Sean Goedecke makes an observation that should make a lot of AI critics uncomfortable: the loudest anti-AI voices come from the left, but their arguments are structurally conservative. Writing on his blog, Goedecke points out that concerns about copyright protection, appeals to some intangible human essence in art, and job preservation rhetoric all mirror arguments conservatives have made for decades.
Take AI art. Critics insist that AI-generated images lack a "human soul" or genuine creativity. This is the same essentialist argument conservatives used against photography in the 1800s, modern art in the 1900s, and every cultural shift since. The left used to mock this kind of appeal to tradition. Now they're making it.
The copyright flip is just as stark. Before 2023, leftists were generally anti-intellectual-property on principle, viewing it as a tool that benefited large corporations and patent trolls. Now many of the same people insist AI companies are "stealing" copyrighted content. A recent case highlights this tension, where an artist found her own work targeted by automated claims filed by an impersonator.
Job displacement follows the same pattern. As Goedecke notes, the left has been "famously unsympathetic" to fossil-fuel workers losing their jobs. Biden literally told coal miners to learn to code. Halting technological progress to preserve existing jobs is a conservative position, full stop.
So how did anti-AI sentiment become left-coded? Timing. When ChatGPT arrived, tech CEOs like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz were making a hard right turn, embracing "Effective Accelerationism" and endorsing Donald Trump. AI got tagged as right-wing by association. Add Trump's own pro-AI stance and the hangover from crypto hype, and you have partisan confusion. Senator Bernie Sanders recently highlighted the other side of this coin, warning that AI billionaires are building a surveillance state. The irony: frontier AI models reliably espouse left-wing positions. Even Elon Musk's attempt to build a right-wing AI with Grok has had mixed success.
This won't last. Goedecke thinks anti-AI rhetoric will eventually shift to explicitly right-wing framing, and the left may find itself defending technology it currently opposes. Or the right keeps embracing AI, and opposition becomes a Democratic wedge issue. Either way, the current alignment is a political oddity that can't persist.