AI would actually be good if it weren’t for capitalism.

This is a true statement. Chatbots, image generators, and music generators have become the public face of AI because they are easily packaged and sold as mass-market products. Meanwhile, socially useful applications (systems that translate sign language using object recognition models, assist blind and visually impaired people by describing their surroundings again using object recognition, or provide real-time subtitles through smart glasses for deaf and hard-of-hearing users using language models, etc.) are often underfunded in comparison to the ridiculous bubble there is at current because they are less immediately profitable.

Technology does not develop or operate outside society. AI is shaped by the material conditions, class relations, and economic system in which it is produced. Under capitalism, investment is directed primarily toward profit, market expansion, labour reduction, surveillance, and the accumulation of private power. The problem is not some abstract “internal logic” of AI, but the internal logic of capitalism determining which forms of AI are developed, who controls them, and how they are used.

The original Luddites had a real grievance with machinery being used by owners to deskill workers, lower wages, and destroy livelihoods. However rejecting the machinery itself was the wrong answer to a problem rooted in class power and ownership. Neo-Luddism repeats that mistake. AI is a tool. The fact that it is currently used largely for nonsense, exploitation, surveillance, and other harmful ends is a systemic problem, not a tool problem.