Today the International Committee of the Fourth International inaugurates Socialism AI, a transformative application of advanced technological development to the political education and mobilization of the international working class.
I have not read the article yet but i think this is a good topic to discuss here.
good idea in theory, sucks that trots were the first to get to it lol. I also wonder what they use under the hood, if it’s just a system prompt being injected into a commercial model or they fine-tuned a model or what. Dozens of different ways one could make this LLM with varying amount of effort and resources needed for varying results. I doubt they trained an entire model from scratch because you still need more than their 250,000 WSWS articles they put in it (which is also just wild to think about that they have 250k articles over 25 years. Do Trots ever only write stuff? Apparently so.)
We have given out ProleWiki content (as txt files) to a dev to make it available for RAG on github, which is basically a compendium of data the LLM looks at before answering. We have no reason to paywall or restrict the use of our content, so it was only natural to start making these - with the understanding that they make the data available to everyone of course, so that it’s ready to use for anyone who wants to try their hand with it (over 5000 PW pages + library books we rehost). They’re currently working through it to format it for LLM use since you don’t just give it the raw text files, and previously they’d also worked on porting the MIA in the same way to a github repo (https://github.com/percy-raskova/marxists.org-rag-db). Oh they also said it was easier to work with the heavily-formatted mediawiki data over the plain html non marked-up data from MIA hah. Even our library books are formatted with clear reference tags and heading/section tags. They also contain metadata in a clearly formatted infobox (on purpose, not every wiki does this) which also allows the llm to natively understand the metadata it’s looking at.
What could come out of it though I’m not sure. That is to say I’m not sure if the best thing you can do with a socialist llm is the novelty of “wow marx chatbot” like wsws seems to be doing. I could definitely see it being queried on much higher-level questions like presenting it with your current material conditions and asking what is the best party form for it based on theory, submitting your organizational ideas to it and having it challenge them with theory. But for that it needs to have a vast corpus of texts available, and definitely MIA + ProleWiki’s current library is far from enough. MIA has a lot of works but they don’t republish if it’s not fair use or from living authors. ProleWiki republishes everything, but we don’t have a lot of works compared to all that exists.
edit: damn they’re just yapping in that press release. get to the point lol.
Sidenote: PW is a goldmine when it comes to ML theory. I’m proud to have helped a little and will most likely be helping more in the future.
The LLM idea is much more versatile than people think. Your examples would already mean quantum leaps in ML agitation and helping people understand without accepting revisionism or something. its really great. my additional idea is something like grok but for MLs so as to get it to cite theory or analysis on social media (mastodon for example).
My personal wet dream is having the individual authors read their works in all languages in color, in their voice. People tend to underestimate the power of personality that comes with movement and language. Stalin at the drums and lenin at the microphone was really a sight to behold (available on red creators network on youtube) although it was of course not authentic as lenin was not a singer afaik. The emotions it triggers are next level. Especially since there are video and audio files of stalin, i would love to have some more of the OGs that gives the incredible theoretical prowess the well deserved personality that people nowadays definitely need.
I’m kind of wary about cult of personality, even among our heroes. I’m constantly reminding myself (after forgetting for a little bit, usually lol) that heros are human, with human falliabilities, partly as a reality check, partly as innoculation against disillusionment with a whole, rather than individual quirks, I think.
I understand that. But after reading a lot of theory, marx, engels, lenin and stalin are amongst the greatest heroes that ever lived, objectively. Not because i count everything that happened while they were in power but by the theory they wrote that will forever help people survive, liberate, change, cooperate, etc. and even proved them to be true. Its the thanos “okay i’m gonna do it myself” meme in a way. Of course they werent alone, they never acted alone, materialism even suggests they did not really have a chance but to write it but i choose to hold them in high regard, place pictures of them at my home, etc. to remind me every day what I aspire to achieve. You can of course do differently or plain disagree on that idea but i dont think this constitutes a “cult”. Its plain admiration of people who managed to do the thing. :)
And there are of course others who deserve admiration. Its also part of my personality to have mentors which helps me learn faster through mimmicking. The important distinction is to basically get off at the correct stop (talking in trains since i’m riding a train atm) and not loosing the bigger picture for plain parasocial relationship.
We’ve looked at integrating TTS natively onto our pages previously but it’s not great. Firefox had an API to use the rudimentary pre-installed voice packages but apparently they are deprecating it and it’s unsure if it’ll work for everyone.
And of course since we change the content sometimes, having a static TTS file means we need to recreate and reupload it every time we make an edit. Very costly if we start looking at AI TTS voices, unless we are able to start running some on our server locally.
You could totally have a choice of voices such as Lenin, Stalin, anyone for whom we have voice recordings basically lol. And yes neural networks are especially good at TTS and even different languages, it’s one of the first things they perfected - it’s pretty surreal listening to yourself speak perfect Chinese or Danish in your own voice and shows that we are not so different after all from each other.
The first time i saw this was when watching cpt traore speak perfect english and only later discovering that he does not speak english, at the very least at that level.
That was when I first thought “this might actually help us A LOT.”
But the most cruel thing will be when you’re discussing something on grad and you can just do cite and !stalin to have an llm use original works of stalin to analyze the quote for its truthfulness and theoretical quality.
Edit: or maybe just @stalin to get the bot to respond. That would be awesome.
edit: okay I’m trying to dig more into how they provide this service and the terms of service are pretty funny.
Left Insight LLC does not return any results online (I might try to scan deeper later). They probably set it up to own the chatbot.
There’s a subscription because of course there is. Greatest victory for the workers and socialism but also pay us to unlock this victory.
Lengthy intellectual property bit. Can’t use the “chatbot” to compete against wsws was a good one.
This doesn’t hold up in US court where they operate from. They can make licences but nobody owns the output of an LLM. Also more funny copyright bit. The trotskyist revolution will not be televized because the workers will not have paid the TV fees.
I also wanted to look at their html to see if I could find more information there such as interface used or maybe even a comment but it’s a huge one-line block that I can’t lint. I threw deepseek at it, will report when it’s done (oh no that counts as reverse-engineering they will terminate my non-existent account with them!)
New comment for clarity, crush is still crushing through the problem (hah) but it has found some cool stuff already. Their homepage calls json files which contain the models they offer, and we see there is at least GPT4.1 and Deepseek. No word yet on how they use these models exactly but since GPT is closed-source they have to be contacting the service and forwarding the requests, can’t run it yourself.
Will update as it works through the tasks.
edit: so we can only look at the JSON and JS files their homepage calls (don’t really feel like making an account with them) and there is some interesting info. Seems to simply be RAG from the way the service parses the data (there’s a file with the steps it will show to the user on the interface).
No fine-tuning or running their own model and BECAUSE OPENAI IS PROPRIETARY, everything you send through the service ends up with OAI.
hey! i’m the developer of the Marxist RAG and the ProleWIki RAG so if you have any questions/ideas/suggestions/want to participate reply and let me know!!!
good idea in theory, sucks that trots were the first to get to it lol. I also wonder what they use under the hood, if it’s just a system prompt being injected into a commercial model or they fine-tuned a model or what. Dozens of different ways one could make this LLM with varying amount of effort and resources needed for varying results. I doubt they trained an entire model from scratch because you still need more than their 250,000 WSWS articles they put in it (which is also just wild to think about that they have 250k articles over 25 years. Do Trots ever only write stuff? Apparently so.)
We have given out ProleWiki content (as txt files) to a dev to make it available for RAG on github, which is basically a compendium of data the LLM looks at before answering. We have no reason to paywall or restrict the use of our content, so it was only natural to start making these - with the understanding that they make the data available to everyone of course, so that it’s ready to use for anyone who wants to try their hand with it (over 5000 PW pages + library books we rehost). They’re currently working through it to format it for LLM use since you don’t just give it the raw text files, and previously they’d also worked on porting the MIA in the same way to a github repo (https://github.com/percy-raskova/marxists.org-rag-db). Oh they also said it was easier to work with the heavily-formatted mediawiki data over the plain html non marked-up data from MIA hah. Even our library books are formatted with clear reference tags and heading/section tags. They also contain metadata in a clearly formatted infobox (on purpose, not every wiki does this) which also allows the llm to natively understand the metadata it’s looking at.
What could come out of it though I’m not sure. That is to say I’m not sure if the best thing you can do with a socialist llm is the novelty of “wow marx chatbot” like wsws seems to be doing. I could definitely see it being queried on much higher-level questions like presenting it with your current material conditions and asking what is the best party form for it based on theory, submitting your organizational ideas to it and having it challenge them with theory. But for that it needs to have a vast corpus of texts available, and definitely MIA + ProleWiki’s current library is far from enough. MIA has a lot of works but they don’t republish if it’s not fair use or from living authors. ProleWiki republishes everything, but we don’t have a lot of works compared to all that exists.
edit: damn they’re just yapping in that press release. get to the point lol.
Sidenote: PW is a goldmine when it comes to ML theory. I’m proud to have helped a little and will most likely be helping more in the future.
The LLM idea is much more versatile than people think. Your examples would already mean quantum leaps in ML agitation and helping people understand without accepting revisionism or something. its really great. my additional idea is something like grok but for MLs so as to get it to cite theory or analysis on social media (mastodon for example).
My personal wet dream is having the individual authors read their works in all languages in color, in their voice. People tend to underestimate the power of personality that comes with movement and language. Stalin at the drums and lenin at the microphone was really a sight to behold (available on red creators network on youtube) although it was of course not authentic as lenin was not a singer afaik. The emotions it triggers are next level. Especially since there are video and audio files of stalin, i would love to have some more of the OGs that gives the incredible theoretical prowess the well deserved personality that people nowadays definitely need.
I’m kind of wary about cult of personality, even among our heroes. I’m constantly reminding myself (after forgetting for a little bit, usually lol) that heros are human, with human falliabilities, partly as a reality check, partly as innoculation against disillusionment with a whole, rather than individual quirks, I think.
I understand that. But after reading a lot of theory, marx, engels, lenin and stalin are amongst the greatest heroes that ever lived, objectively. Not because i count everything that happened while they were in power but by the theory they wrote that will forever help people survive, liberate, change, cooperate, etc. and even proved them to be true. Its the thanos “okay i’m gonna do it myself” meme in a way. Of course they werent alone, they never acted alone, materialism even suggests they did not really have a chance but to write it but i choose to hold them in high regard, place pictures of them at my home, etc. to remind me every day what I aspire to achieve. You can of course do differently or plain disagree on that idea but i dont think this constitutes a “cult”. Its plain admiration of people who managed to do the thing. :)
And there are of course others who deserve admiration. Its also part of my personality to have mentors which helps me learn faster through mimmicking. The important distinction is to basically get off at the correct stop (talking in trains since i’m riding a train atm) and not loosing the bigger picture for plain parasocial relationship.
I’m saying there’s a fine line between admiration and hero worship; and that I cross it too often. Ymmv
We’ve looked at integrating TTS natively onto our pages previously but it’s not great. Firefox had an API to use the rudimentary pre-installed voice packages but apparently they are deprecating it and it’s unsure if it’ll work for everyone.
And of course since we change the content sometimes, having a static TTS file means we need to recreate and reupload it every time we make an edit. Very costly if we start looking at AI TTS voices, unless we are able to start running some on our server locally.
You could totally have a choice of voices such as Lenin, Stalin, anyone for whom we have voice recordings basically lol. And yes neural networks are especially good at TTS and even different languages, it’s one of the first things they perfected - it’s pretty surreal listening to yourself speak perfect Chinese or Danish in your own voice and shows that we are not so different after all from each other.
The first time i saw this was when watching cpt traore speak perfect english and only later discovering that he does not speak english, at the very least at that level.
That was when I first thought “this might actually help us A LOT.”
But the most cruel thing will be when you’re discussing something on grad and you can just do cite and !stalin to have an llm use original works of stalin to analyze the quote for its truthfulness and theoretical quality.
Edit: or maybe just @stalin to get the bot to respond. That would be awesome.
It’s 100% a system prompt on a commercially available model/API - it even uses the “sign in with Google” option (lol)
lmao
edit: okay I’m trying to dig more into how they provide this service and the terms of service are pretty funny.
Left Insight LLC does not return any results online (I might try to scan deeper later). They probably set it up to own the chatbot.
There’s a subscription because of course there is. Greatest victory for the workers and socialism but also pay us to unlock this victory.
Lengthy intellectual property bit. Can’t use the “chatbot” to compete against wsws was a good one.
This doesn’t hold up in US court where they operate from. They can make licences but nobody owns the output of an LLM. Also more funny copyright bit. The trotskyist revolution will not be televized because the workers will not have paid the TV fees.
I also wanted to look at their html to see if I could find more information there such as interface used or maybe even a comment but it’s a huge one-line block that I can’t lint. I threw deepseek at it, will report when it’s done (oh no that counts as reverse-engineering they will terminate my non-existent account with them!)
New comment for clarity, crush is still crushing through the problem (hah) but it has found some cool stuff already. Their homepage calls json files which contain the models they offer, and we see there is at least GPT4.1 and Deepseek. No word yet on how they use these models exactly but since GPT is closed-source they have to be contacting the service and forwarding the requests, can’t run it yourself.
Will update as it works through the tasks.
edit: so we can only look at the JSON and JS files their homepage calls (don’t really feel like making an account with them) and there is some interesting info. Seems to simply be RAG from the way the service parses the data (there’s a file with the steps it will show to the user on the interface).
No fine-tuning or running their own model and BECAUSE OPENAI IS PROPRIETARY, everything you send through the service ends up with OAI.
hey! i’m the developer of the Marxist RAG and the ProleWIki RAG so if you have any questions/ideas/suggestions/want to participate reply and let me know!!!
❤️ thank you