Monday AI Resistance Update #9

A random sampling of stuff I've come across this week...

Article - A Lo-Fi Rebellion Against A.I.

I don't think there's anything revelatory in this, artists have for a while now been valorising their own human jankiness as a counter to the hyper-realist sheen of GAI outputs but the commercialisation of it suggested in this article is an interesting aspect. AI slop is already recognised as a way to cheapen and ruin your advertising/marketing but the elevation of more disjointed human creativity marks a craft behaviour shifting into the the realm of the corporate. No doubt GAI companies are already pushing to emulate the styles but it'll always be a game of catching up for them, artists are agile and creative, not reliant on a slew of existing training data. So even as AI slop enters the world of the disjointed we may, perhaps, have already raced on to the next thing. Not for the benefit of ad companies of course, but as our own constant practice of evasion and space building.

Education - Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt booed during graduation speech about AI

University students booing speakers who mention AI seems to be coming a bit of a trend at the moment and hopefully a self-perpetuating one. As ever those speaking seem to be either completely indifferent or completely oblivious to the actual impacts of their fetishised technologies and I'm sure they'll remain unfazed by the push back. Still, as emergent trends go this is certainly an encouraging one for the rest of us. It's also something possibly mirrored in the minor Tik Tok trend of people filming themselves battering delivery robots, something which I assume targets a similar demographic to that of these students.

Education - Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI

Mirca Madianou wrote about how some of the earliest testing grounds for 'AI' technologies was amongst vulnerable refugee communities and it increasingly seems as if that targeting of the most vulnerable is an ongoing habit for those pushing the technologies. I've mentioned a few different efforts to roll out AI platforms for students on this blog and the tide of attempts to push them doesn't seem to be lessening at all. Worryingly I'd even say it's, anecdotally, more pervasive and insidious than the uses being pushed onto workers who at least have a more immediate understanding of the harms generated in their particular contexts.

This time it's a university looking to introduce AI surveillance for school children although, having just gone through my own ethical clearance process, I've no idea who was behind it or what their motivations were given the deeply questionable approach they took.

Certainly the suggested lack of information offered on requesting consent (in an opt out system) seems completely insufficient.

Here the reaction from parents was enough to put them off of the idea but given the ubiquity of these efforts to enter into the education/surveillance space there are bound to be instances where the push back either doesn't come or isn't sufficient to make a difference. Definitely an area for parents to be aware of and for those on the resistance side to try to inform people about.

Podcast - The UK Government’s AI Obsession is a Big Risk w/ Will Dunn

Tech Won't Save Us is one of my favourite podcasts in the tech-critical genre and full praise to Paris Marx as a host. So that general recommendation aside this episode is an interesting reflection on AI in the UK government context. Anyone who lives here and pays a bit of attention probably already knows how bad our state is for buying in to the technosolutionist hype but this offers a great overview of what's happening and some of the thoughts behind it. Highlight for me was the mention of how some MPs talk to their LLMs with the genuine belief that there's an actual, conscious intelligence behind it. Reminds me of a comment I heard myself where an MP's first concern about the tech was that they were obliged to use Copilot for work in Parliament - which is fair enough, but maybe not the biggest issue to focus on.

- Dylan