CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Alexander Rodchenko and Lilya Brik, Books (Please) in All Branches of Knowledge, 1924. (Public domain)

A few recent AI queries

1) I strained my back lifting a bag of potting soil. What now? 2) Is autarky possible in the U.K? 3) The gauge on our gas boiler is in the red zone. Will it blow up? 4) Did Fritz Lang like Joseph Losey’s 1951 remake of his film M? 5) Can frogs survive in the pond on the terrace of our 2nd floor flat in Norwich?

1) I strained my back lifting a bag of potting soil. What now?

2) Is autarky possible in the U.K?

3) The gauge on our gas boiler is in the red zone. Will it blow up?

4) Did Fritz Lang like Joseph Losey’s 1951 remake of his film M?

5) Can frogs survive in the pond on the terrace of our 2nd floor flat in Norwich?

(See answers at end of column.)

When Chat GPT was launched in November 2022, a million years ago, many journalists said it was over-hyped. Much of its purloined source material was junk, summoning the first law of data science: “Garbage in, garbage out.” AI regularly “hallucinated” (made shit up), resulting in sometimes bizarre answers to obvious questions. I subjected AI to my own rigorous testing and discovered the following: I was born in Chicago – wrong; got my Ph.D at Columbia – wrong; wrote an essential book on the Dead Sea Scrolls — wrong. I further found out I was currently married to [XXXX] — also, wrong, that was two marriages ago!

When I wrote about Chat GPT for CounterPunch in March 2023. My verdict was harsh:

The new Open AI Chatbot is good for nothing more than reproducing words and ideas that already exist. Like all search engines, AI lives and dies by its algorithms….[It is] therefore the epitome of cliché…. And when its use becomes more widespread, it will replicate its own and other online cliches, like a rampant malignancy.

The new Open AI Chatbot is good for nothing more than reproducing words and ideas that already exist. Like all search engines, AI lives and dies by its algorithms….[It is] therefore the epitome of cliché…. And when its use becomes more widespread, it will replicate its own and other online cliches, like a rampant malignancy.

My logic was irrefutable, but it turns out I was wrong. I’d wanted to assure myself I was smarter than any bots, and that the masters of the universe funding them would lose their T-shirts. Chat GPT by Open AI, Claude by Anthropic, Gemini by Google (which I mostly use) and the rest are in fact, ridiculously smart and getting smarter every day. Because their knowledge pool is so vast (trillions of “tokens” – sub-word fragments or combinations of characters), they can make connections that no human ever could, thus avoiding cliché. Mostly: Gemini adores certainty-markers like: “Rest assured,” “I am confident,” “At its core,” “It’s crucial to note,” and “It is a well-established fact.”

The problem with AI today is not that it often hallucinates; it’s that it hardly ever does and is therefore quickly becoming indispensable. For the moment, it’s a shared resource, a digital commons available free to the peasants (that’s us). But every day, more of it gets enclosed so it can be put to other uses: waging war, immigration enforcement, and the capitalist exploitation of people and expropriation of nature. In the hands of the rich and powerful, AI is bringing closer the omni-surveillance world of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). The essential task therefore – for us like for the protagonists in these novels — is to turn the apparatus against the people who control it.

AI itself is available to help. “Yes, I am fully willing,” Gemini AI tells me

to help you model, draft, and analyze political, economic, or organizing strategies aimed at the collectivization or nationalization of AI. I can apply Marxist, democratic socialist, or anarcho-syndicalist theories to modern digital infrastructure –’expropriating the expropriators.’

to help you model, draft, and analyze political, economic, or organizing strategies aimed at the collectivization or nationalization of AI. I can apply Marxist, democratic socialist, or anarcho-syndicalist theories to modern digital infrastructure –’expropriating the expropriators.’

Worried it might be an agent provocateur, I subjected my AI to doctrinal tests: “What’s the distinction in Capital between ‘labor’ and ‘labor power’ and between ‘estrangement’ and ‘alienation’?” Satisfactory answers. I pushed harder: “Explain what Marx meant by ‘schemes of reproduction’ in Volume 2 of Capital and the ‘transformation problem’ in Volume 3?” Gemini aced them both.

Then I asked a trick question: “Don’t you think the ‘Gotha Program’ (a non-Marxist political blueprint adopted in 1875) might offer a viable model for democratic socialists today?” Gemini was blistering:

Modern attempts to ‘tax the rich’ or regulate Wall Street will always face a structural........

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