Outsourced and diluted

AI is shit

I have listened to so many conversations and read so much about the emergence of artificial intelligence. My read is that much of the worry and paranoia is misplaced, and purposefully misplaced. There should be absolute panic and concern about this, but not from the viewpoint of AI being godlike. No, the diversion to the godlike paranoia is purposeful on the part of the extremely wealthy. My qualm is not with AI as a technology, though I do not like it at all, my qualm is with AI as technology sold to us in a way that makes it an inevitability and an inevitable good for the most part.

AI dressed up as god is a distraction from the fact that most of the anticipation and excitement and fear is part of the technology, and the technology is marketed and made with those in power in mind. This is not a ground up tech that shifts the lives of the poor and working class, of the racially subjugated, of the gender oppressed, of the global South. Power requires us to be placated into further complacency, and convenience is an ultimate tool in that continued project of placation. Convenience is sold to us relentlessly as a means to contend with the conditions set by the system requiring said convenience, capitalism. Imperialism and its mechanistic partner, capitalism, operate on foundations of easy and lazy overcoming more than anything else. They are always looking for the road of least effort. We of course know of the wildly violent outbreaks across history, but in the in-between quiet moments, the administrative and bureaucratic nightmare of empire’s expansion becomes further and further cemented into colonized nations.

Now, this tech that tells people “look, you don’t have to make much effort any longer, all you have to do is input a few lines of prompting here and there and you can make and remake all the things you want just on your computer or your phone”. That means that we become further and further siloed from one another, in a world where selfcare and individualism have been sold to us as ultimate ideals already. Where selfcare is I alone, instead of I cared for in relation to the world I inhabit. And individualism is I as I alone, main actor and only real concern, regardless of the impact of I on the other and the world. If we are to make it out of this continuously manufactured and reinscribed mess of colonial and capitalist expansion, we cannot do it with convenience or the ambition for convenience as the baseline operating structure of society. We cannot do it with the I as the center, with no mutual recognition or regard. True accommodation and convenience is absolutely necessary, but what this is is a tactical deployment of a technology marketed entirely with the aim of isolating us further from one another.

AI is the work of industries bent on making people’s efforts useless and we are already seeing the results of that, with extremely wealthy and powerful businesses making work obsolete for masses of people. That would, of course, be fine, if we made it so that the value of human life was not tied to the capacity of that human to produce capital for the already hyperwealthy classes. Capitalism in partnership with the dilution of person’s effort and thought and feeling into nonsense middle of the road nothingness will propel us further away from one another, into siloed worlds where chasms exists between us. These chasms already exist, of course, with individualism at the core of much of Western imperialist capitalist propagandizing, where we are somehow always in competition with one another and calculating our positionality in relation to one another. But with the normalizing of this new additional tech that is still in its early stages, the chasms become deeper and more cemented.

The continuing project of normalization of AI technology, especially in art and learning worlds, is going to further impact any possible chance of recovery we have. Everything is being diluted and it is becoming harder and harder to distinguish AI outsourced bad art and scholarship from a felt and thought through made thing. I can't comment on tech worlds because my work is in the world of education and arts, but I can only imagine many coders and computer technology people must be fuming at the mediocre productions going on with the machinery available as a pretend democratizing of information systems. And the democratizing scheme in the marketing and normalization efforts absolutely are pretend, capitalist centered efforts at driving faster towards profits and salability. Tech should help us build, but as the luddites have been made into a punchline over time for destroying automating machinery in their workplaces, I suppose I fall within that punchline category now as well. When they protested and demonstrated against the introduction of automated machinery to replace them as a workforce, it was exactly because they knew well enough and understood well enough, that their bosses and overlords of industry were doing it without a consideration of what will happen to the poor and working classes. Profit before people. And that is what AI is here, profit before people, sold as a technology that will bring a democratizing force to fields of research and arts, but all it produces is a well read diluted algorithmic expression that holds little to the inconsistent and improvised efforts we make, faltering along the way, but making together nonetheless. Not much good will come from this, but it will be normalized and we will be convinced of its not-too-badness at least, or its greatness for many. I hope, perhaps, that there is still a chance for us to dream and think and make and do and fail and become in this moment where all of that is outsourced to an algorithm reliant on making a weak as neutral mix of all the thoughts and inputs of people it can steal from or find input by people online.

I hope to continue to make music and teach and make art where I can.

A luta continua.

Black Auralities