Socialist AI as an alternative to platform-capitalist AI regimes

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak* 

The development of AI—from the Turing Test to systems such as OpenAI's GPT-5, Anthropic's Opus 4.6, Microsoft's MAI-1 (Thinking 1), Alibaba's Qwen, and Google's Gemma—has expanded the use of multi-agent teams and workflows for solving complex problems. These developments occur within a market structure in which AI companies seek rents and operate within a platform-capitalist system. 

According to this perspective, this system is said to deepen a culture described as worse than techno-feudalism, at the expense of labour and labourers. Digital medievalism and profit-driven AI regimes are presented as incompatible with human happiness and progress.

All technologies, including the input and output models of AI and its generative designs, are described as based on the creativity of labour. Human hands and minds produce technology intended to empower and emancipate human beings from tedious and boring work. However, current AI platforms and their ownership are said to use the creativity of labour as disposable. This system is argued to use human labour and discard it according to the needs and desires of platform capitalists without empowering labour. 

This is presented as the fundamental problem of AI-led knowledge traditions, which are described as extensions of the duality (input and output) of Eurocentric knowledge traditions that promote profit at the cost of people and planet. The causal relationship between input and output is said to follow Eurocentric knowledge traditions; therefore, AI models are argued to have yet to understand and analyse the conditions and contexts of different issues confronted by the majority of working people across the world, or to predict solutions that change those conditions and provide alternatives for permanent solutions to inequality and exploitation.

The science of causality based on Eurocentric knowledge traditions is said to ignore various contexts and conditions while developing AI models based on the world digital library, described as a repository of European languages, contexts, and conditions. It is argued that this approach does not engage in detail with people and their problems across the world, their cultures, languages, and societies. 

In this context, socialist AI is proposed, both as skills and as knowledge traditions, to ensure collective foundations of knowledge for collective welfare and empowerment. Socialist AI is presented as more natural and normal than the current neo-colonial rent-seeking approach to AI led by platform-capitalist systems that are said to exploit labour and nature simultaneously and to be unsustainable in the long run.

The languages, codes, numbers, algorithmic models, and mechanical designs used in current AI are not products of AI companies and their digital-capitalist systems. Human interaction with nature and the immediate environment produced signs, languages, numbers, and codes to express, interact, and communicate. Human beings are therefore described as the owners of all languages in their different forms. 

Human creativity is presented as central to the growth of all technological developments and innovations; therefore, human beings are described as the direct owners of all forms of knowledge, which should serve human beings in their path of progress. However, the text argues that there is no difference between the mill owners of Manchester during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century and AI companies controlling the technological revolution today. Stealing human labour and nature for profit is described as central to both the Industrial Revolution and the AI revolution.

However, a Luddite rebellion is presented as neither an alternative nor an option. Socialist AI is described as reclaiming the power of labour over its own products, power, and creativity. It is about reclaiming and changing the system that separates labour from its own products and creative power, so as to realise the full potential of labour for its own empowerment. 

As human beings produce all forms of technology and technological skills and knowledge traditions, it is argued that human beings collectively need to control AI technology in terms of its ownership, control, function, and distribution. This demands dismantling the knowledge market that promotes the buying and selling of knowledge, in the form of skills, as commodities. Collective control of AI in terms of its development, distribution, and redistribution is presented as the only way to ensure AI-led technologies in the service of human beings and the planet.

AI companies are said not to produce knowledge and not to add value, but to control the processes of production and the pricing of products to generate profit. They are described as creating new forms of bondage—'like, subscribe, and share'—to generate rent-seeking revenue, even after consumers buy their packages, which are shaped by different generations of technologies and by consumers' ability to access them according to their purchasing power. 

They are said to coordinate, collect, and control human creativity and treat the technologically advanced workforce as disposable, while their crony-capitalist networks help to create regimes, institutions, and processes of technological accumulation with the support of the state, governments, laws, and judiciaries compliant with the requirements of AI regimes.

In a socialist AI regime, by contrast, there is said to be no limit to human creativity, as human beings themselves control their own labour and creativity. This non-separation is presented as creating the conditions for the end of human alienation from themselves and from their own labour. Therefore, socialist AI is described as natural and normal, whereas digital and platform-capitalist systems are said to be designed to exploit human beings and nature together. 

Digital medievalism and its profit-driven AI regimes are presented as incompatible with human progress. This system is described as neither normal nor natural but imposed on people by market forces who manipulate human beings with propaganda to normalise what is described as an unnatural system of AI companies and their regimes of accumulation at the cost of human beings.

In this context, socialist AI is proposed to create emancipatory conditions to accelerate egalitarian human freedom, happiness, leisure, and pleasure—conditions in which human creativity flourishes without hindrance, discrimination, or exploitation. Socialist AI is also proposed to facilitate the decolonisation and democratisation of knowledge and the deepening of citizenship rights and freedoms, thereby empowering labour and celebrating its creative power. 

Socialist AI is presented as the sustainable future in which AI serves all human beings and equally serves all other living and non-living beings on the planet.

---

*Academic based in UK