I have a cap with the words “Please don’t talk to me about AI – I’ll kill myself” embroidered onto it. I wear it to go running and, by now, my friends know not to mention AI to me, but obviously it hasn’t worked to calm my anxieties. The dread persists. And yet we’re not allowed to be afraid of AI, everyone tells us, because “it’s here to stay”.
If I had a rand for every time someone has said that to me, I’d have… well, what’s the use of physical currency in a future where we live in a simulation?
I would just like to point out that when someone gets diagnosed with a terminal illness, we don’t say to them: ‘What’s the point of being afraid of death? It’s coming for you anyway.”
I think we’re allowed to be afraid, even if there’s nothing we can do about it. I’m allowed to think AI is genuinely malevolent and will cause humanity to go mad or destroy itself, even if I recognise that most people have acquiesced to it as “inevitable”. It isn’t inevitable, for the record. We go along with things and then, because we’ve gone along with them, they seem inevitable. But we could resist. We don’t have to go along with this. But if we resisted, we’d have to really put our backs into it. Complaining certainly isn’t going to stop what’s coming.
Now when I say AI I mean the large language models. I have nothing against AI being used in medical screening for improved disease recognition and prevention, for example, or for help with complex engineering problems – such as greener energy. If it can help us with intractable problems – great.
But the AI that generates books, essays, poems, video footage, movies, music? The AI that has just birthed the first “synthetic actress”? That does things people actually want to do, that they feel inspired by and passionate about… but it does them faster? The AI that feasts on our (stolen) cultural production and then remixes and reproduces it in such convincing ways that it seems new, and it seems like the real thing? I think we can all agree it’s unethical and very dangerous, no?
Perhaps Step One is to acknowledge that it serves a very narrow set of interests. The owners of the tech, and their investors, at the expense of artists and cultural workers.
It is class warfare masquerading as “progress”.
The tech class has stolen our craft. They have wrested the tools from our grip. Artists did not consent to have our work fed in to train this monster. We were not compensated and we were not given the right to refuse. Copyright was violated on a scale never seen before, and you would think that the capitalists would be horrified by the violation of intellectual property rights. But property rights are only protected when it serves the elite to do so. I’m reminded of OpenAI saying that it would be “impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials”, which to my mind would mean, obviously, then give up on the AI models. They’re unfeasible.
Of course, capitalism is built on theft. Indigenous people were stolen to work the plantations as slaves, and they had their land stolen, so that they could no longer live off of it, and would need to work for wages. This happened within Europe and was then exported across the world. What is happening now, with AI, is simply the next stage. People were separated from their land; now we are being separated from our skills so that the tech-bro billionaire class doesn’t have to pay us anything at all. Instead of hiring a graphic designer or a photographer or a writer – you just pay a subscription to a tech platform that stole their skills. It’s the capitalist dream of “efficiency”. What’s more efficient than zero costs? Don’t pay people anything. Get the work done for free. Shareholders will love it.
And this is much bigger than people losing their jobs. For artists, their work is their calling and what gives their lives a sense of purpose. And this is much bigger than artists, too. Stories are how humans communicate culture. It’s how we make sense of ourselves and our lives. Songs and films and literature – that’s humanity talking to itself. And it influences how we think, how we dream, how we make sense of our lives. Churchill said of architecture, “we shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us”. The same is true of culture. If the owners of the tech are the ones shaping our culture, where does that leave us?
It feels specifically designed to de-fang us. To make us compliant. Toni Morrison said: “Art is dangerous. Dictators, and people in office, and people who want to control and deceive know exactly the people who will disturb their plans… and those people are artists.” Margaret Atwood said: “A word after a word after a word is power.” And yet AI is driving the perceived value of words down to zero.
Already, society is fraying because of tech. The algorithm has been radicalising people for no reason other than to keep their eyeballs glued to their screens. When our timelines become flooded with nonsense “content”, when it’s impossible to know what is real and true any more, whether we’re part of a society that thinks like we do or we’re utterly alone, how do we make sense of anything?
When you criticise any of this, people love to brand you anti-progress. Whose idea of progress is this?
I saw a TikTok recently on the idea of “temporal capture” – like State Capture, but about time. Specifically, our conception of the future. What has been captured is our ability to imagine a future that we want. We are presented with “the future” as if it is fact, as if it is already set in stone. But this high-tech, ever-faster, ever-more-consuming future is just someone’s idea. They are working very hard to realise it because it’s profitable for them, and they are co-opting us along the way. But it is their vision. Their imagination. It is just an idea. It doesn’t actually exist in reality until we all agree to it. There are other ideas and other futures available to us.
My ideal future looks nothing like theirs. It doesn’t involve cyborgs and uploaded consciousness in the cloud and algorithms running everything and interplanetary colonialism. It doesn’t involve humanity out of work and out of art and irrelevant as anything other than units of consumption.
In their future, we’re all isolated, relying on their proprietary technologies instead of each other, forming “friendships” with large language models. Perfect little capitalist subjects. All we do is consume. We won’t produce anything (the machines do it better). We won’t create art (the machines do it better). We won’t find meaning in anything (what is meaning without struggle and community and love?). Crucially, we won’t organise. We won’t resist. We’ll just watch the content they produce, for free, with machines.
I think most people recognise that as a dystopian nightmare. That’s why it’s taking so much money and manipulation to shove it down our throats, to convince us it’s the only way. First, they get the business leaders to believe it’s inevitable, and then the business leaders make their workforces adopt it for fear of being left behind. Maybe resistance is futile. Maybe the tech overlords already have so much power and influence that they can ram through their vision of the future. The original Luddites were crushed with extreme violence. Who’s to say we’ll be any more successful?
But we don’t have to go quietly. We don’t have to think it’s “cool”. We don’t have to agree that it’s their way or being “left behind”. Or, if this is being left behind, then the world I’m left behind in is better. There is humanity in our stories, and artistry in their telling. We seek deep human connection, not a higher volume of “content”. Here, meaning-making is left to the humans who have felt sorrow and grief and love. After all, that’s all we have, while we’re alive. DM