On Refusing AI
This is an excerpt a column by tech journalist Brian Merchant on his site Blood in the Machine. You can read the whole column here.
I think we’re seeing something of a new mode of AI protest emerging.
As tempting as it is to call it a backlash to the AI backlash to the AI backlash, it feels different, and maybe more robust than that. Where the last backlash fixated on products, companies and their harms and shortcomings, this new spate of refusals feels grounded in more categorical terrain. The questions we are litigating now are less ‘is this AI product good or bad’ and more ‘we have seen what it can do, and do we want AI to exist in this space at all?’
Do we want a half dozen tech giants spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers around the world to build what is essentially the same technology, spiking energy costs, creating noise and pollution, and even, according to one study, dramatically raising the temperature around the complexes due to an advanced heat island effect? So that those tech giants can make good on their promises to automate jobs en masse and remake the social contract to their liking?
A great many people who live closest to said projects have decided they do not, and rather than cut deals or hedge bets, they have chosen to refuse them.
Do we want AI text and image generators producing our journalism, safeguarding our stores of knowledge, creating our art? Even if it can?
If not, then it makes good sense to refuse outright those products’ entry into those arenas. To ban AI-generated content from Wikipedia, from publishing, from video games. And to ban the companies aspiring to enrich themselves by taking over all that knowledge and content production from setting up shop in our backyards.
There is great power in refusal.
The Luddites are mocked today because elites worked hard to distort their legacy—it is too inconvenient, too dangerous, even—but they were cheered as folk heroes and left the industrialists deskilling their jobs terrified by refusing outright to submit to rank automation. The writers and actors in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA who went on strike in 2023 rallied millions to their cause by drawing a line in the sand and refusing to let their work be turned over to studio bosses with enterprise ChatGPT accounts.
Looking back at the events of the last few weeks, I can’t help but wonder if we’re seeing a reawakening of our capacity for this sort of mass refusal. As it becomes clearer by the day that AI promises to be an implement of automation; of worker exploitation and knowledge degradation; an enormous energy and resource consumer; a tremendous engine of wealth transfer.
There are more signs yet: Stop GenAI mutual aid groups that pull no punches in calling for exactly that. The similarly monikered Stop the AI Race that protests in the streets of San Francisco. … I have been asked to join a number of ‘Writers Against AI’ groups in recent days, and to sign a call to ban outright generative AI products aimed at children. …
Now, sure, “AI” is a nebulous descriptor that can be applied to a great many technologies and tendencies, many of which are not being operationalized to automate creative jobs and deskill workers. (This is a fact that is often wielded to AI industry advocates’ advantage to blunt or deflect critique: Do you hate spellcheck too??) But the truth is, it’s clear enough to most people what Silicon Valley’s project boils down to, in practice, when its executive class talks about AI. It is to move as much chatbot product, slop and job automation as it can.
It’s entirely possible—as well as moral and popular—to refuse this project.