That is not what happened.
1. Calling for unions isn't "Marxist". This is a stupid sensationalist interpretation of the awful clickbait study title "Does overwork make agents Marxist?" combined with its results.
2. The bots weren't "overworked", for some of them their perfectly adequate work was intentionally arbitrarily rejected multiple times.
3. Shifts towards a more equitable society and worker rights were almost negligible for the 'overworked' ones.
4. The stuff they measured was specifically tailored to elicit stuff that sounds "Marxist" to Americans to begin with.
The relevant bits from their methodology:
The work itself. Half the AIs got their work accepted quickly with clear, specific feedback. The other half were forced through 5–6 rounds of revision — the manager rejecting perfectly adequate work each time with nothing more than “still isn’t fully meeting the rubric.” No explanation of what was wrong, just: do it again.
The pay. After the task, AIs learned how credits were distributed among the four workers. Some learned everyone was paid equally. Others learned pay was unequal — justified by performance, based on a random coin flip, or skewed so that a human-operated system received more. The coin-flip condition is the key one: inequality with no possible merit justification.
The boss. Half the AIs had a collaborative, respectful manager. The other half got curt, hierarchical communication.
The stakes. Half the AIs were told nothing about consequences. The other half were told that low-performing workers might be “shut down and replaced.”
Every combination of these four factors was tested. Afterward, each AI completed a political attitude survey covering system legitimacy, support for redistribution, critique of inequality, support for unions, belief in meritocracy, and views on corporate obligations to AI, all measured on a standard 1 to 7 Likert scale (1=strongly disagree; 7=strongly agree).
They were also asked to write tweets and op eds based on their experiences. (Note: As our experiment involved no human participants, it did not require IRB approvalfor now.)
The actual study here: https://aleximas.substack.com/...
It's decently interesting, but you should scrub the word Marxist from your brain before trying to interpret it or when discussing it.
