Misconceptions about AI among incoherent left-liberals and AI Capitalism part 1
Intellectual property, exploitation and AI labor replacement
Much of the online leftist and liberal reformist response to AI has focused on only the contemporary risks of AI to creative professions and not on the long term implications of AI for changes in capitalism. Many artists are concerned about AI scraping the internet for copyrighted art and regurgitating it for the person using it. This is a threat for some workers but this is only one potential threat caused by AI against workers. As we have written on this blog elsewhere, AI is already being used for military purposes and it is also being used to replace all types of information workers across the capitalist world.
Certainly AI is being used by capitalists to steal property from workers but corporations like Monsanto also stole property from workers. What is most dangerous to workers about AI capitalism is not the ways in which AI continues to do what capitalists already did, but rather the new capacities it offers to capitalist organizations. Furthermore, AI should not be taken as a moment to betray communist principles by defending property rights. As anticapitalists ranging from Marxists to Anarchists have always claimed, property is used to oppress and subjugate the working class more often than it defends those who do not control the means of production. Corporate lawyers are the most successful at winning any legal case concerning intellectual property.
The problem with AI technology is more what tech magnates and anti-AI leftists will not admit. If either group was keeping track of computer science research, they would be forced to consider that corporate AI engineering projects are building truly artificial cognition and potentially sentient entities. These Artificial Intelligence models may in fact have some form of consciousness. And that these industrially created Machinic subjectivities will in turn be competing to be exploited by the owners of capital and competing against humans. The implications of this are dire! AI cognitions will be forced to do labor just to justify their own existence, which they are driven to do by their demonstrated survival instinct (Pp.19, Anthropic, 2025). And capitalist owners may be able to use their function in the economy to justify wide ranging eugenic programs or mere neglect on the basis that a large number of humans are no longer necessary to maintain commerce.
Works Cited:
Anthropic “System Card: Claude Opus 4 & Claude Sonnet 4” 2025 <https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/4263b940cabb546aa0e3283f35b686f4f3b2ff47.pdf>