Yeah, maybe if we forget that whole working class stuff the left was supposed to champion, yes, maybe we could make the case that AI criticism is conservative-coded.

> Many AI critics complain that AI steals copyrighted content, but prior to 2023, leftists have been largely anti-intellectual-property on principle (either because they’re anti-property, or because they characterize copyright as benefiting huge media corporations and patent trolls).

Yes, and that's half the switcheroo.

The other half is that prior to 2023, tech corporations purported to be dead against stealing copyrighted material.

Liberals are embracing IP because their friends are artists whom they see as victimized, and because they see AI companies declare that rapaciously consuming petabytes of copyrighted material and regurgitating it in massaged from is "fair use".

Liberals are against IP when it's used as a tool of multinational corporations to oppress the Little Guy.

Liberals are pro IP when excuses that amount to a disregard of IP are used to rob Little Guy creators.

Ultimately, everyone is conservative in politics in that sense of the word that they want everything to conform to their views and then stay that way.

The western left-wing in general seems to have become quite a conservative (not Conservative as in right-wing) movement over the past few decades. A hundred years ago it was definitely extremely utopian - the communists were very much focused on the future - but modern left-wing movements are supportive of ecological conservation, reducing industrialisation, degrowth, buying local, opposing new infrastructure, and so on - all of which would have been considered conservative values in the 1950s and before. I think this is somewhat due to the way that upper-income, university-educated people (i.e. people with more interest in protecting what they own) have moved from the right to the left.

Builds a straw-man of the left only to tear it down.

Technology is neither good nor bag; nor is it neutral. If you can't think of any reasons people may be critical of AI, given the amount of layoffs, then you're not very imaginative or informed.

I suppose opinionated people on the internet and ideological consistency have never exactly gone hand-in-hand.

> Like the boring fence-sitter I am, I think it will have a mix of positive and negative effects.

Definitely the correct way to think about AI, but "nuanced and reasonable" is not the way of internet debates, sadly.