Monday Resistance Update #6
A random sampling of stuff I've come across this week...
The internet, having killed off the fine old tradition of 'a bloke in the pub reckons...' has finally come full circle and embedded it's own chronic bullshitter directly into searches. To a degree I'm ambivalent about this, that AI is often wrong is no surprise but then the idea that people are doing serious, in depth research on any search is questionable. That said the surrender of any ability to judge the output is something new. Some people may have believed RickyFuhrer1488's blog on evolutionary science, but those were people with a desire to be wrong, most people had at least a fighting chance when it came to using their own judgement on what they read. AI overviews on the other hand tap into the authority of the platform, the unreadability of the process and ease of access to make critical approaches hard to impossible without reverting to the act these 'tools' are supposed to negate - actual research.
Resource - Rebel Tech Alliance
As I heard these guys run a workshop at this weekend's Resisting Big Tech Empires conference I thought I'd give them a shout out. Not specifically focused on AI but a lot of the info they offer for switching away from big tech does help negate the dataveillance that feeds it. There's an increasing number of guides on switching away from the worst platforms and while it's no great step in itself it's definitely good practice to move to better where you can.
News - People still hate data centres...
Data centres really are looking like the biggest frontline at the moment in the non-digital resistance towards AI, well, it's either them or surveillance infrastructure. But on both sides community mobilisations are surging and showing zero tolerance for the environmental harms, laughable promises of jobs and high handedness of the developers. For one thing - you love to see it. For another it ticks all the boxes for drawing people out - the local impacts are obvious, central government seems to be completely indifferent to local will (often looking to circumvent it) and there's no hiding behind tech mystique when it comes to the impacts. People can see the harmful effects, no amount of tech bro hype can obscure them.
So, solidarity to the fine folks of Imperial Valley, CA.
On a side note - it's definitely going to be important to tie wider AI harms to these moments of resistance. There's always a strand in these types of local push backs where some people will say 'absolutely not...' with an unspoken 'in my area anyway'. I don't think that's been the case with the resistance I've heard about so far but the companies can't be left the dodge of moving to somewhere more easily exploitable if they do lose. There is no community that deserves these wasteful, destructive hyper-scale builds, or the effects of AI that they enable.
Commentary - AI girls can't say no...
Sorry for the Instagram link but the commentary from the anti-AI activist is worth a look. Faux-social chatbots are actively marketing their 'girls' as unable to say no. That's a fairly obvious statement given the nature of LLMs (there is no one to say no) but the marketing focus is... disgusting, really. Plenty of other platforms fully lean into the same logic with their bots but I've not seen it so overtly pushed as a selling point before.
I've not found particularly reliable data on how much these things are used and to what end, what I have seen has relied on self-reporting which I'm cynical about (especially with younger users) but in general it's worth pushing back against as if it could have a broader impact than any of us might hope. At some point I might try to do some work on comparing the various platforms myself, having already used some in writing the paper I'll (hopefully) be submitting soon there's no shortage of opportunities for similarly unpleasant stuff on them.
- Dylan