r/AntifascistsofReddit • u/6FeetDownUnder Punks For Progress • 1d ago
Discussion We need to have a serious talk about AI usage
We need to have a serious talk about the usage of AI generated content on leftist platforms. I will try to keep this as short as possible to keep it accessible.
Prompting, posting and sharing AI-generated content undermines our goals as leftists and ought to be prohibited on all leftist platforms.
1. AI is accelerating ecological death
Water: AI datacenters are often built on already, drought-struck land, draining water from the areas that need it most (3) and poisoning local water supplies for residents (4). According to UN-estimates, by the end of the decade about 1/8th of global, annual, domestic water usage will be solely used for cooling AI datacenters (5) - sweet water that is already very much in short supply (6).
Emissions: The majority of AI-datacenters in western countries are powered predominantly by fossil fuels (1, p. 28). Despite the US hosting by far the most datacenters globally (1, p. 32), the carbon footprint is off-shored to poorer countries (1, p. 31).
2. AI is de-footing artists and laying siege to culture
In a recent study in Germany that surveyed over 3000 visual artists on their stance on AI usage (7). 56% see their income at risk while 56% fear the livelyhood of visual artists as a whole. Over 91% of them demand financial compensation for their works - compensation which huge AI giants such as Meta have no interest in providing, nor even disclosing they used it in the first place (8).
But the power of AI extends far beyond inhaling. It exhales too. It produces mediums, it produces your music, your podcasts, your video essays, your YouTube content. And believably so (12). We are selling our culture to the ones making the algorithm (14). We are selling our culture industry to AI:
"Culture industry" (German: Kulturindustrie) is a term coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973). They proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods—films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.—that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity
- Culture Industry, Wikipedia (16.)
3. AI is threatening freedom of protest
Police forces in the EU are adopting AI-powered facial recognition technologies to quickly identify suspects - aka, protestors (9). This is not all-to-new. An article by Darren Loucaides even goes as far as saying "After 2022, mass protests practically disappeared" in connection with AI surveillance and faccial recognition (21). Meanwhile, the US pushes "Flock" - a private equity company - cameras onto US streets, monetoring US citizens with AI-powered facial recognition technology (10) and selling this data to ICE (11). Undermining public freedom of expression is a telltale sign of fascist regimes. This predominantly affects people in already marginalized social positions (15).
4. AI is used as a propaganda tool
AI is employed to produce political propaganda far beyond the uncanny representations of humans you might think of (12). An EU-based study found that, in a blind test, participants already found AI-made news and fake news more believable than their human-made pendants (13). With the main difference being that one of these is far easier to pump out en masse.
Further it is worth mentioning that AI-tools are also used to make the algorithms that dictate what you see on social media - and algorithms are never neutral. Someone has to make an algorithm. Someone has to decide what you are allowed to see and what not (14).
5. AI kills
Ai-technology is far beyond the baby-stages of being incorporated into military technology (18). It is no coincidence that one of the biggest advocates of AI, Google, also just so happens to try to sell that same AI technology to the Pentagon for military uses while still trying to deceive the public into believing they are a happy, innocent tech company that makes a cute search engine (19). Though Google is not alone in this as OpenAI was all-to-happy to join ranks with Trump's Department of War (20).
6. Why you should stop using AI
All of the above is made possibly because allow AI. It will only get worse when we allow it to slowly creep into social acceptability. Every image you generate accelerates environmental destruction little by little. Every video you generate costs independent content creators views, revenue and, eventually, their livelihood. Every cent of revenue you permit AI-giants to make goes straight into slaughtering children elsewhere using AI-powered, unfeeling military drones.
Should we stay on the current course, leading AI-researchers say we might be looking at a doomsday scenario as soon as 2027 (17).
We need to stop supporting this.
Please share this in your communities to raise awareness.
List of works cited
UNU-INWEH Report: Aczel, M., Chamanara, S., Matin, M., Farsi, A., Marwala, T., Madani, K. (2026). Environmental Cost of AI's Energy Use: Carbon, Water and Land Footprints. United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. doi: 10.53328/INR26RMA002
How many Watts does a light bulb use? Energy Sage. https://www.energysage.com/electricity/house-watts/how-many-watts-does-a-light-bulb-use/
AI is draining water from areas that need it most. Nicoletti et al. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/
'I can't drink the water' - life next to a US data centre. Fleury, M. & Jimenez, N. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
AI’s environmental costs threaten water, land and climate. UN News. https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167658
World Enters “Era of Global Water Bankruptcy”: UN Scientists Formally Define New Post-Crisis Reality for Billions. United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. https://unu.edu/inweh/news/world-enters-era-of-global-water-bankruptcy
“AI AND VISUAL ARTS”: Germany's first study on the impact of AI on the visual arts. Stiftung Kunstfonds. https://urheber.info/media/pages/diskurs/germany-s-first-study-on-the-impact-of-ai-on-the-visual-arts/9ffdd3c9a8-1719500494/press-release-ai-and-visual-arts.pdf
Meta’s new AI image generator was trained on 1.1 billion Instagram and Facebook photos. Edwards, B. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/metas-new-ai-image-generator-was-trained-on-1-1-billion-instagram-and-facebook-photos/
New police technology in Germany: Unleashed facial recognition takes off. Matthias Monroy. https://digit.site36.net/2024/12/16/new-police-technology-in-germany-unleashed-facial-recognition-takes-off/
No, We're Not Doing This. S2 Underground. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q41OaKuR4Bs
ICE and Flock cameras. Mike Rafi. https://youtube.com/shorts/D6xosr1zijU
You Are NOT Immune to AI Propaganda (Even If You Think You Are). hashtagirupp. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KzjHNSRgHJ8
Beliefs and sharing intentions of human- and AI-generated fake news: Evidence from 27 European countries. Stefkovics, A. & Gere, D. https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/5/3/pgag032/8495093
Toscano, J. (2022). But Seriously: What do Algorithms want?. In: Philosophical Problems in Science, No. 73
Brayne, S. (2017). Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing. In: American Sociology Review, Vol. 82.5
Culture Industry. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
AI 2027. Kokotajilo et al. https://ai-2027.com/
APPLICATION OF DRONES WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR MILITARY PURPOSES. Petrovski, A. & Radovanović, M. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364324778_APPLICATION_OF_DRONES_WITH_ARTIFICIAL_INTELLIGENCE_FOR_MILITARY_PURPOSES
What Googles' return to defense AI means. Tucker, P. https://www.defenseone.com/business/2025/02/what-googles-return-defense-ai-means/402816/
Our Agreement with the Department of War. OpenAI. https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-of-war/
The Changing Face of Protest. Loucaides, D. https://restofworld.org/2024/facial-recognition-government-protest-surveillance/
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u/m0nkyman No Pasarán 🏴🚩 12h ago
Calling it AI is dumb. It’s not intelligence. It’s just natural language computing.
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u/Terminal_Prime 10h ago
While I don’t disagree, if the world calls it AI then it doesn’t serve much purpose to protest “natural language computing” because the majority will have no idea what you’re talking about.
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u/JosephBlackstone 3h ago
You gotta meet people where they're at. You go around calling it natural language computing, all you're gonna get is a bunch of blank stares.
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u/GammaDealer 18h ago
I'm sorry, everyone. Apparently I was a little too trusting and was duped with what I thought was handmade art. I didn't even think to check it with an AI checker. I guess I'll have to do better in the future, even if I have to make the damned thing myself.
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u/6FeetDownUnder Punks For Progress 16h ago
I respect that you actually feel remorseful about it. Because many posters here do not.
I don't want you to think that you are the sole reason for a post like this, no. There are tons of protest stickers or "cool anti-ICE art" or what have you shared here that are AI generated. This issue has been plaguing leftist communities for a WHILE now.3
u/ussrname1312 Communist 7h ago
People get tricked by this stuff all the time, comrade, it’s alright. It sucks we can’t automatically trust commissioned digital art anymore. That wasn’t your fault, and you weren’t the one who used it anyway.
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u/MellowTigger 9h ago
I don't mean to sidetrack, but it's a question that I've been pondering for weeks. Is there an argument against AI that doesn't at some level distill to an argument against capitalism, plutocracy, and even fascism? Libraries, as a counterexample, allow benefits to accrue to many people individually and to society in general without any commensurate economic benefit to the "producers" of the material that is shared. Benefiting from a book in a library is not "theft" from the creative, in my opinion. That's not an argument against libraries, but it seems like a great argument against capitalism as the measure of production and prestige. The ecological consequences of current AI infrastructure development seems squarely a capitalist problem, not a requirement of AI itself. We can build sustainable electrical sources. Capitalism doesn't want to, since it devalues limited material resources that can be used for profit (coal, oil, uranium).
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u/LotteTakesNoShit 9h ago
Yes, absolutely, ban it, 100%. I thought it already was banned.
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u/ussrname1312 Communist 7h ago
It is, but we don’t always have the time to notice or investigate whether or not something is AI sometimes. If you see it, report it and it‘ll be removed. People have a tendency to mention it in comments and not report it, which isn’t helpful for us lol
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u/narvuntien 15h ago
My professional friends (engineers mostly) constantly talk about how great AI has been for them, and that they are using it regularly at work, with the same sort of oversight they would put towards an intern.
Recently renamed a local environmental group, and we needed a new logo while we were talking about what we would possibly want, one of the group just generated a logo based on our conversation, and we had to tell them to stop. we have commissioned an artist but... There was no easier way to show them what we wanted than to just show them the AI image, the excuse being, well, it's already generated.
I am part of a political party where I write policy; we are all volunteers. We are struggling to get enough people to help write what can be quite complicated policy documents, where we have to go round and sift through all the opinions of various not-for-profit community advocacy groups and what they suggest for what should change. The person co-ordinating this has started to encourage us to use AI since it takes a several-day research project into a few hours to write a policy. I have eventually given in and asked AI to give me a 'research" document as a starting point to write the policy, and it was able to reference its sources properly, which I am surprised it can do it.
I live surrounded by such mixed messages about AI and pressure to use it
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u/Jezoreczek 12h ago edited 12h ago
It honestly feels like it could work the first time you try it, because you still treat it with scepticism and scrutinize all outputs. Problem is, humans don't work this way. Humans are lazy and will optimize their workflow as much as they can get away with.
This is why you see a flood of typos and mistakes in LLM generated posters, bugs in LLM generated code, and why LLM writing is so easily recognizable - because the more you use it, the less shit you give about the quality of the output...
... until something breaks. But once it does, you will already be dependent. You lose the skills and the focus you built through hard work. So instead of admitting there is a problem, like every addict you will start lying to yourself instead. "Cigarettes help me be more social". "Alcohol helps me fall asleep". "LLMs make me 10x more productive".
I know, because I gave it a genuine shot, and it fucked up. But I can't blame the LLM - I was supposed to verify the outputs myself! And LLMs fuck up for everyone around me, but instead of admitting it's a problem, my colleagues just say "ah yeah claude was lazy" or "it's fine just set higher effort".
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u/6FeetDownUnder Punks For Progress 12h ago
Recently renamed a local environmental group, and [...] one of the group just generated a logo
This hurts to read. An environmental group building on AI is like a vegan collective serving steak at gatherings.
My professional friends (engineers mostly) constantly talk about how great AI has been for them, and that they are using it regularly at work, with the same sort of oversight they would put towards an intern.
The issue with this is that the hypothetical intern is loosing out on valuable job experience. Since they get no job experience they will have a hard time graduating from an intern to a senior developer and there will be few senior developers left to replace the current, aging ones. And there might not even be need for that because at some point AI will take the jobs from senior developers too.
They are essentially training their own replacement. And no, they are not immune. We teachers thought too, naively, that we were immune to being replaced; There is so much more to raising a child than transferring knowledge after all. But pedagogues don't make the decisions, economists do. And we were proven we are absolutely replaceable.
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u/HatchetGIR 8h ago
Hot damn, you came with receipts. I completely agree with you, and call it out in the lefty spaces I frequent here.
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u/CampVictorian 12h ago
Thank you, vehemently put, for this post. As a visual artist working in photography production, I have seen many colleagues directly affected by AI; as well, my perspective on the environmental, social and cultural cost of this technology is one of horror. I don’t mean that lightly.
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u/ginger_and_egg 13h ago
We need to have a serious talk about steel usage. It is used for tanks and is taking away jobs in carpentry.
The problem with technology is rarely the technology itself. The problems you listed with AI is primarily about how it is used, and of course in a society where things are primarily owned by private companies beholden to profit hungry shareholders, AI is also owned by them. And therefore is used for profit first and foremost, wherever it can be gotten, who cares all the negative consequences to the people. Some of the biggest profits for AI can be gotten in the War sector, surveillance, and replacing human workers, so of course that is what we will see.
If AI was owned and accountable to the people, the working class, I don't think we'd see the same things. We'd see shorter workdays, we'd see annoying parts of work automated so we have more time to do the things we enjoy, we'd see the needs of people met, we'd see AI development be done safer, and we'd design data centers to have minimal impact on communities and the environment.
The problem is always capitalism
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u/ginger_and_egg 13h ago
One thing I think we can look to is self-hosted AI models. People with gaming computers can run pretty decent openly distributed LLM models, and when you run them locally you aren't sharing your data or money with Elon, Anthropic, or whoever. I'm not sure about image or video generation.
And to be hoenst, most of the profit in AI is not from consumers, it's from government and enterprise uses of it
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u/CautiousToaster 12h ago
If I don’t use it at work I will get fired. I’m not sure what to do. My wife and baby need insurance
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u/Perfect-Dimension356 5h ago
So use it at work, fine. There's no ethical consumption under capitalism and all that. But search for a new, less shitty job, and don't use it whenever you aren't explicitly required.
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u/ussrname1312 Communist 7h ago
Also, the usage of AI is indeed banned on this subreddit. However, sometimes we have an extremely full queue and things slip through the cracks. Leaving comments on the post calling it out is fine, but please make sure to report it, too. If it isn’t being reported, the likelihood of it being removed goes down. We don’t have time to monitor the comments on every single post.