Jobs Not Bots: There's No Such Thing As "Good AI"
AI was sold to us as a means to help some poor, disadvantaged penguin to waddle with better balance. But in the real world, 99.99% of AI's purpose is to stalk and subjugate the public, steal everyone's labour, destroy jobs and enrich the elite. It's time to put up the stop sign...
Let's be clear. The "good AI" vs "bad AI" choice that Mozilla is so desperate to shill on behalf of Google, is a false dilemma. The real choice is "NO AI" vs "bad AI". For all AI is bad. It's anti-human. A grand looting of the people, by the elite. Purely a route to mass joblessness, mass poverty.
It's not a bubble. That's propaganda. Propaganda orchestrated by the AI demigods themselves.
Yes, the "AI bubble" trope was manufactured by anti-human technologists who want their opposition to believe that AI is not a threat, and that it will go away when the "bubble" pops in the just-beyond-foreseeable future. In truth, by the time we all quit waiting for the "bubble" to burst and actually decide to meaningfully oppose AI's unprecedented attack on human rights, it will be way too late, and life for anyone outside the AI industry will be a living Hell. That's the whole point of the "bubble" theory. "Manage resistance". "Keep the public docile while we loot their assets and destroy their lives".
AI IS A SCAM
That's right. AI, as it's being sold to the public, doesn't exist.
There is no robot brain.
AI is just final-stage capitalists recording human labour for eternal re-use.
We used to have a system called royalties for situations like this. But that's only viable if corporations are not allowed to simply steal our shit. And thanks to the "digital rights" circus, which has spent the past three decades helping Surveillance Valley preds to loophole copyright law, corporations very much are allowed to simply steal our shit. We can't steal their shit, let us note. But they can happily steal ours.
The elite technology companies who sit at the sharp end of AI have been able to obfuscate the reality of AI courtesy of their industry's longstanding association with actual technological breakthrough. It's hard for us to spot what AI really is when it's sold to the world as a technological marvel, by companies with histories built around technological marvel.
It's been predicted in the UK that more than a quarter of the working population could be made redundant due to AI, and that's not even a long-term forecast.
The reality? AI is simply a harvester mechanism that appropriates our labour, reconstitutes it, and reduces its market value from £20 per hour to £20 per month. You cannot reduce the value of human labour by that factor without creating either redundancy or slavery. And already, we're seeing AI's true sweatshop prognosis writ large in sectors of the tech industry that don't have the infrastructure or propaganda machine to cover up what the scheme really does...
Companies like Toloka perfectly encapsulate the truth about AI. At first glance, Toloka looks like your average player in the artificial intelligence and machine learning market. Lots of techno-babble and that unmistakable aura of advanced software. But if you look a little harder, you find they have a separate wing called Mindrift, which is nothing more than a bunch of freelancers feeding human input into a database for perpetual regurgitation. It's fiverr, with the important difference that everything the freelancers feed into it becomes re-usable. So in addition to working for derisory pay, Mindrift freelancers are also putting themselves, and every other human in their field, out of business. As if the "gig economy" were not already exploitative enough.
Somewhat akin to The Wizard of Oz, AI is really just human labourers behind a curtain. One can actually regard Toloka as a step forward in that its Mindrift freelancers are at least told they're feeding their own executioner, and at least given the option, per individual, not to do it. The Silicon Valley collective didn't employ people to create their information collateral. They simply took the collateral. Either flat-out looted it, or tricked people into willingly providing it on false pretexts.
But before anyone hastily considers applauding an AI vendor for paying its sources, let's remember what's really happening here. In the past, if someone was desperate enough to work for £10 a gig, that was their business. Now it's literally everyone's business, because AI by nature preserves that work forever. And can sell it forever, importantly, AT A VASTLY LOWER PRICE THAN THE HUMAN WHO PRODUCED IT CAN AFFORD TO OFFER.
Governments have welcomed AI knowing full well that its endgame is poverty for the many and obscene wealth for the few. That tells us all we need to know about where their real priorities lie.
WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH MOZILLA AND AI?
As I documented in Firefox - An Illusion of Choice, Mozilla is Google by proxy, and has been for two decades.
For well over a year, Google has been locked in a new battle against Microsoft, in which the Redmond Recidivist has been soundly kicking the Mountain View Monolith's sorry ass. Google didn't want AI invading the websearch genre , and initially said it would not respond to the Bing/ChatGPT fusion like-for-like. But since then, AI search assistants have gone wild, and created far more threats to Google's ecosystem than Bing alone could have mustered.
Startups have gained so much ground by incorporating AI assistants that Google was faced with a simple three-way choice:
- Have a good idea for the first time in 28 years.
- Copy Microsoft.
- Sit back and watch as Google search dies the death of a thousand listicles.
They chose option 2. It didn't work. And why would it? Why would the concept of a brand that everyone with a functioning brain hates, copying another brand that everyone with a functioning brain hates, ever work? So Google were now left staring at option 3. Whatever could they do?
"Oh, hang on..."
...they said [probably].
"...There are still a few people left in the world who don't also hate Mozilla! And Mozilla has form in tacitly criticising Microsoft on our behalf, whilst simultaneously positioning itself as the alternative. Let's get Mozilla to shill out our shitty, anti-human AI, whilst characterising Microshaft as the purveyor of "bad AI", and posing as the umm... ahh, eThIcAl AlTeRnAtIvE, LOL.
[once again, probably]
And that's where we are. Mozilla has pitched valiantly into a quest to cast Microsoft's shitty, incompetent, anti-human ChatGPT as "bad AI" - without mentioning any brand names, obviously - whilst championing Google's shitty, incompetent, anti-human equivalent as "good AI", and claiming to be the source of said "good AI".
Before we go any further, let's just observe a hard fact.
Self-styled "privacy" brands like Brave, Kagi, You and Mozilla do not have the money to develop their own AI. It costs $billions. So the fact that they're offering AI is a reminder that they're doing business with Big Brother. And you can be 100% certain that if they are doing business with Big Brother, then Big Brother is getting their data. Which, if you are using those brands, is YOUR data. Which means the "privacy" claim is a straightforward lie. We knew that anyway, but it's nice of them to remind us.
THERE HAS TO BE SOME GOOD AI THOUGH, RIGHT?
Everything AI can do, humans can do better. AI is just a subset of human knowledge. If you look at what AI is really doing to websearch, you don't see an improvement. You see a reduction in the amount of results, and tellingly, a hugely increased danger of false information being interpreted as absolute truth. Speed at the expense of accuracy, balance and choice. Consensus at the expense of nuance. That's AI. Across the board. And people with intelligence are already running away from it, to the degree that Big Brother has already had to implement its usual aversion-management resort: force. You do not need to force improvements upon the public. If you're using force, you're peddling crap.
Find me one person who would entrust a critically important decision to AI. There isn't one. When it comes to the crunch, we instinctively know that AI cannot be trusted. And yet we allow the AI industry to brainwash us into use of a persistent prefix, every time we launch into a critique:
"I'm not against AI but..."
I AM against AI. It's not in my interests, and unless you're profiting from it, you know that it's not in yours either.
There is no stigma attached to hating AI and wanting it wiped off the face of the Earth for the sake of society, jobs, mental health, equality, the environment, energy conservation, and every other fucking thing it is ALREADY destroying. Vastly more lives will be lost due to AI than will ever be saved by it. Certainly as far as the tech elite are concerned, there is no "good AI". They have one intention, and one only - and it's not to help disadvantaged penguins. They want obscene wealth. And they don't care who suffers in the process.
HOW DO WE STOP AI?
AI as we've come to understand it could not exist if intellectual property law had kept pace with 21st century developments. Due to endless lobbying by the "digital rights" circus, who champion corporate interests for huge "donations" from Google and Co, IP law has instead been progressively weakened through the course of the past three decades.
As part of a wider update to labour legislation, we urgently need robust changes to intellectual property law, to prohibit the wild and unrestrained exploitation of human labour that we're now seeing in LLM schemes. Elements to address include deliberate obfuscation of source, gaping royalty loopholes on perpetual re-use, the right to say no, the right to withdraw, and non-verbatim copying, which has now been industrialised as a catch-all method of mass labour theft.
Simultaneously, we need emergency amendments to data protection law, dictating that no part of our biometric print - whether face, voice or anything else - may be incorporated into a composite digital model without our consent. The need for legislation against digital cloning is dire even without AI, but AI will be a big recipient of digital cloning stashes in the very near future if the practice is not stopped.
But if you want appropriate protections, you have to call for them. Governments have welcomed AI knowing full well that its endgame is poverty for the many and obscene wealth for the few. That tells us all we need to know about where their real priorities lie. And our silence is their excuse...
"Ohhhh... Well if you didn't want the obscenely rich to loot the shit out of you, you should have said. I mean, we're not psychic. We assumed you all WANTED to work for free so a few anti-human psychos in Surveillance Valley could profit to the tune of $trillions.
The net result of toughening IP and data protection laws as above would not, of course, be some spectacularly fine-grained LLM ledger documenting the minutiae of where, and from whom, every syllable or pixel was scraped. It would simply be an abandonment of indiscriminately-scraped LLMs on the basis that they'd no longer be practicably legal. Which is what we want. Or what we should want if we value jobs, society and the environment over bots.
Systems like Toloka's, where contributors give explicit consent, could still exist, subject to fair compensation of contributors, and in particular a means to fairly distribute royalties for perpetual re-use of expertise. Simply, if some kind of royalty system is not mandated for what is essentially a recording of human labour, most of society is going to end up in the gutter. Royalty systems were implemented for writers and artists to protect creative workers against inevitable poverty. Those systems must now be extended much more universally - and properly enforced - if we're to avoid mass poverty in a world of recorded labour.
VOICE YOUR CONCERNS WITH CONVICTION, AND DON'T BE MANIPULATED BY CORPORATE SHILLS
As a first step let's stop prefixing our every complaint about AI with "I'm not against AI but...", and then let's recognise the "digital rights" circus for the corporate propaganda mill it really is. Think about it. What has "digital rights" achieved? Tech corporations have more rights than ever. We, the public, have virtually none left. The self-styled champions of cyber utopianism have had three decades, £billions in donations, and one job:
MAKE THE INTERNET A BETTER PLACE.
Look at the fucking state of it!
Why are we still listening to them?