Complicated Feelings: Generative AI and Technofascism

Hello again. It looks as though the cadence I am naturally falling into for this newsletter is Monday evenings; freshly off the anticlimax of Sunday’s inherent hysterics yet overwhelmed by the deluge of headlines and uncertainty, I’d like to gently remind myself that none of what is happening right now is normal. CORRECTION: Monday was the day I realized that this topic was too ambitious to complete in a night. Tuesday was the day I realized that this topic is developing faster than I can keep track. Wednesday is the day I’m deciding to simply let you all know that this will be incomplete and I’m going to click ‘send’ anyways.

A quick disclaimer: I write this for free and because I feel like it. I do not currently have any payment options set up and my only social media is my Instagram.

When I started this newsletter I generally thought I would use it as more of a creative writing outlet in the way I have previously used a journal on my bedside table, and I still intend to do just that, but I keep getting small bursts of inspiration to tap into a more academic vein. For those who don’t know, I have a degree in Philosophy from the University of Melbourne where I focused on Ethics. In 2018 I specifically wrote about the emergence of Artificial Intelligence and the pitfalls it could face… I have been scouring old documents trying to find it to no avail. I’ll keep searching for it, but 6-7 years down the line I have quite a bit more to talk about (I also wrote about the antivax movement at around the same time which turned out to be upsettingly prescient).

Artificial Intelligence has been around for a long time, and can be a very useful tool for things like determining the best route to get to work to avoid traffic or helping you decide what to make for dinner with the ingredients you have on hand. In recent years we’ve seen a massive uptick in new and “exciting” applications for it of which I remain deeply skeptical. Let’s dive in.

I need to start this discussion by examining the current state of the tech industry. For The Guardian, Becca Lewis outlines the reactionary right-wing history of Silicon Valley - a culture deeply obsessed with the performance of masculinity, as underlined by Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments, and a culture that is staunchly resistant to regulation and oversight. This has all led to today, the “techification” of the U.S. Government and Elon Musk’s ongoing coup, which historian and author Garrett Graff correctly notes in his excellent newsletter, Doomsday Scenario, would be reported much differently if it were happening in a different country. Here is an excerpt:

“Over the last two weeks, loyalist presidential factions and Musk-backed teams have launched sweeping, illegal Stalin-esque purges of the national police forces and prosecutors, as well as offices known as inspectors-general, who are typically responsible for investigating government corruption. While official numbers of the unprecedented ousters were kept secret, rumors swirled in the capital that the scores of career officials affected by the initial purges could rise into the thousands as political commissars continued to assess the backgrounds of members of the police forces.”

This brings me to the topic of surveillance. Much has been written about the use of facial recognition software and the ethical ramifications, especially given implicit biases in these software resulting from the lack of diversity in the engineers creating them. Google recently dropped their pledge to not use AI for weapons and surveillance, which is cause for major alarm given the trial run of AI-fueled warfare in Israel’s assault on Gaza. It’s increasingly clear that tech companies are receiving major financial windfalls to ignore ethical considerations, which is unsurprising given the ongoing human rights violations in the DRC being fueled by the tech industry. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made some headlines recently for suggesting that the proliferation of Generative AI tools would lead to some “changes to the social contract”. He conveniently does not mention what these changes might be, or who would be in charge of implementing them (spoiler alert: it’s him and his tech bros).

TANGENT: The extent to which wealthy and powerful people seem to worship ‘hustle culture’ and castigate DEI efforts occupies a similar space in my mind to cryptocurrencies/NFTs, conspiratorial thinking, the color grey, and copy/paste comments like ‘Nice try, Diddy’. It’s all so dreadfully boring.

A recurring pitfall of rapid technological advancement is the emergence of new and complex ethical issues faster than can be regulated. Deepfake videos have spurred substantial ripples online and prompted some mad-dash efforts to regulate the technology in state and national legislatures. So what happens when this tech evolves further and completely fabricated videos are indistinguishable from reality? What implications does that have for propaganda, inauthentic evidence of crimes, plausible deniability, internet trolling? My guess is that we are quickly heading towards the complete unraveling of digital order; that efforts to moderate this technology are coming too late and too meekly to avoid an internet made up primarily of fake profiles, covert advertising, misinformation, and abusive content. Further, there will be real-world effects when we find out that AI is being used by police forces in the name of ‘maintaining order’ and disproportionately targets Black, brown, and visibly queer people (ESPECIALLY trans people and people who look like they could maybe possibly be trans).

The conclusion of all of this – of massive amounts of people using GenAI as a search engine (and I haven’t even talked about the environmental impacts), of chatbots and smart doorbells and facetuning apps, is that tech companies are in control of massive amounts of data and are not disclosing what, exactly, they are doing with it. As Elon and his small team of discount Hitler youth seize access to information and processes that should not be in the hands of the richest man on the planet I feel confident in saying that technofascism is well and truly here.

One last quick tangent: I remember when the Internet used to be fun and I’m really pissed off that a bunch of unfunny dweebs ruined it in the pursuit of hoarding more wealth than several nations. Drew Gooden made a great YouTube video about AI and the death of the internet which I highly recommend.

Stay sane, stay focused, and if you can manage it, please stop (intentionally) using GenAI. Next week I think I’ll write something fun and fictional. Please subscribe!