This piece I wrote was initially published on Facebook, specifically on the Gold & Steel Fandom Group Page in response, or rather in tandem with, a Wired piece titled: Silicon Valley Doesn’t Get Why You Hate AI wherein Wired’s readers were asked to state their apprehension or disdain with AI.
If you’ve read or followed that aforementioned Facebook group or my Bluesky page, you’ll see that (and I hope it’s of no surprise) that I am firmly in the anti-AI category. I personally call it, The Scourge (feel free to use that), hate everything about it, refuse to use it in any capacity, and hope someday it is a thing of the past. With that said, here’s my Facebook rant:
Post begins here.
They don’t understand what it is to be human anymore. They’re too far detached and insulated from it, if ever there was a time when they were grounded on earth with the rest of us. To that effect, to be human is to create.
They like to push a narrative that states that AI is the next step in technology that helps us do that, and some of them probably believe that, because, again, they simply cannot relate to what it means in the first place to create.
Let’s take writing, as an example of what I mean. The earliest form of story telling involved some means of putting art physically onto surfaces that could receive and retain it. Think of art like ancient cave paintings found in France and New Mexico (which the bros’ political buddies are cool with destroying for a worthless border fence). Next came written language carved into stone and inked onto early papers like papyrus. Advances in language, writing instruments and materials made this gradually easier until the printing press offered a big leap forward. Much of it still had to be done by hand, and the next big steps forward wouldn’t come until we invented analogue typing machines. Computing hardware and word processing software came next.
With every one of those steps, though, the creative was core. A chisel would never carve into a tablet without a human hand, a pencil would not put words on paper, a typewriter would never clack out a novel on its own, and the word processor would sit with its cursor blinking idly as long as the computer was powered on.
Every part of it was to advance the tools that the creator had at their disposal. It made it possible for us to express our ideas and ourselves, to show our version of the human condition as we see it, and then to share that with others (if that is what you so choose, you may create only for yourself too, and that’s fine). Tech bros have (deliberately or unwittingly) severed that persistent thread that has existed since the days of those cave paintings (up to 40,000 years long, if not potentially longer) and put a knot on the end of that thread tied to their software.
It’s not to help any of us, because it’s not supposed to, in either concept or design (and if you believe them when they say otherwise, then someone less scrupulous than I has oceanfront property in Saskatchewan to sell you). This software requires massive data centers dotting the world on valuable lands, using untold amounts of minerals to make the hardware, with our finite supply of water, making harmful levels of noise, just to operate. That software further requires the consumption of human-made material to emulsify into usable sentences, phrases, and art fragments, sometimes literally, based on how they’re de-spining books to scan and burn. Then that software has to be further refined by people willing to use it, “for free” by training it with “prompts” so that it can do its guesswork of what’s acceptable. In fact, without that human input on both ends, it has nothing. It can’t create a single thing if the work of authors and artists wasn’t fed into it in the first place. It simply has no capacity to create, because it’s not actually capable of the intelligence to do so inherently.
None of that is done for any betterment of us or this world in which we live. These bros know that they’re destroying the environment, they know they’re destroying and hoarding resources, they know that taking the actual creating out of creative arts deteriorates our ability to actually create and makes us more reliant on the software. In fact, the environmental side of it is the collateral to manipulate the human side.
If we’re no longer able to even conceptualize what it is to create, (evidenced already by statements like “I don’t know how anyone could write a five page paper without AI”), how are we going to be able to think or learn? That’s what these AI pushers want, though. They want us to be dumbed down to the point of perpetual compliance, reliance, and thoughtlessness, like the denizens of Orwell’s 1984. They want to control all of our information and media and decide what we can and cannot know, own, consume, and create.
These bros have brought us to, and I say this without hyperbole, a rare precipice in humanity’s history. We have to rise as one and reject their bid to control us, or we are doomed to certain darkness that may take generations, if even possible, to crawl out of.
The spell AI has on many of us needs to be broken. Data centers need to be denied wholesale. Refuse their expansion over our minds and lands, and we deny AI. Sure, someone might be able to still make and push AI software on a small scale, but the bros know that they need a ton of update and infrastructure to get to their end goal. It’s up to us to stop that in its tracks.
Thank you so much! It’s about time someone pointed to the algorithmic hysteria for what it really is. If I have something to comment about the article, it’s that the real events of the past century seem to warn us about the dangers of thoughtlessness as the fictional world of George Orwell does. The classic case study of real-world thoughtlessness is, of course, the story of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann: The organizer of the death trains during the Holocaust, and famously tried for his crimes against humanity at Jerusalem in 1961.
From the comfort of his desk, Eichmann diligently rubber-stamped documents which ordered the murder of millions of defenseless civilians in the most brutal and coldly-calculated ways ever devised. He knew exactly what he was doing throughout the entire process, but he never once dared to reckon the moral implications of his career as an active cog in the SS bureaucracy. Watching Eichmann attempt to explain his genocidal career to the court in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt coined the term “The Banality of Evil” to describe the brand of “Thoughtless” evil he seemed to embody. Eichmann never thought hard enough – never looked himself in the mirror long enough – to consider his actions as part of the most terrible crime. Separating himself from the victims through his distance from the death camps and the daily busywork of the vast Nazi government, he never put himself in the shoes of the victims, and he never wondered if he was as much an executioner as the men who operated the gas chambers.
That is to say, I think the rise of this bizarre digital amorality in Silicon Valley – where art and writing and even certain human beings are accused of being worthless in the face of a radical plan for society – may a foster a new generation of Eichmanns, who take orders without question, even murderous orders; Who obey directives from their leaders, however insane; And never dare to look beyond the surface level of things.
Techbros love trivializing history. They love to substitute crude digital caricatures for real photos of human life and suffering, and would rather consult an unthinking algorithm than the eye-opening testimonies of history books. Above all, they share a childish contempt for the past, and insist that all that came before should be swept away in favour of an extreme future. They want to make everybody doubt the reality of anything they read or hear or see.
The Survivors screamed to the watching world in 1945: “NEVER FORGET!” Those words mean more than a powerful call to remember what happened before; They are a warning that it could happen again. I can never trust Silicon Valley’s leaders because they want us to Forget.
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