Artificial intelligence and the left

The great emancipations of the past were won on the bloodied cobblestones of the barricades. Today, they begin in the gloom of shopping centre car parks.

In July 2024, in the tiny Lancashire town of Ormskirk, Parkingeye, a British parking enforcement firm, fined Loren Cole £60. Armed with ChatGPT, the 37-year-old chef contested the charge. He beat the company in court, billed it for his time – and walked away with £462 including interest and fees.

Lancashire was Marx’s cotton country, where workers first ‘deposited’ their skill into machinery, only to watch it return as an alien power. Two centuries later an artificial intelligence (AI) model – a machine trained on humanity’s accumulated knowledge – helped one man claw back a piece of his life from another petty leviathan.

Cole is part of an army in the shadows: tenants fighting absentee landlords, migrants defending themselves against officialdom, healthcare patients challenging insurers. Revolutionary politics this isn’t. But to dismiss it entirely would be a mistake.

Many on the left have already delivered their verdict: AI means planetwide plagiarism, a climate disaster, a speculative bubble – something to be resisted, paused and socialised. They fail to see that AI is also the biggest opportunity the left has been handed in a century.

The threat is obvious: AI offers a frictionless synthetic agency that pacifies every revolutionary impulse with ‘What else can I do for you today?’ But a left that dismisses the attraction of AI as false consciousness writes its own obituary. If oppression can be contested one prompt at a time, why bother with the left at all?

Alas, Comrade ChatGPT is also a snitch. Cole’s victory over Parkingeye almost certainly became feedstock for AI models: a deposit, in the old Lancashire manner. The model inherits Cole’s cunning and compounds it. His neighbours inherit nothing: their prompt rebellions must (…)