Yes, AI is Dangerous — Because of the Corporate Humans Behind It. And It Could Get Much Worse.

Whether you realize it or not, the oligarchies of the West and powers that be are working hard to take away the last right that we can truly say is yours: the right to change your mind.

Yes, the image above is AI-generated art, which appeared in a 2022 Times of Israel feature by Shoshanna Solomon. And yes, this is an AI article. It will be an article blisteringly critical of AI, full of unapologetic swear words, as in the sentence, “Stop trying to give us fucking AI in creative fields,” because if I want to write shit or fuck, I don’t need Microsoft Word nagging me over my language with a red underscore line and a note. Yes, you can turn that feature off, but one day, I can almost guarantee… you won’t be able to.

I wrote an article more than a year ago which turned out to be fairly popular and spoke to how many of us were sick and tired of hearing about Chat GPT. I made several points, all of which I still believe. Having grown up as an engineer’s son with plenty of technology around the house, I know that technology is not the villain.

I argued that real literature of value, all the art that we treasure from around the world, is “validated by the authenticity of the human experience.” I didn’t fear ChatGPT when I wrote, “Because who the hell wants to read poetry or a novel by a computer program?”

But I missed the big picture and ignored the motives of the real villains, the motherfuckers behind all this — the oligarchs whom we don’t regularly call oligarchs but should — Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, et. al.

I had to change my mind. AI is a greatly underestimated existential threat to us. People protest over Wall Street or Palestine or climate change, but I have yet to see massive protests against a technology phenomenon no one asked for and which is being shoved down our throats. One that quite literally imperils our global safety.

Think I’m exaggerating? Forbes ran a recent piece that noted how “data centers supporting AI alone” are ravenous for electric power, and in just a couple of years, they could end up needing “roughly the equivalent of the entire annual electricity consumption of Japan,” which has 125 million people. This is obviously at odds with our ticking clock for reversing climate change and being less insane about how we manage the resources of our planet.

But of course, Forbes, being a business mag, slanted its article that all is well, be of good cheer, even headlining it, “Why Bill Gates Feels Energy Hungry AI Systems Are No Cause for Anxiety.” Hey, Gates and other tech magnates are dumping billions into this — surely we can trust the guys who will profit from it, no matter what, right?

Because that worked out so well when Gates — wearing his philanthropist disguise that still suckers most Western media — tried to steer Africa’s agriculture away from traditional seeds, crops, and methods in favor of genetically modified seeds and technology. It’s been a disaster. Condescending towards Africans, shortsighted in the extreme, those who advocated for it will never have to pay the tab. (Ethiopians will roll their eyes when reminded that the board chair for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, co-founded by Gates, is Hailemariam Desalegn, their incredibly clueless and politically inept former prime minister.)

Why are we still listening to billionaires even after they show us they will callously, unapologetically screw up Africa, the last place the human race might have to depend on for groceries?

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this grand experiment in Africa was done with the same ruthlessness that white colonizers brought to introducing concentration camps in South Africa and Libya and then trying out air bombings of civilian centers in Ethiopia (bombing Harar in 1935 was the audition for Guernica in Spain later that year, which in turn was the warm-up for bombing the East End of London in World War Two).

A Very Different Great Replacement Theory

Which brings us back to the grand experiments with AI. Yes, the two are connected. Because the underlying motivation to all this is the rapacious drive for control. Control plants, control crops, control land to increase profit — don’t work in a mutually sustaining ecosystem where you give back to the land, and it supports you, dominate it. And while we’re at it, let’s figure out how to control people.

Don’t sing me the song of how AI innovations have and will do miracles for medicine, engineering, etc. No one has a problem with such breakthroughs. But we have every right to be suspicious of and even dread the relentless sales job underway to make creative professionals extinct.

For instance, the chief technology officer for OpenAI, Mira Murati, told Dartmouth University’s engineering department in June that she thinks AI is “really going to be a collaborative tool, especially in the creative spaces. Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

Mira Murati

I can think of no better contribution to society from Heaven’s Ironic Judgment Division than to see OpenAI wind up in bankruptcy — with Murati getting only a minimum golden parachute and a Coke machine replacing her in her office.

Creatives are understandably upset. I’m upset. And it’s not simply because the ever-hungry beasts of AI trawl the Internet and will quite literally steal from published books, without compensating authors. No, my concerns go deeper.

You see, those AI programs that Murati so callously will allow to replace jobs will also replace thoughts. Not improve on them, not even think original thoughts — no, just replace our more nuanced, occasionally confrontational and certainly inconvenient notions with acceptable Pablum.

Yeah, about now we ought to reach for our dystopian classic because oh, hell, yes, these guys got it right.

What makes Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and a few other writers so incredibly brilliant is that their dark visions of a totalitarian future can easily accommodate technological innovations. The technology is, in fact, far less important than the creepy appetites of these futures’ sponsors.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien tells Winston Smith, “In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”

And if you work in journalism, you are in even bigger trouble. Because you might go extinct sooner than the rest of us.

No News Is AI News

Journalism is supposed to be about facts, but its delivery depends on more creativity and human initiative than outsiders may think. You need judgment to select relevant bits of information, you need experience to know when you’re hearing bullshit and serving as some political shill’s stenographer, and you need to care enough to go find additional details rather than settle for what some shmuck tells you over the phone or at a news conference.

What’s maddening is that even journalism professionals have been utterly stupid over AI, most treating it as another gee-whiz tech novelty that won’t kill off their own profession.

Yet the warning signs are practically billboard size. The parent corporations of news networks and newspapers in the West have decided in their wisdom to starve their operations and lay off staff. The result is a trend that insults the intelligence of their viewers and readers. I’ve posted about this on LinkedIn, pointing out the absurdity of the CTV network having a bureau chief in the landlocked Canadian province of Saskatchewan “narrate” a story about Hurricane Beryl hitting the American coast, or a journalist in Ottawa try to plausibly explain what’s happening with a stampede in India.

Driving this trend is the logic of greed. If news must be revenue-generating then costs must be minimal. If costs must be minimal then cut the most expensive items, people, and don’t shell out money for correspondents in cities that yes, are expensive to live in, but which happen to be news hubs.

Only it’s not so logical after all. Because if I want to know what’s happening in China or Peru or even France, you’ve essentially told me I can’t get it from you, except your microwaved, sad-ass narration, with its facts ripped off of wire services and other outlets, so I might as well turn you off. And after I turn you off, your corporate parent shrugs and says, “See? We’ll have to do more layoffs and make do with less.”

Proponents of this kind of thinking always claim they’ve “crunched the numbers,” and they’re being “efficient.” They will point to their monitors and claim their data can’t lie.

Well, we’ve already known for a long time that AI can be racist because of human assumptions plugged into programs and what’s called machine learning. AI can get it wrong because humans can get it wrong, sometimes disastrously so. Only now it can get worse.

Consider that the stories you read online at The New York Times or the BBC no longer have to live with their human errors or sometimes hilarious gaffes. A human being in the news bullpen can do what’s called a “silent edit” to adjust the copy, and unless you go poking around in archive sites like The Wayback Machine, you may never know something’s been changed.

Okay, well, what happens when Fox News or CNN realize an AI program can write a news story on a disaster that’s pretty much the same as the one written by their reporter in the field? Fires burned in California. Flooding in Texas. Change the locales, plug in different names of victims and witnesses, and there you go. Cookie cutter crap. After all, you’re already not sending a reporter sometimes to major events. How perfectly logical to remove the reporter entirely from the equation.

Now imagine if the corporate parent of your favorite news network decides you don’t need to hear about that protest in India at all? Yes, the choice is often made to do that anyway by human editors in New York or London, but again, we stupidly plug in our assumptions about race, gender, culture into AI programs. It’s not that farfetched to believe AI can and likely will perpetuate those same frustrating approaches we get now for news out of Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America.

Tell the program to crank out a headline on famine/coup/terrorism attack, now go interview (white) pundits who are authorities, now get a quote from Amnesty/Human Rights Watch/UN, now tag with vacuously moronic phrase like “time will only tell if” X happens or changes, as if news in developing country should have a cliff-hanger… Heat and serve.

No human editor to mind the store anymore. Why bother? It spell-checks itself, right?

Consider how far we’ve already strayed from responsible, meticulous, on-the-spot journalism. And the motivations behind such drift are obvious. It’s all about greed and control.

The trope in popular imagination, mainly thanks to Orwell, Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon), Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451), et. al. is that your larger-than-life enemy is a government. But when I briefly taught journalism in Myanmar, it was public knowledge that Microsoft worked with the Tatmadaw to root out pro-democracy email accounts. Facebook infamously let hate speech reign on its platform as Rohingya were ethnically cleansed. Elon Musk’s X is clearly shadow-banning accounts (including my own) that speak out over Abiy Ahmed’s despotism in Ethiopia, but of course, no one notices in the wider world because so much of social media is devoted to American news, American politics, American opinions.

The data supposedly doesn’t lie that American views count more and are more profitable (even though X, like Facebook, is a global platform). But that’s thanks to X being programmed at the whim of a human being who openly despises democracy and thinks some people have more value than others.

It’s bad enough that Orwell’s famous “boot stamping on a face — forever” will keep coming down in developing parts of the world. But in the West, we have more sophisticated but equally destructive trends because as it turns out, Aldous Huxley was also right.

Aldous Huxley

After reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley wrote his former pupil Orwell to say, “My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power.” Huxley was convinced that the world’s rulers “can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”

And this line is eerily prescient: “The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.”

What this means is that if you live in the West, the threat to your free speech these days is less from the government than from your employer. You are not allowed to express political opinions because your employers have the final say on whether your view impacts their bottom line and its efficiency. The result is a corporate slavery, but no one calls this out.

So, our problem today, as I’ve said many times before, is not so much freedom of speech as access to freedom of speech. By all means, go outside and shout at Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park or vent your spleen at Dundas Square in Toronto (if you can be heard above the buskers). No one will give a shit but have a ball. You and I both know that the power of a message is greatly reduced if it can’t find oxygen on a very short list of digital platforms. Yes, you technically still have freedom of speech, but capitalist monopoly and corporate law have the power to either render you invisible or prevent you from achieving any kind of relevance.

On top of this, social media has created a paradox for our online expression. Now, we are each seemingly a “public person” who can be criticized, mocked, and ridiculed if our views run up against someone more influential and powerful. If we are “lucky” enough to gain such attention, our persona becomes fixed. Your past offenses or controversies can often be summoned with a few clicks of the keyboard.

This is where the paradox lies: You aren’t allowed to change your mind anymore or have the potential to do so.

All that you express in a tweet or with a photo on Instagram is enough to “encapsulate” you to your employer or gawd help you, law enforcement, which means you can’t easily grow. Your views can’t evolve. We have so easily let ourselves be commoditized, to be not only the consumer but the product of big tech, that it is almost unimaginable to expect “public” (and not so public) figures to change. Do so at your own peril as you can easily earn more ridicule, rapid accusations that you’re inconsistent, or spiteful claims that you chickened out/sold out/burned out.

We know that great thinkers and activists like Gandhi, Camus, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, all adjusted their opinions throughout their careers, and the nature of the media in their eras allowed them the grace to do that. What a luxury that would be today.

Is it any wonder then that some will happily latch on to AI and let it do the thinking for them? Which is why it’s so damn dangerous. For nothing controversial will ever come out of AI’s mouth, just as you shouldn’t sit up at night thinking your Golden Retriever will suddenly talk to you about Zen.

So, I don’t think it’s coincidental that the same rich creeps who own those platforms are heavily invested in the technology that could forcibly edit or completely replace what you have to say.

Huxley was right. Your mouth is being gagged, and you’re told that this is best for you. You’re being “helped” right into the grave with the coffin lid slamming down.

Triumph of the Abdication of Will

Let’s examine for a moment what you get with an AI program to “help” you write a term paper or a novel. It does the thinking for you. There will no doubt be some who protest that it’s only summoning information for you to use, but this is like suggesting I “researched” the Galapagos by sitting on my ass and watching a David Attenborough documentary. That some university students are so lazy or careless as to leave “ChatGPT” at the bottom of an essay page tells you how the brain has been switched off.

In making such mistakes, yes, we are to blame, but what we miss is how our tech oligarchs did a bait- and-switch job on us, so that for the sake of convenience, we abdicate our will.

In my living room is my TV remote. I can either press the button to change channels, or I can tell Alexa to bring up Netflix. But seriously? Is it really so much damn work to press a frickin’ button to change a channel? I worked in Ontario’s Office for Disability Issues for a while, so yeah, I know such a device is likely a godsend to those who have limited mobility. But the rest of us? Great, you can tell your cable box to get you Disney+. In trade, your cable box is surveilling you.

When I was a kid, I liked to draw. I still like to draw but do it less. And people would say to me, “Oh, that’s marvelous, I wish I could draw!” This baffled me because no one ever gave me permission, I just picked up a pencil or crayon. Now here comes AI, which while still giving you a ridiculous number of arms on a figure and other hilarious mistakes for the time being, can sometimes do astonishingly convincing artwork.

Images from NightCafé Creator

And I don’t doubt that it’s here to stay. As I wrote last year, I believe creators will still want to create, they’ll feel that beautiful compulsion to write, to draw, to paint, to film. My hope is that AI’s visual aesthetics will provoke its own downfall. It may improve in achieving the “hyper-realist” style that some painters already excel at by hand, but we’ll hopefully mature in our tastes and appreciate human creators even more.

As usual, history is a comfort to me, and it’s on my side. Take a look at old paintings of a moving horse from the 1700s or 1800s. Hardly anyone got the damn legs right because they couldn’t. It took until photographs revealed the actual motions of the animal for painters to depict properly how horses galloped, trotted, jumped hurdles. Photography obviously didn’t kill painting, and in fact, it inspired painters to go in new directions.

But that was thanks to the creators’ efforts, not some smug, pontificating corporate jackass who is treated as a prophet by lickspittle journalists and who lectures us all on what is good for us, right down to how we should value creative jobs.

Every few days or so, someone does a story on the progress of self-driving cars, but no one questions the underlying assumption behind their manufacture. If you can pour billions into developing a self-driving car, you can obviously make a more efficient and green-friendly public transit system. And yet we can’t have that. Why?

Because it’s more profitable to make individual cars… which is not the same thing as making cars for individuals. Lots of individuals like to drive. A self-driving car demands the abdication of your will, again misrepresented as something for your convenience. If something goes wrong, trust me, corporations and insurers will find a way to dump liability on the vehicle owner. But there’s no “out” with a mass transit system that runs on the assumption that all should enjoy the benefits of the technology. The buck stops at a government administration, which can then turn around and ask hard questions of the manufacturer. Doubt me on this? Just ask Boeing.

So, isn’t it strange that AI programs are supposed to be this freeing technology that will relieve us of the “burdens” of creativity yet keep us as consumers?

The struggle is not between man and machine. It never has been. The cold calculations behind AI’s increasing use, whether we asked for it or not, are done by cold, calculating humans who have stopped caring about most of their fellow beings.

Like Elon Musk, billionaire Peter Thiel grew up in an entitled background with several formative years spent in apartheid-era South Africa. Because he’s been identified as a key funder of Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance, a 2009 column he wrote on the right-wing journal, Cato Unbound is getting fresh attention. In it, Thiel declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel got a well-deserved shellacking over this other bit in his column: “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Economist Robert Reich wasn’t about to let this absurd take pass and pointed out, “Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of America had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.” He could have added that the decade marked one of the highest increases in not-so-optimistic, lower-class Americans joining socialist, Communist and other radical parties because they couldn’t get decent wages and working conditions.

For me, however, there are lines from Thiel that are far more disturbing. He compliments the scheme of Patri Friedman, the libertarian who wants to create sovereign ocean colonies, a bizarro scheme that would make any sci-fi reader think of Robert Heinlein’s capitalist valentine short story, “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” Nature and technology must bend to the will of the new generation of robber barons.

“Unlike the world of politics,” wrote Thiel, “in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”

Consider the logic here. Thiel went on in his column about entrepreneurs and investors, so the only reasonable inference is that he considers them the only “individuals” who count. Freedom is not a value in his world, it’s a means to an end. He wants to “make the world safe for capitalism,” not use capitalism to expand freedom.

It’s the reductive rationale that only a machine could appreciate. It’s the demented, selfish logic of the narcissist, the colonizer who, instead of wanting to enjoy the company of his fellow human beings and live by the values and rules that aspire to equality for all, wants to be the despot of his own kingdom even if it pollutes a coral reef. We should worry plenty about this mindset that can influence machines.

We should be hitting the streets in mass protests to fight back. Because Thiel and his kind are no doubt working on how to eliminate the goofy “extra arms” in their sterile vision of the future. And when the vision gets down to one monomaniacal, controlling pair of hands, we’ll really be in trouble.