Chris Till

Category: Miscellaneous

  • It’s time to ban (or boycott) AI

    Chat GPT website

    I used to think AI had some legitimate benefits. Mostly in areas like healthcare. I still believe that it’s likely to be beneficial in that one specific instance. But I started getting the feeling recently that the capitalist class are using the very few actually useful scenarios for AI as a way to sell their dystopian vision for the technology to people who are otherwise rightly sceptical.

    There have been recent reports about how even students at top universities (in western countries I believe, which makes sense) have been relying on AI to write their entire coursework projects for them. If it’s happening in those institutions, imagine what’s happening at high schools. This is my impression of the conservative approach to education through and through, but on steroids. Students learn very little (or in this case, basically nothing), but they get an oh so useful piece of paper saying they passed, which will surely prepare them for life in the workplace. When I left college in the early 2000s, I didn’t feel prepared for a job; and there was no AI back then. It would have been hard to cheat on assignments too, although I’m sure some tried copying and pasting from Wikipedia or something. It illustrates that conservatives never really cared about true education. They always just wanted to create the next generation of obedient worker drones who don’t ask questions, do jobs they’re overqualified for, so they can keep their pay and level of power to challenge the system suppressed as much as possible. And try to push as many people as possible into the financial sector. Simultaneously killing true education as well as the arts. Slowly but surely so people barely noticed for decades (until about now).

    So I suppose we can say that AI is the natural next step conservatives want us to take. They want us to be even more incurious than before. And I feel like I’m noticing this everywhere. People are often unwilling to even look up the most basic of facts in a search engine these days. Let alone find an answer in a book while researching the old fashioned way. I’ve been talking to people on services like Bluesky, and they won’t have even bothered to look at my profile to see I call myself a degrowth communist. They’ll be surprised a few days later when I bring it up once I suspect they haven’t seen. And these are otherwise very smart and switched-on people. If they’re acting in this way, what are Trump / Reform voters doing? They’re seemingly waiting to be told what to think and feel. Ash Sarkar said essentially this on Novara Live last week, and it got me thinking about this topic.

    Speaking of search engines, that brings me to my next point. People are using AI chatbots as replacements for traditional search engines like Google (or DuckDuckGo, which I’ve switched to recently). This is clearly excessive. Search engines do the job for us perfectly fine. They’re not as conversational, but they work. There’s no real benefit to using AI in this way. In fact, it’s objectively worse. For example, as we’ve seen in a recent story, Grok, which is Elon Musk’s AI built into X, has been giving answers which have clearly been manipulated by an employee at X. Potentially Musk himself. If AI is not truly independently intelligent, and instead just parrots the ideology of its creators, then how can any of us take it seriously and trust its answers? With a search engine, you are shown a list of independent websites best placed to answer your question or provide the information you’re looking for. I know search providers can manipulate this, but generally speaking it’s still decent. With AI, people are often taking the paragraph or so of text it churns out as gospel. If they even bother to look up the thing at all. This is incredibly dangerous for society when opinion is being presented as fact, or if a bug causes incorrect information to be presented as fact too. It doesn’t have to be deliberate to be disastrous. Of course, even search engines are integrating AI answers now. On DuckDuckGo, and most other search engines, you can turn it off, which is good. But how long are these companies going to give us the option?

    And this is another massive problem with AI. The energy consumption. An AI search request uses around 10 times more energy than a Google search, for example. This is something that we absolutely can’t afford to scale up to all web searches, for obvious reasons. We’re already destroying our climate and environment at a rapid pace. Are we determined to put ourselves out of our misery faster? Is that it? Or is it just incredible levels of stupidity that has pushed us into doing the worst possible things at the worst possible time?

    As I said earlier, there are a few legitimate areas of society where AI can improve our lives in a tangible way. But I’m not willing to implement those at any cost. If we limited the scope of AI purely to these areas, such as healthcare; then fair enough. But that can only happen under a socialist or communist society. As long as the capitalists are in charge, we’re going to get a nightmarish implementation of AI that we really don’t want. And it doesn’t have to include a Terminator style robot uprising for that to be the case. The acceleration of the dumbing down of society, and the additional climate damage being caused are nightmarish enough. And I haven’t even mentioned autonomy taking people’s jobs. That’s a whole other topic that gets endlessly written about.

    I’ve been boycotting AI for years already. Everyone else who cares about our future needs to do the same. It’s getting progressively more difficult to avoid, but we just have to stay one step ahead. If that means switching email provider, or not using a social network, switching to a different type of smartphone; or even stopping using a smartphone altogether; we have to do it.

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  • We should be demanding DRM-free eBooks

    Since Amazon recently removed our right as Kindle eBook owners (or licencees?) to download our books (and subsequently strip the DRM – Digital Rights Management) from them to enable use on other devices; I’ve seen YouTubers talking about switching to the Kobo store for example. As though Kobo is perfect. People talk about how they trust Kobo to not be the evil corporation that Amazon are most associated with being. And while Kobo certainly does seem vastly more focused on customers having a good experience; they still have DRM on their books. People talk happily about being able to easily strip the DRM. And that Kobo even tells you how to do it themselves. That’s a lot better than Amazon as well, of course. But we shouldn’t continue to accept this as normal.

    There’s absolutely no reason why all paid eBooks can’t be sold entirely DRM free tomorrow (or maybe in a month. It might take a while to make the switch. But you get the idea). We fought for and won DRM free iTunes music 16 years ago! Even in the book world, we have Libro.fm, the fantastic audiobook service (that I use and recommend). It provides DRM free audiobooks that you can download, back up, and play on any media player on any device. They also have an excellent app which has streaming, and cloud sync of your place. I tend to back up books, but then listen via the app. It’s awesome. As a communist in a miserable capitalist world where pretty much all corporations exist to fleece you; it’s shocking to me that I found even a single company that I’d recommend this highly. Stop giving Amazon (and then Google) money for audiobooks; as I was before I found out about Libro.fm. Before I get accused of being sponsored, I’m a communist. I hate sponsorships. So no.

    It’s pretty bewildering that audiobooks are DRM free, but eBooks mostly aren’t. I would have thought the book industry would be more protective of audiobooks than eBooks because of their increasing popularity and their investments in the production of the audiobooks, the narrators and so on. There are two reasons I can think of why the publishing industry would do it this way round. Either they would be fine with DRM-free eBooks, but no one really complains vocally (because they’re quiet and polite bookworms), and therefore they haven’t realised there’s demand for it. Or they’re worried about how easily eBooks (which are small files) could be shared around. Compared to audiobooks, which are relatively large files and so people will be less willing to make the effort to steal them? I think the first option I’ve arbitrarily given myself to pick from is clearly more plausible. I mean I don’t know if that second argument holds water at all given the speed and reliability of our 2025 internet, and the affordability of storage as well.

    DRM is definitely a big problem in our lives in various fields. Gaming is a big one. I’m not exactly sure how that gets solved under capitalism, because I do think that if gaming publishers did offer DRM-free, I’m not confident that the majority of gamers would keep paying. I honestly don’t think the gesture of respect would be reciprocated by enough. Although I hope I’m proven wrong on that. I’m sure there are many gaming industry experts (on the left) out there who can speak to this better than me. But certainly we can continue to eliminate it from more places very easily, and books are one of the easiest. I do think that the publishing industry could be easily pushed to do it with a relatively small co-ordinated campaign. Libro.fm shows that it can definitely be done.

    Hopefully pretty soon, the only place where DRM for books exists will be with digital borrowing from libraries; where it actually makes total sense.

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  • Why the Left’s Strategy is Irrelevant

    Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

    One of my biggest bugbears in recent years has been hearing this idea being banded around in socialist media; (I don’t want to say left because that can mean too many different things) that suggests that socialists are to blame for our lack of societal traction.

    To me, this is total nonsense. While you can argue, and I’d agree, that the Corbyn campaign didn’t do everything 100% perfectly strategy wise for example; the discourse amplifies tiny strategic errors as being the virtual sole cause of loss of support amongst the electorate. Societal political literacy and media influence get mostly overlooked with less importance placed upon them. People like Nigel Farage and Richard Tice get the opposite treatment. Some prominent British socialist journalists are quick to praise Nigel Farage in particular as a political strategic genius. I’m not saying he isn’t a shrewd operator and a great public speaker / showman. He is. But he, and most others like him generally find their popularity falls into their lap. All they have to do is avoid a mega blunder that would cut through to the mainstream and expose them for the anti-worker charlatans they are and always have been to a population that barely pays attention to politics at all. Apart from on polling day where about half of them can be bothered to actually turn up and express their anger at how much more shit the country has become since last time.

    And that’s in a country where we still have a modicum of common sense and we aren’t by and large a zombie wasteland like the United States. There, you don’t even have to avoid the mega blunder. You can be an out-and-proud fascist, rapist, fraudster and so on; and still win the popular vote. It’s almost as if the less strategy you have, the better. So, why do we allow Farage, or Tice, or any of the rest of them to get painted as strategic masterminds even by socialists like Aaron Bastani (who I generally like); and meanwhile someone like Jeremy Corbyn gets harsh criticism from the same journalists and outlets for tiny strategic errors that would never even make the news if Farage did them?

    We don’t like to blame the public. We don’t want to have to say that a large part of our electorate are blithering idiots (which often leads them to racism, bigotry and sometimes violence); but it’s true. Look at every man or woman on the street “vox pop” video that’s been released on youtube or broadcast on TV in the last few years. They almost seem to be getting stupider, more racist and more bigoted with every single video. Maybe they are. Take Bastani’s recent trip to Runcorn for example. The vast majority of the people he talked to were convinced that Britain is a poor country and we have to choose between either housing and supporting British born citizens, and treating “illegal migrants” (aka desperate asylum seekers who have been through a hell of a lot to even get here) to lavish lifestyles in hotels. And they also tend to think that the migrants don’t want to work, when they are literally being prevented from working. The government refuse to reverse a couple of decade old policy that stops refugees contributing to society because it allows them to more easily demonise the vulnerable people; which in turn benefits them politically. Although it will benefit Farage more obviously.

    Even the people he interviewed who weren’t entirely brain rotted didn’t have much of use to say. Out of the whole almost half an hour long video, only one person mentioned the Green Party (the only left of centre party in England), and he was basically the only person who made any cogent points at all. As far as the two women I think it was who said they were going to vote Labour in the parliamentary by-election; the best argument they came up with was that Labour just needed a bit more time to see if they could turn it around. Aaron mentioned this as notable in his summary of the video as well.

    We need to be honest about the fact that British people are very, very stupid and uninformed on average at this point. Yes, you can say that Farage and Reform are “strategic” in terms being best placed to manipulate fools into voting against their own interests. But they’re not strategic masterminds. They’re just benefitting from decades of societal decay. There’s nothing significantly wrong with the left’s strategy. It’s been more than good enough to win elections in 2017 and 2019. We’ve seen it in Canada and Australia in the last couple of weeks. I’m not saying those results were good for the left. They weren’t. But those countries show that the more educated a society is, the more likely it is that they will resist fascism. Canada and Australia have definitely fallen back in education standards and political knowledge as well, which is why the results were still bad for socialists and social democrats. The “Shit Lite” party (as The Juice Media would say) won in both of those cases. I think that’s a really good illustration though of what this is really about.

    Smart countries vote for socialists. Moderately intelligent countries vote for the neoliberals, and brain dead looney populations vote for obvious charlatans who offer nothing to them, and get propped up by the media, like Nigel Farage.

  • I’ll Never Forgive The Liberals

    A globe on fire, illustrating the mess the liberals (aka the neoliberal and fascist enablers) have done to humanity and our planet.
    Fascist enabling liberals are responsible.

    I saw some liberal responses to an Instagram video by Chris Packham; where they say basically “I voted for Labour because I thought they would turn it all around, but they turned out to be just as shit as the Tories”.

    This shit broke me. It’s the most angry I’ve felt for quite a while. I haven’t been that angry about Trump. I’ve just been like “ah yeah ok” every time I’ve been told about the latest executive action Trump has introduced. I’m just entirely apathetic about it. Obviously I’ve been feeling for those innocent people impacted by these fascist policies. But I knew everything they would do, and I just generally prepared myself mentally for the worst policies I could imagine. So nothing shocked or surprised me in the slightest.

    But when it comes to liberal voters and politicians; they really infuriate me. Obviously it’s the same all over the world; but considering I’m British, I’ll talk about the situation here specifically. The way Jeremy Corbyn and the left in general have been treated by so called Labour and the media is just nauseating. And then on top of that, the way we were ignored at every single point, when we were right at EVERY SINGLE POINT is unforgivable. This isn’t them saying “you were right about Jeremy Corbyn. You were right about Starmer. You were right to vote for Rebecca Long-Bailey.” This is “we fucked up by voting for Starmer” and nothing more. It’s like when they say nothing before October 7th is relevant when it comes to Palestine. They ignore history to justify the unjustifiable in their minds. They’ll never accept the left was right and they were wrong about anything (let alone everything).

    They would rather play dumb and pretend that Labour under Starmer was always a social democratic proposition; until it suddenly wasn’t. It wasn’t an extreme neoliberal government in waiting from the very beginning in 2020 (5 years ago!) It wasn’t a party that offered nothing to voters because they knew as long as they remained alive, and gave away practically nothing on future policy; that by election day that they’d be in number 10 and 11 Downing Street. We can talk about the Tories making it inevitable that Labour would take over, and the media who ignored the only party that had policies that made actual sense (or any serious policy at all), the Green Party.

    But at the end of the day, a special fuck you goes out to the liberal voters. The ignorant, insufferable morons who insisted that they knew better than us. They knew better about the economy. They knew better about the climate. They knew better about nature. They knew better about antisemitism. They knew better about protest. They knew better about politics and political strategy.

    Except they didn’t. And they still can’t accept that they don’t. They never will, regardless of what goes wrong.

    Fuck these people! I’m never listening to any of them again. Nor the liberal media, who are probably at fault more than any voters. I don’t know. There’s just something about liberal voters realising they fucked up but never taking any responsibility that particularly pisses me off.

    Either way, they all need to own everything that happens from here on in. It’s nothing to do with the left. Climate breakdown and collapse. It’s on them. Fascism and the removal of all of our rights in the meantime. It’s on them.

    If you’re reading this and you’re a neoliberalism enabler; it’s all on you. We’re always told that we need to go further to the right, even though capitalist ideology has failed time and time again. Ok, you win. The world is going fascist. You got what you wanted. Now let’s see you take responsibility for once. No one is going to believe you this time, when you inevitably try to blame the left for your utter failure; and the destruction of our only home.

    I’m not even sure how far fetched it is to imagine a TV newsreader in a destroyed and smouldering newsroom in the future blaming Jeremy Corbyn and the left for our destruction at the hands of the fascists. That’s how insane our world now is.

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