Monday Resistance Update
Going to try to make this a habit, just sharing things I've discovered through the week. Articles, papers, podcasts, news etc. If anything comes up that you think should be added just get in touch.
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A Guardian article with some comments from (US) academics trying to push back against the AI drive into academia. Working in academia myself at the moment I've always thought the space for everyday resistance within the classroom is fairly open to experimentation. For all the management level hype there is ultimately a point where you're dealing direct with students and you can be honest with them, pointing out what they lose by handing over aspects of their education to machines designed to negate the actual practice of learning. It's far from perfect, some people don't care, others are blindly pro-AI and institutions will always have their own (usually bad) lines on AI implementation. But it is something - a privilege of agency within a space where you can still engage in proper discussions around critical AI issues, if you choose to. That's not something to be underestimated.
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Paper - AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum by Dan McQuillan
Arch-AI critic Dan McQuillan has a new paper out framing AI as a reaction to the tectonic shifts within our socio-economic structures. The counter he presents is a prefigurative form of decomputing, alternative structures emerging to create new pathways through the 'interregnum'. Coming from the everyday resistance end myself I think the leap from the everyday to prefigurative/destituent/reimagined forms of power is always one of the hardest to bridge with whatever model you want to present being more an aspiration than a reflection of whatever line of desire people will follow from resistant intent to progressive rebuilding. Dan's work tends to set the stepping stone as workers'/peoples' councils which is an entirely valid direction of travel, but I do wonder what models could emerge if the everyday is empowered from the daily craft of resistance to creating more structural alternatives. Either way the paper's well worth a read.
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Article - I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI - and it only took 20 minutes
Presented as a 'risks of AI' issue with the usual spiel about companies having a responsibility to close loopholes this experiment from a BBC reporter still gives a bit of inspiration for those looking to resist AI. Using a nonsense article about eating hotdogs Thomas Germain managed to get various LLMs to regurgitate false claims with virtually no effort at all. The risks here are fairly obvious - any malicious actor could use the same technique to push dangerous scam medical care, fake news, extremist content etc. But the potentials to undermine the seeming faith some of these platforms has garnered is there too, if the system can be made entirely absurd then perhaps the glaring inefficiencies of it can be properly highlighted? Just a thought...
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Article - Tech Ecology in the Service of War by Masoumeh Iran Mansouri
Looking at the ongoing US/Israeli war against Iran, Mansouri highlights the consistencies of tech usage between regimes. It's well worth a read and perhaps an especially prescient reminder of how readily tech - and currently AI especially - is ultimately just a dull reflection of familiar power structures. For the most part it lends itself most easily to oppression regardless of the context, with Silicon Valley drivers happily creating multi-purpose tools for punching down but rarely, if ever, for liberating. That's not something that's done by random chance either.
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Book - Techno-Negative A Long History of Refusing the Machine by Thomas Dekeyser
New enough that I only just received my copy, which I haven't had a chance to read yet, but having heard the author talk about it I still think it's well worth a look. Taking a deep dive into the history of refusal Dekeyser explores the persistent resistances against technology which are often all too easily dismissed as kneejerk Luddism (pejorative).
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Call for Papers - CfP: Topical Collection on AI Resistance, Refusal, Reclamation and Reimagining: Ethical Imperatives and Emerging Practices
One for the academics and researchers - there's a new call for papers for a Springer edition on AI Resistance in all its many forms. Led by Tania Duarte from We & AI the deadline for submissions is the 30th of May and I'll be helping out as a guest reviewer myself. So, good opportunity if you're working on something.
- Dylan