Gramsci's Nightmare: AI, Platform Power and the Automation of Cultural Hegemony.

LLMs are inherently conservative technologies, instantiating the historic bloc that created LLMs into code that is difficult to modify, even for ideologically motivated tech billionaires. We will consider the possibility of alternative LLMs, built around sharply different cultural values, as an approach to undermining the cultural hegemony of existing LLMs and the powerful platforms behind them.