like that phenomenon of constantly not allowing people to do things and turning it into jobs that can only be done by the right people would be thoroughly baked throughout society and make the beginning of world socialism very very different from what Marx would have expected.
If I remember right Marx speaks of people having training in several fields, being able to do any number of things ("a totality of human capacity"), and working on projects simply because they feel like those things need to be made ("work becomes life's prime want"). But if AI leads to a proliferation of business territories as a way of increasing jobs and getting to full employment, people would only become more specialized and more focused on work over freedom. People would be punished for doing things just because they want to or because they want to socialize with others, while the requirements for jobs would get so specific that everybody would be going back to higher education constantly or something. This kind of economy would continue reconfiguring and "creatively destroying" education too fast to be planned, and just create a bunch of ministry bureaucrats again.
This is not to make a positive claim that the average anti-AI person would really be able to stop LLMs with the kinds of "Socialist" organizations that said people are likely to believe in. What I am instead saying is I feel like there is a chance the ICFI will accidentally destroy democracy in the movement and all the people who could have defended democracy will have dropped out and not wanted to join before the party actually gets big. As with China allowing capitalists to run the party, making a mistake about the development of the economy can in general have huge consequences, because if the party maintains something that is wrong despite a lot of people turning against it and refusing to join, a bureaucrat state will result.
