Colloqium #39
Oct 18, 2025 at 12:00 pm CEST
Description
Generative systems like ChatGPT have been around for several years. Yet what these systems do and how they do it is still hotly contested. One position holds that they reproduce a semblance of human consciousness and that generative AI is a step towards human-like artificial general intelligence, and ultimately, godlike superintelligence. This position is prevalent among the CEOs and salespeople who market these systems. Another position is that generative AI is a form of enhanced autocorrect and that these systems are stochastic parrots. This view is held by critical AI researchers.
This talk will present a third position based on Marxist theory’s analysis of the role of machinery in the exploitation of societal labour. It will focus on the prerequisite for the development of generative AI: an enormous corpus encompassing all human intellectual labour in the form of the internet. Generative AI is analysed as a new form of social relationship in which this intellectual labour is alienated and exploited.
This raises a new question in the political debate on generative artificial intelligence. Rather than entertaining utopian ideas about machine gods or rejecting this technology outright as a scam, we should be discussing the expropriation of the expropriators.
Speakers
Max Schnetker