Comment by Lerc

That's because it's a meaningless, populist trope. There is zero helpful information, solution or context which depends on the specific issue at hand.

...you could also swap out with "rich people" or "all people," "governments."

In fact, reading these sentences with ad-lib on the subject tends to give these sentences interestingly different connotations.

Well, as Nick Land said, "Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence are the same thing"

If one considers a firm to be a non-human entity that exhibits cognition, then yes. Various religions also exhibit those characteristics, which would fortify the Roman pope’s position with irony.

See Joscha Bach’s claim about religions not publishing their A|B testing at 51:47:

https://youtu.be/7bqdPHLIY8w

And while your comment has validity, in the US the phrase uttered by Presidential candidate Mitt Romney adds a layer of complexity:

“Corporations are people, my friend.”

Same thing though. AI is largely a service provided by companies

Yes yes I know, open source models exist, yadda yadda

I think it's safe to say the overwhelming amount of AI usage in the world today is gates by corporations though. The vast majority of people will barely configure their own OS nevermind managing their own locally hosted open source AI instance

I don't think anyone actually has an issue with AI. I think people are finally fed up with late-stage capitalism and lashing out.

Yes! I've felt exactly the same. Everything people have taken issue with - "plagiarism," concentration of wealth and power, termination of jobs, environmental harm to feed data centers, land being wasted on new datacenters, resources being distributed terribly so as to feed the AI monster, slopcode being shit out as fast as possible to stay ahead of the market, software quality dropping for the same reason, engineers phoning it in at work to hit LLM KPIs, it's all just capitalism in its most raw, inevitable, end game form.

Edit: Someone replied to this with a question. I'm rate-limited here for getting into a flamewar with a PRC citizen that was gloating to me about my country being possibly invaded soon (which, fair, flamewars are bad), so I'll need to put my reply below:

There's no exact road map, but generally speaking, in our capitalist countries today, wealth started out more distributed, and governments had more power, in the beginning of their liberalization. States often competed in markets or simply nationalized things like power, healthcare, education. Ongoing examples of that are lots of places in Europe.

With the advent of neoliberalism (Thatcher, Reagan), concentrated capital converts more easily to political power in an exponential manner - more money, more ability to buy government, leads to more money, more ability to buy government.

Corporations are profit generation algorithms. They want the profit to always go up, and when they run against the barriers of laws (restricting their environmental impact, ability to underpay their workers, create cheap and dangerous working environments, do international trade in some way), naturally the next investment step is to remove those barriers.

So, early capitalism is strong regulation, socialized services and infrastructure, government competition, some nationalization, and private ownership of the means of production.

Late stage capitalism is weak/no regulation, no services, privatized infrastructure, no government competition, no nationalization, sectors tending towards monopolization, and wealth concentration.

"Raw capitalism" is where the commodification of everything is complete.

so maybe we'll get to the right place by accident when all companies are effectively replaced by ai ha ha. (not putting a high %age likelihood on that one, obviously, just being cheeky)