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I have written a lot, but I am afraid you may not have the patience to read through everything, so I try to keep it brief again: I think the organizers do not allow people to use AI, perhaps because they think that the AI on the market is basically created by training data with copyright disputes, so using these AI is infringing on copyright.
Although you mentioned no copyright, anti capitalism and no copyright are often not contradictory. You can see many capitalist companies using no copyright projects, or they themselves open source many AI models and projects.
But actually, I don't really care about copyright issues. Maybe it's because I'm a programmer, not an artist (you know). I think anti capitalism is more about expressing: there is no oppression of the people, no forced work of the people, no enslavement of the people, and so on. And the things you mentioned about private property and copyright, I think they have nothing to do with capitalism, they can also exist in other ideologies, such as socialism.
However, I may not have a very good understanding of capitalism, after all, I do not live in a capitalist society. I am in China, which is a socialist country, but copyright and private property still exist.
Although I don't know why anti capitalism requires the removal of private property After all, I believe that even in the era of true communism, it is still more reasonable for people to have the concept of private property. Think about it, aren't your bedroom and computer, as well as your toys and badminton rackets, basketballs, all your private property?
Or perhaps my concept of private property is different from what you mentioned, I don't quite understand it
AI as it exists today is basically a digital enclosure of the commons. It was trained on stolen data without any compensation or respect for artists, and it's a major driver of capitalist speculation at the moment. There's no need to further boost these companies that transfer massive wealth to capitalists. They have to be show the respect they deserve: none.
You avoided my question because no model was trained by respecting licenses, which even OpenAI admits would be impossible.
Stealing or inspiration is very subjective, and honestly not that important here. The problem with GenAI is the sheer scale. Copying anything made by others still requires significant effort and maybe years of training for a single individual. GenAI simply ingested all the worlds data before people were aware it existed and can now generate an industrial scale of copied work and flood out the content it was originally trained on. See how Internet searches have become completely useless due to all the slop content that is now indexed.
Seeing as how its output is several orders of magnitude higher, the comparison to a few individuals inspiring (or copying) each other is not relevant.
I'm not talking about how things work in a hypothetical society of the future, I'm talking about how they work now. Corporations like Microsoft and Meta stole the works of thousands of artists and used them to generate massive profits. Nvidia has transferred a record $954k/employee to capitalists (buybacks and dividends) just last year thanks to the AI craze.
You're telling me that you're fine with this, which is NOT the highest expression of capitalism?? Because fighting licenses is more important than fighting capitalists that are enclosing the creative commons?
Lol i thought the exact same thing as around the same time, thank you for pointing it out. The overtone window has shifted to the right so much that the good old leftist proverb "property is theft" is too radical for contemporary anticapitalists I suppose. I find it slightly worrying that the status quo has become so far, far right that even the "fuck capitalism jam" isnt a good place to develop countercultural alternative systems of ownership and property.
I can only conclude that the jam organizers believe in a form of property that doesn't devolve in exploitative capitalism, which strikes me as naive but it still is a somewhat consistent position. At least they don't mandate that all works must defend this weird ideology, so I can still work with that.
To be fair the text also mentions that they believe in self organizing communities so you could try and push for some democratic control of the rules, but democracy usually being an alias for dictatorship of the majority it probably won't change things the way you hope XD
Here's a thorough exploration of why AI hate is fundamentally right wing for anyone interested:
https://yo252yo.wordpress.com/2026/03/23/why-ai-hate-is-fundamentally-right-wing...
This person did not mention the issue of AI and copyright disputes. Did I overlook it?
In addition, Marxism or communism, in fact, aims to enable people to live freely without the need for work, which requires great productivity to achieve. However, this person claims that Marxism advocates the value of labor, but no, he has mistaken the target
yes there is a section of copyright in the blog article, it is well studied and well documented that intellectual property is an inconsistent concept invented by bourgeois to commodify ideas and extract rent from patents. In the article I link this conference by Richard Wolff as an introduction to the resource on the topic:
Furthermore I think you misread the article, the article says that the overemphasis on the labor value of the AI hating crowd is a point that Marxists have studied and well understood, early Marxists fell to the same fallacy and put a lot of emphasis on the labor value too, which is something most serious Marxists have move past AFAIK. Baudrillard's The System of Objects is a great book about this.
i see, so when u say private property, it means copyright or something, i thought something reality, like u buy a food, it's ur propertydemolition. i think the way he said (reward people for new ideas) is a good way. but now copyright has a time limit about 60 years, right? it can slightly reduce the impact and ensure the rights of those who invent new things.
I have never said "private property" just property in general, private property is usually excluded from this kind of discussion because it's a different form of property which probably should be called something else.
To be completely transparent, I am against the concept "you buy a food", I am against the use of money especially for basic necessities like food.
There are many alternatives to the concept of intellectual property that those scholar discuss (you can research "copyleft" for instance) that are way more effective that lowering the age limit of the current extractory system. I also should point out that the myth of intellectual property stimulating innovation is also widely disproven.
But it's a whole field of study that I have no desire or credential to summarize in a few forum posts so I'll leave you to your research. Just make sure to consider alternatives to current systems, not just slight modifications, because we need rapid, radical and massive change as confirmed by the doubling of the speed of the current ecosystemic collapse.
Btw you mentionned you were from China, may I ask what part of China, I'm curious about your background, it could help me improve my communication.
i mean right now, the world still run base on u need to buy food, but yeah, basic things like food if they can be free, then it's alreay like communist society, but it's still far away. I come from a big city but not hot citys for foreigners i guess... Actually, when I was a child, I was very skeptical about the idea that "copyright can stimulate innovation", but my teacher felt that this was my problem lmao
that is very interesting, thanks for sharing! I disagree with a lot of your presuppositions, there is already enough food produced in the world to feed everyone if the distribution used better mechanisms, there is definitely no "need" for money, but that's also a completely different topic xD I wonder if the education in China around the concept of copyright was always in this direction, I suspect it might have been a lot more skeptical of copyright before the 80s, but that's research I'll keep for some other time :)
idk the other countries, but i think food in China is enough, so yeah, but i mean the world run based on it, i think if someone can change it...that's too hard thb lol, after all, this world already run by this way like maybe 4000 years. i guess we need a character like Jesus lol. and well in China, before people basicly follow the west way, like copy how USA does it, and import a lot of things like capital, the core of capitalism, and even a Chinese person wrote an article praising capitalism, which was published in schools and every middle school student had to learn (to be honest, I hated this article at the time).
So in the past, many people in China were actually "worshipping foreign things" or blindly believing in the identity of the "beacon of justice" of the United States. I was also very fond of the United States before I was about 10 years old (because you know, we have to learn English, and most English teachers are from studying abroad in the United States, so they blindly believe in the United States), until later when I went online myself, I found that although many people also like the United States online, after reading history, I realized that the United States is clearly not a so-called "just country"? (Although I later understood that a country cannot be judged by justice or evil, because a country is a collective, a collection of many people), overall, Chinese people now basically understand a truth, which is that we cannot blindly trust Westerners, we need our own system to better protect ourselves
(used translation, cuz too much words XD)
The theme emphasized by China now (or rather the theme I learned about about about 8 years ago) is "innovation and autonomy". Schools encourage middle school students to participate in a competition, which requires you to draw a picture to describe the future. You can give some ideas and thoughts, and even provide a feasible design plan. Regarding copyright issues, most programmers in China are not very concerned about AI copyright issues, but artists are very disliked (referring to those who draw, not including artists who make sculptures or other things, and I don't know about that type of people). However, apart from that, the public has a indifferent attitude and likes to use AI to generate funny pictures or interesting videos. The reasons why domestic artists dislike AI that I have heard are mostly related to copyright. They feel that AI has infringed on their painting copyright. However, I think AI itself is a process of learning images, providing prompt words, and then generating autonomously. I don't think this is considered infringement (but if I say this, artists will definitely kill me). The copyright policy in China is also similar. You can apply for a copyright, and there is a copyright period during which no one can steal your design. Then there is a phenomenon: many graduate or doctoral students must apply for a certain number of copyrights, although I don't know the meaning of this behavior, I think it's just too much. It's just some junk copyright
You mention "property is theft" which was popularized by Proudhon, but you skip the distinction he clearly makes between personal property (possession in P.'s words) and productive/private property. This conflation of terms is a common misunderstanding of socialism, often used by right wing grifters in statements such as "your toothbrush will be shared". When Proudhon used it, he was referring to the landowner and the capitalist that uses (private) property to steal profits from the laborer, which ironically, you end up defending.
An image generated by a web cartoonist is personal property created by the artist. Like a toothbrush, the owner decides if somebody else can use it and under which conditions. It's not productive property because it has no means of replicating itself and creating new goods. Thus, it's not a target for falling under public/cooperative ownership. Generative AI models are productive property, and are very clearly privately owned in today's society. By using them you are just reinforcing private ownership of means that should be socialized.
Disney, Warner and NYT are perfectly capable of defending their intellectual property in court against AI companies and will end up getting favorable deals (either through reparations, redirection of traffic or removal or copyrighted material). The ones that cannot defend the work that was stolen from them are the small artists that cannot afford prolonged legal battles. By using GenAI, you are not destroying intellectual property, you are just strengthening the companies that currently gain the most from it.
Socialism doesn't just mean "free stuff"; it means equal exchange of labor in the Marxist tradition, and free association of producers in the anarchist tradition (so a producer can choose to not share their creation with you for whatever reason). Usage of GenAI (as it exists today) is incompatible with both.
The event organizers believe in small creators' right to decide how their work is used.
By self-organizing communities, we meant initiatives like /jam/fuck-capitalism-jam-2026/topic/6287288/local-jam and some others that will take place during May beyond our control. Apologies if this isn't clear.
I dont want to pour fuel on an extremely stupid and depressing fire, but I find it quite worrysome that so many supposedly progressive people have such strong, non-negotiable opinion about something they seem very misinformed about, and are so eager to conflate mathematical algorithms that run on any personal computer with the far right oligarch to which they are willingly giving the monopoly of this technology (let alone the abstract concept of intellectual property which was supposed to be the topic of the thread).
Apologies if this line of thought is also unacceptable in this community.
Let me also take this chance to deeply thank everyone who actually read and engaged with the arguments offered in the article I linked instead of hate-mashing their keyboard, even if that doesn't appear to include most participants of this community.
Attribution and recognition of the human beings who devote time and effort to create something is not Capitalist in anyway. When you take from someone else and erase the person behind it you're re-enacting exactly what corporations do to workers but with the click of a button. The erasure of workers and labor is a facet 100% capitalist.
You don't need AI to have a voice and to express yourself free of charge. That's a part of the foundation of this Jam. There's no gatekeeping here.
The issue then becomes, "But what I make won't be as polished as what someone else may do," and that is EXACTLY the mindset that Capitalism endorses. Keep up with the Jonses because if you're product isn't "marketable" then it isn't a subjective GOOD.
Make something that isn't good. Make something unmarketable. Make something that would cause a CEO to throw you out of a board room. Be UGLY and IMPERFECT and be proud of it. Just have it come from YOU. AI tells us who an AI distributor wants to be creatively, not who they are.
copyright is not inherently capitalistic, of course big corpos use it as a capitalism tool, like every aspect of life. Think of it like this, all the artist of disney movies should have the rights to the work they did, but they don't, disney owns their work. This is the base of class struggle, the workers build things and corporations steal their work and the financial gains they could acquire from it with the famous wage theft. The same thing happens with AI, all the work produced by artists/programmers is stolen by AI companies that then resell the machine that creates an altered version of their work, it's quite similar to the example I gave except it skips the "wage" and just keeps the theft. Using AI is very capitalistic.
yes, using AI is very capitalistic, it's a tool you do not need in your life whatsoever. I'm not going back on that. Ai exploits all workers in all it's ways, from the workers who build the LLM's, to artists who's works get stolen, to the workers who suffer from data centers being built, from the workers who need to classify photos and images to classify the scraped data (and by the way are paid miserable wages and have to see full gore pictures in order to label them). And you might build your own LLM at home, and it'll not be able to achieve much without the scraped data. It is fully dependent on the exploitation of someone elses work. Which is why it's inherently capitalistic.
As an anarchist, I believe that copyright laws are far from ideal, but artists/creators, as workers, have the right to reap the rewards of their labor. In this case, genAI would be the equivalent of the means of production that capitalists monopolize through private property, allowing them to steal the surplus value from workers. But genAI is even worse, because once it has been fed the artists/creators’ work, the owner of the means of production no longer needs them and therefore doesn’t have to pay them, even though, from the very beginning, it fed on stolen works taken from the internet without permission and without any kind of compensation for their work but making profits using it.
In short, generative AIs are the ultimate expression of capitalism: the ultimate extraction of surplus value without the need for workers (or at least some of them), while maintaining private ownership of the means of production.
If you want to make something and you don't know how to do it, learn it or search for someone who know about the topic. Make a team, create community, learn something new, try and experiment, enjoy the process, don’t leave it to a plagiarism machine. genAI also serves as a tool for fascism. There are already studies linking the use of AI to a decline in cognitive ability and critical thinking. There are two values that the use of genAI erodes: learning and collaboration. It’s easier to ask genAI to do something we don’t know how to do (even if we don’t know whether it’s making mistakes). That makes us more ignorant, more dependent, and more isolated; a demographic that is far more vulnerable to fascist ideology.
You can't be serious. Maybe there are some uses of LLM that can be beneficial in very specific scientific areas, like medical applications, etc... but the use of genAI to do the creative process instead of you ins't bringing any skill or knowlegde to yourself, it's doing the opposite. You learn nothing and you adquire no skill at all. We need the free time and our needs covered to afford to learn and be capable to do these things if we want instead to outsource the process to a probabilistic calculator greedly feeded with the labour of other people.
We can convey no technology itself is inherently capitalist or anticapitalist but when we talk about genAI we all know the kind of models are we talking about and the uses we are referring. Can you train a genAI to do something really more useful and constructive that collaboration with soemone who knows how to do the same thing better, that is not a waste of energy and is trained by data obtained etically? Can you do it in the context of this Jam? Of course not.
Anarchists usually are more akin to praxis than theory and the examples in the real world of the use of genAi are a massive support of capitalists and big corporations, right-wingers and fascists, market speculation in harware components, a lot of people losing their jobs, etc... you can teorize what you want about an ideal ude of AI but the praxis says another thing.
English isn't my first languaje, sorry if the structure of my text have errors and is not very clear.
Going beyond the specifics of the Jam? Ok! Hi, I disagree.
Offshore radio was very cool and largely embraced for many many years and in some forms continues to this day. All sorts of groups across all political stances embraced it as a way to avoid government monopolies. I have never heard anything about an anarchist (other than anarcho primitivists?) who was rejecting or decrying any sort of pirate broadcast.
As far as the early internet is concerned, there was worry due to the fact the early infrastructure of the internet was using military technologies/companies. But, there was a large social movement and anarchist presence from the very beginning. Look up the Cypherpunks, read their activism and manifestos, etc. They are also very cool.
Feel free to share what evidence you have for that claim, because honestly I have no idea why you made that claim to support your argument for AI.
Also, it is a harm to programmers. Every interaction you have with LLMs teaches more to the LLM. It is watching you too, harvesting every request and scrap of data you exchange. Please remember, the problem that AI is trying to solve, is WAGES. So yes, it will cause great harm to many many entry level programmers.
The harm to creativity is this. Someone would have made something. Because someone asked their AI model to create, they did not. How many cute janky doodles never got shared with the world? How many artists never built up their skills and confidence to create more things? How many artists never found their style? Or worse, saw their style get scraped and remixed by the machine? Are you sharing studio ghibli selfies?
When you say decades, that is a large amount of time. That puts AI on the same level as Wifi, stem cell treatments, and additive manufacturing in your home with 3D printers. AI requires data centers, it requires mass data collection. AI will always be an alloyed good. A product built and bound to massive corporations that have no respect for you, for copyright, for art, for workers.
(Data Centers are causing all sorts of other problems too!, raising power & fuel prices, water management, pollution, violation of US EPA regulations, consolidation of the internet into corpo control, etc.)
I do not reject AI out of "ideological purity". I refuse it as a moral necessity. I find its use immoral. GenAI is rent extraction on the act of creating.
:)
Radio, TV and Internet are means to distribute information. AI is not, and it's goal is not the same. Remember that the definition of AGI according to OpenAI and Microsoft is when AI systems can generate at least $100 billion in profits.
Also, the sheer scaling and government insight required to produce anything meaningfully helpful for society puts it firmly out of most people's reach and firmly into big capital's.