(Almost) Monday Resistance Update #4
A short update today as I put out the last one on Thursday. Again, I'm running late, but things have certainly gotten busy recently. Normal schedule is slowly resuming, Tuesday is almost Monday after all...
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A weird article given that the research is partially produced by an 'agentic'-AI company and the editorial seems to be half despair for the pushback against AI and half threat towards workers but there is something amidst the detritus worth seeing.
Workers, apparently Gen Z ones especially, are going deep into the spirit of everyday resistance, seeking out ways to push back against anti-worker technologies. I haven't gone far into the report but I'd be cynical about these figures regardless really, the source is what it is but also relying on self-reporting to tech company backed, workplace surveying is... dubious. How eager would anybody be to confess to using tactics that may get them fired even in the best, most anonymised and distanced studies? Never mind to an AI company and their 'content generating marketing and publicity partner' (Workplace Intelligence).
All those caveats aside though it's not implausible that their findings reflect some real and possibly underestimated trend and the shift in public discourse to one of 'problematic' rejection of AI is certainly better than the one around absolute inevitability.
Policy - China's Approach to AI Anthropomorphism
Even good policy is subject to the will behind it, if it's not enforced then it means nothing. But China's new policies on anthropomorphised or faux-social AI certainly seem to be more concrete, focused and coherent than anything else I've seen. Not enough, in my opinion, but it does suggest a rare concern for the potential harms these platforms may cause. Could it prompt the EU and US to pay similar attention to harms and even offer vague, potential sanctions for companies who don't live up to a duty of care? I doubt it. As the article about this mentions - winning the AI 'race' is the main focus all round, what harms that race entails are of negligible interest to most participants. Still, it's better than a kick in the teeth.
Event - Feminist Data and Epistemologies in Technofascist Times
Short notice as it's today but...
I'm wary of the re-imagining stuff, speculative fixes for what AI can be but this looks cynical enough to be interesting and my doubts are my own, it takes some utopianism as well as rampant resistance to create a world.
- Dylan