The Tiger in the Library
Generative AI and its threats to life and livelihoods
For a few years my main source of income was proofreading for South American psychologists. It sounds niche, but they were developing a platform of accredited Continuing Professional Development courses, for mental health professionals to keep their qualifications and professional memberships current and legal.
It was fairly remunerated, invoices were paid swiftly, I could largely work at my own schedule and pace, and I very much enjoy proofreading. As a bonus, I learned much about ‘third wave therapies’ just as I was going through various pandemic-related traumas. Despite being freelance I was treated like a member of the global team, invited to Christmas Zoom parties and the like. My work on their training and marketing materials was referred to as “word magic”.
Despite this, in November 2023 I was let go with immediate effect and replaced by AI. The company had expanded too quickly, it needed to trim its sails, and I was easiest to replace. No one has kept in touch, perhaps because they feel badly about it. Not so much part of the team after all. I mean, I got it. I get it. But, fuck.
I know I’m by no means the only one affected by AI in this way. Friends who are copywriters, ghostwriters, content writers, illustrators, voiceover artists, other proofreaders – have been let go from good gigs with little to no notice, and/or have seen a downturn in work. I was one of the earliest, a canary in the code mine. When I look for proofreading jobs on Indeed now, they’re all shittily paid ‘opportunities’ to check and correct the output slurry of … motherfucking AI.
To add insult and injury to insult and injury, I’ve learned that at least eight of my published works were stolen by Meta to train its AI. And I highly doubt that Fuckerberg is the only sociopathic tiny-dicked thieving bawbag weirdo to have done that. (I’ve asked around but they tend to block me, the cowardly lyins).
I was already up against ageism as it was. And now, aged nearly 60, I’m competing for ever-diminishing employment against the very products developed with the help of the various forms of “word magic” I’ve created through the decades, without consent or compensation, and at speed. For the first time since starting work aged 10, I’m having to rely on state benefits.
Yes, the British taxpayer is increasingly subsidising this shitstorm of stupidity and criminality, while incel techbroligarchs – mostly in the Disunited Sharts of Murca – profit in the billions. Yet the UK government wants to empower them, while continually telling me off for not being “working people”. (I note that they usually drop the ‘hard-‘ and ‘families’ bit of that insufferable, robotic, gaslighting bullshit phrase lately, after single people like me savaged them on socials).
Let’s look at my Top Five Things to Loathe about Artificial Intelligence – actually a really good name for it but not in the way that’s generally assumed – and the dimwitted, misogynist, misanthropist losers desperately ramming it down our gullets on every possible platform even though few actually want it.
1. It’s incel-coded.
Speaking of ‘few actually want it’. Tech pushers don’t seem familiar with the concept of consent, with asking permission or taking ‘no’ for an answer. They’re disrupterssssssssssssssss maaaaaaaaaannnnn mmmmkay?
It’s all happened so quickly, been inserted into our lives and devices without our say-so in an existential way. Governments don’t have a mandate to push it on us further but are doing so anyway because lobbyists and donors and networks.
It’s all profoundly undemocratic – and illegal! IP law! – and makes you feel even more powerless than usual. It reminds me of the dynamics in the post-apocalyptic novels I’ve become attracted to over the past decade.
A few weeks ago I somewhat read a book about ‘lean start-ups’ because it was in the Paris apartment where I was cat-sitting. I might have misunderstood things because it quickly bored me and I skimmed. But it seemed to say that you can’t know what customers need, and they don’t always know they need something until you offer it, so build and ship then experiment and iterate. It all sounds well and good and there’s evidence behind it. But it also represents so well the Silly-Con Valley mindset of changing our lives without us having much choice.
I know that’s been true of most inventions since the dawn of time, that this is how innovation works, and that it can be not only a mixed blessing but sometimes V. Good. But this isn’t about a new way to get us from A to B, or talk to each other, or cure disease. It’s designed to replace our labour and actual brains.
2. It makes people stoopid and sociopathic.
Or it encourages them to be even more of the rancid things they already are. And all at the same time that societies across the globe have opted to throw up their hands about the repeated Covid infections proven to cause brain damage, among other things. (Ask insurers if you don’t believe me). Idiocracy is a documentary.
Writing is thinking. Making art is magic. If you can’t be arsed to make art or write stories or emails, why should I be arsed to spend time looking at them?
I know automation has its uses. But to paraphrase some people on socials, I want it to clean my room or do my tedious life admin while I perform word magic and make art, not vice-versa. Stay in your fucking lane, AI.
As with most technological ‘advancements’, their inventors are so busy trying to see if they can that they never ask if they should. And they can be used for good or for evil, but especially for evil. See, for example, this eleventieth level of hell necromancy from a journalist I formerly somewhat respected, or at least didn’t loathe at Megyn Kelly and Isobel Oakeshitt levels. I even used his name in my recent guide to ‘hublication’, which I’ll now revise. To quote the much-stolen-from Hayao Miyazaki on AI, this is an insult to life itself.
Meta has developed ‘smart’ glasses, ‘Waves’, that record everyone you interact with. “Record in stealth, livestream all day.” Not creepy, intrusive, or rape-coded at all, nope.
“I feel completely violated.” A well known and respected voiceover artist has become the voice of Scotrail trains … and wasn’t even told, let alone asked.
Apparently what we all need even though we haven’t asked for it is AI doctors and nurses. So says slippery Skeletor Tony Blair, who’s been lying in mutually beneficial beds with Oracle’s Larry Ellison and other technocrats like a pig in shit for years. In completely unrelated news, Ellison gave Blair’s stink tank £200 million, and Blair’s son owns an AI startup.
No doubt it comes as a huge surprise to you that Elon Musk’s fash AI tool Grok also spits out violent rape fantasies.
Images are being used non-consensually to generate AI porn.
The UK Government has so far refused to make behemoth wankers like Google (don’t be evil you guyz – no, seriously, they meant you, not themselves) reveal what copyrighted data they’ve trained their AI products on. And now they’ve made a deal with Google to train civil servants in the use of those same products, the pricks. No legal consequences for them, ofc. It’s not only arguably illegal, and just rancid, it’s also “dangerously naive”. Just look how shaggable the AI overlords are finding the Labour Party. Finally, someone is agreeing to fuck them, and paying them for it to boot!
If you thought that couldn’t get any worse, the Google-UK deal includes UK data being held in the US. Really protecting you there, your ‘government’.
The European Commission is developing legislation that would make creator permission for licensed AI use of their data ‘opt-out’. Even the US Copyright Office agrees that’s an unfair and terrible model. (“I burgled your house coz you didn’t opt out”). But lobbyists work fast.
Israel uses AI to facilitate its genocide in Gaza. Guess who supplies it? Peter Thiel’s Palantir. (He’s knows we’ve all read Tolkien too, right?). Guess what it’s called? ‘Lavender’, and ‘Where’s Daddy’. Yes, Daddy. Rancid, rancid people.
Letting some of the worst, most socially incompetent, usually most unfuckable people in the world design our tools results in … guess what?
Degree holders who know nothing. Lonely people befriending chatbots who convince them to end their own lives. Human drones. Google calls its product DeepMind but it would be better named HiveMind. Or NoMind. Or NeverMind.
3. It’s shit. And imperialist.
Just as with NFTs and Crypto, few benefits or advancements claimed for AI are real. Cory Doctorow has just, as he often does, written excellently about this. It’s not really about tech but about money – another hydra-head of feral late-stage capitalism. Sam Altman of OpenAI has just claimed some breakthrough or other, I dunno, too-lame-didn’t-read, but his own study shows a 91.4% factual error rate and proof of an LLM plateau. Follow Ed Newton-Rex, Ewan Morrison, and Reid Southen on Twitter for more on this one.
Read Karen Hao’s book and see her interview with Carole Cadwalladr.
4. It further breaks the already broken.
In my aforementioned short guide to hublication – do buy it as it’s revolutionary and pro-Substack and also because AI has impoverished me – I wrote (all by myself! With no help from HAL 9000!) about how journalism is mostly shit. Ever more newsrooms are taking up AI and yeah, sure guys, that’s going to help in a world desperate for authenticity. As John Pilger said, “Journalists are never real journalists if they are the agents of power, no matter how they disguise that role. Real journalists are agents of people.” Not Robbie the fucking Robot.
I don’t know if you’ve heard but we’re having a wee bit of a self-imposed climate emergency just now. AI only makes it worse. And as is always the case, impacts fall first and hardest on women and children, minoritised communities, and the already-poor and vulnerable. One AI centre in Texas alone has guzzled 463 million gallons of water; nearby residents are asked to ‘cut back on showers’. Again, there’s no consent here, ofc.
5. It stops us finding better solutions.
While unicorn bilge is claimed for AI, Eleanor Drage points out that there are other fixes for our many problems – ones that can empower and enrich local communities rather than rancid farflung gazillionires. But many if not most people will just reach for whatever’s easiest, even if it’s a chimera.
After all this, will you still suck up theft, water, and energy to make fleetingly relevant memes or write things your own brain is perfectly suited to and aches to learn from? If so – I’m judging you. You are morally and psychologically adrift.
You’re choosing to hand your precious mind over to the likes of Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel so they can get even more rich and powerful, and build government-free nation state islands where your grandchildren will clean their minging loos for a pittance. Shame on you, handing your power and your planet to impotent fuckless twats like this, who strip-mine centuries of glorious culture to make banal and harmful slop, then call it radical genius:
Or will you listen to Mary? It’s your brain, your curiosity, your soul. Use them or lose them.
I’ve been alive for quite a long time now. There’s so much I never foresaw, nor could I have imagined that it would happen so fast.
I’ve somehow ended up in a parallel universe in which people are only considered worthy of existence if they’re seen as ‘hard-working’ – especially by the same political party that once compassionately created a welfare state to support the many who can’t work or whose truly hard and endless work (i.e. caring, in the home) wasn’t fairly recompensed.
At the same time that same party equates worklessness with worthlessness, it ignores the many still being killed or disabled by an ignored pandemic, while exhorting the ill and disabled to work more. Yet it also colludes with the money men of machines to take jobs away – enthusiastically enabling the elimination of human labour from the work paradigm.
Schrodinger’s Twats.
Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up. You have gifts no AI can manufacture