Exposure Therapy - AI Resistance Inspired by AI Hype
Between the two distant poles of thought on Artificial Intelligence - those of abolitionism and blind enthusiasm - there lays an infinite and fertile ground for eclectic resistance.
In my own views I sit closer to abolition than anything, as looking at AI is more or less my day job I never struggle to find new mobilisations of it which I object to, or new ways in which old objections can be renewed by fresh horrors. I think my judgements are right, of course, I even think I can defend them with at least some clarity with people who acknowledge something at least vaguely resembling the material reality I perceive (which is not everyone). I’m also aware though of how consuming the path to my position is, how much exploration and thought it takes to define, never mind understand the term ‘AI’ and the many technologies which fall vaguely into its ever expansive category. Most people won’t engage with that process, nor should they - the world is loaded enough with bad things and while trying to understand them is, I think, a duty for us all trying to be universally weary about everything is a maddening impossibility. So, when I think about how others may perceive AI I prefer to look to the inbetweens. The vast spectrum of views between mine and those of the AI devotees.
In that middle ground there’s a world of individuals and communities whose views of AI are, in my experience, always at least partially resistant. Through them you can map the pressure points and mobilisations of AI where they actually impact, through them you can see the degradation of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ as a term in itself down to a simple totem for marketing. A means by which tech companies can smuggle through their nudification apps, punitive surveillance tools and automated warfare beneath the broad narrative of ‘inevitability’ and the focused defences of tailored ML instances (cancer detection always being a favourite). A tactic which has proven incredibly effective for funding and obscuring all sorts of detrimental technological deployments albeit with ever diminishing returns.
The insistence on ‘AI’ as a thing, a coherent whole embracing myriad different technologies is a rapidly fading pathway for tech companies and, in truth, resistance actors alike. The nuance and experience of those impacted by it all between our extremes is seeing to that. Outrage at Grok’s CSAM, hatred of extractive and polluting data centers, artistic disdain for GAI and labour revolts against both the unemployment and employment LLMs are leading to - it’s all created a potent brew with the potential to surge in new and unexpected directions. It’s also created a landscape of emergent redlines. A space where tech companies, having built the big tent with the intent of overawing us all, are starting to realise how many parts of it are points of vitriolic disdain for people who may otherwise have been easily held customers. Just as they took on endless debt to wildly expand their networks of data centres they also took on an ethical and cultural debt in their wreckless embrace of anything that seemed like it may, one day, represent a profitable use case.
The giggling fervor with which tech companies attacked the arts, for example, has ossified into a deep social divide with them - turns out that fostering an audience that revels in trolling creatives wasn’t a way to win friends. The same goes for the embrace of faux-social design choices for LLMs - the same choices that have led to numerous cases of murder and suicide - or the backroom deals with amoral states to fund their war machines. Each act in the frenetic search for profitability and validation of the technosolutionist future has forged a new set of enemies whose disdain grows more acute even as they sit well short of the outer reaches of abolitionism or Luddism. They have, in their frenzy of hype, made ‘Artificial Intelligence’ a poison chalice at their own hands.
In some ways its a canny reflection of the personality deficiencies of some of the big tech bosses - Thiel, Altman, Karp and - above all others - Elon Musk. At the heart of all of their distinct manias lays a profound need to be respected, adored, acknowledged or revered. Ego which endures even to the (occasional) detriment of their own commercial ends. Just as they will drift into niche audiences of right wing fanatics and grifters in search of the praise they so desperately desire so their companies will open up their technologies for any use case in the faint hope that the next nudification app, bombed school or suicide inducing bot will, at last, validate them as commercially and emotionally valid. And at each new abhorration they find themselves ever more isolated within an audience that, through vigorous self selection, matches many of the worst products they put out.
From a resistance perspective it’s a profoundly effective mobilising tool. The exposure laden conduit from ‘I like ChatGPT’ through to ‘I hate my local data center, detest military AI target selection and am disgusted by your CSAM generator’ is a very real one and not one that really takes any motive energy from our distant pole. It may not lead to the solutions we want either but amidst the chaos of human resistance to define the point it’s supposed to reach is always a futile goal anyway. What matters is how readily the well of ‘AI’ has been cross contaminated by the ethically empty gold rush for novel and profitable use cases.
It also doesn’t forestall the progress of the worst implementations of the scattered technologies under the ‘AI’ umbrella. Countries aren’t going to step away from military or public service uses of them simply because people increasingly recoil in disgust, nor are they particularly inclined to even regulate or reform the flood of slop coming from the tech companies. But then, as so many things have shown, the modern state is seldom a staunch ally of its citizens so perhaps the best any of us can hope for is the growing revolt fired by the very exposure that tech companies have so eagerly courted. In making everything ‘AI’, in approaching the technologies they mean with the same neediness which defines the personal behaviours of their front men, they’ve created something more and more designed to be disdained. To (badly) quote a half heard voice from the radio ‘the CEO of Ratheon doesn’t put every thought on Twitter’ - but AI companies have had to because hype is their funding model and adoration all too often the burning need of their owners and, it seems, the more we all see of both, the less we all want to.
- Dylan