What is this obsession with "tool"? If only there was a word for a "tool" that lives only by sucking living labor - here in the most literal sense! They're also made for the exact same purposes whether in the West or not.

You mean as in the entirety of your comment?

it's regrettable we have comrades speaking on issues they have not investigated. There is no such thing as a neutral tool outside of class interests, and AI certainly isn't sitting there for us to seize. The supply chains necessary to sustain AI, like the slave labor used for data annotation and to mine the resources needed for compute (China is different here only in that they take advantage of poor rural citizens in their own country for data annotation, as reported by the CPC's own Sixth Tone, and that labor comp case pro-AI people love to mention in fact does not even come close to outlawing AI replacement, in fact, it outlines the exact cases in which it's totally fine for a Chinese capitalist to do!), the massive computing requirements, etc. If you believe AI is a neutral tool, so too are Where's Daddy?, Lavender, Gas chambers, bioweapons, minority sterilization, Unit 731's experiments, etc. See how this sounds completely insane when it's applied to other "tools" used in and designed for/developed in genocide? Will you be seizing them as well, since they're also just neutral "tools' that can be seized from the capitalists? Maybe we can also have Socialist Lockheed-Martin while we're at it.

Of course, what everyone will say is that "under socialism all that will be fixed", which is an absolutely meaningless platitude. Defending a very potent weapon of the bourgeoisie by appeals to abstract possibilities in the far future is objectively incorrect, muddies the water, and is never done after one has investigated the technology. And if there are comrades among us, spouting nonsense such as seizing technologies whose goals are addiction, mass data collection and surveillance, industrializing the cognitive aspect of warfare, and serving as the ultimate cudgel of dead labor's dominance over living labor, they are playing an objectively reactionary role. No one told the slaves that the cotton gin was just a neutral tool and the only problem was the plantation owners. Or I mean, if someone mentions the U.S. bombing 90% of buildings in North Korea, do you say "the bombs were just tragically misused by the capitalist US!, seize the bombs, don't shoot down the planes!"???

The anti-AI crowd you slander has seemingly accomplished far more in terms of class consciousness and actual real world struggle than any of you all here, and if you were all actually involved irl, you'd find that it has a lot of potential. the naked aggression of AI and AI companies has awakened a great deal of people to the fact we live in a DICTATORSHIP of the bourgeoisie, and your haughty pontifications against them are just incorrect. It's hard to express how repugnant it is for someone to lecture on things they have no clue about while slandering the proletarians actually trying to do something about it.

There literally are individual people stealing from artists...? It's really ironic of you to mock them when you haven't done enough investigation to know that, and tbh that makes your chauvinistic attitude even more disgraceful. Have you ever heard of LoRA, CivitAI, or Midjourney? The first of these requires said theft to function and is almost always trained by an individual, the second is a repository for said parasitic techbros, and the third is an AI image generation service whose head kept a spreadsheet of artists tracked like cows, including whether they had been "milked" (trained on) and if they were aware of it.

It's quite incorrect to treat it like the Cleverbot of the 2000s. Cleverbot did not automate industrial scale genocide, for one. See Israel's Lavender and Where's Daddy? AI programs for example

At least in my area of the US, knowledge of the CIA and US's crimes and whatnot is a lot more than it was a couple years ago. Nowadays, we have hot topics like Flock, data centers, and AI which all map very cleanly to (and are used to commit) said crimes. There's really no liberal conceptions that can't be eroded over time (assuming said person is, in fact, a proletarian). But that erosion has to be practical, you can't just bring up "Oh btw did you know the US used bioweapons on its own citizens without their consent multiple times?" or anything else like that just outta the blue, you have to actually connect it to lived experience. Bringing these things up out of nowhere will almost universally result in them just using the "bad apples" (it's just a few bad apples, we just need to get rid of them and everything will be good) defense. As Marx, Lenin, Mao, Vygotsky, and Luria demonstrated, THEORY MUST BE PRACTICAL. Theory without practice is a purely scholastic affair.

The same thing also goes with snarky rhetorical questions, random theory bombs, and thought terminating cliches like "That's just CIA propaganda!". These things are absolutely useless and are usually based in liberal egotism rather than any genuine attempt to educate. Even if they are genuine, no one is learning anything from you calling what they said CIA propaganda. This does not teach anyone why "CIA propaganda" is invalid, does not teach how the US Govt uses NGOs and the media to pursue its agenda, and is often deployed as a universal "stop all criticism" shield. If a teacher did not correct a student's mistake, but just obstinately called it "wrong" with no explanation, all it will lead to is frustration and resentment. If you are a Marxist in the West, you will have to live with the unfortunate and difficult reality that the vast majority of the working class are either liberals or "don't do politics", and work around that.

Ironically the Chinamaxxing craze is about as Western Chauvinist as it gets, and is a wonderful example of commodity fetishism. No one is celebrating the workers who actually did all of the labor to build China, they're celebrating abstract technology and making the same sort of banal racist tropes as usual. Yesterday, it was "OMG Bing chilling! Get it, Chinese sounds WEIRD!", today it's "I'm at a very Chinese time in my life!" (I consume Chinese commodities! Everyone laugh!).

It's literally the exact same grift as people in 2016 saying Japan was "living in 2030" because they had the Shinkansen, had "no crime and everyone is kind and respectful" and a bunch of 7/11s.

All idyllic illusions about China are best dispelled by actually investigating the material conditions of the country and its history rather than getting caught in PR fluff, and it's something that warrants extensive investigation both because China has become the new universal boogeyman of Western media, and because as conditions continue to deteriorate, people look to the more "advanced" countries in a vacuum for what ought to be done in their own, and because these people are liberals, they fetishize abstract technology and nominal socialism as in the Chinamaxxing trend. Always remember that Lenin's definition of imperialism was never limited to finance capital.