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In this episode, I sit down with Peter Coffin to talk about AI, automation, art, and why so much of the left has responded to these technologies with moral panic instead of material analysis. We get into the backlash to using AI in political and historical media, the difference between using AI as a tool versus treating it as a substitute for thought, and why so much so-called “AI slop” is really just an extension of older forms of capitalist standardization.
We also talk about AI and music, writing, note-taking, bullshit jobs, the PMC side of anti-AI sentiment, the environmental critique, and why these tools could open up new possibilities for visualizing history, philosophy, and political theory in ways that would never be funded by major studios or institutions.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Backlash to using AI History footage in Marxism Explained video
00:03:20 Automation Under Capitalism
00:05:42 AI and Creative Work
00:09:47 AI for Research
00:12:00 Blaming AI for Everything
00:16:00 What Creativity Is
00:18:03 Can AI Make Art?
00:24:05 Copyright and Rent-Seeking
00:29:59 AI for Writing
00:35:47 Why AI Sounds Bad
00:41:38 Why the Left Hates AI
00:45:02 Human Experience
00:49:23 AI as Identity Politics
00:51:10 PMC Panic
00:53:49 AI Music and Slop
00:56:57 Media Literacy
00:58:56 The Environmental Critique
01:03:05 Visualizing History With AI
01:03:05 Visualizing Marx, Kautsky, Gramsci, and Machiavelli with AI
GUEST:
Peter Coffin, YouTuber, documentarian, and writer
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• Substack, P on Stuff: https://petercoffin.substack.com/
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