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.
I’m still trying to figure out what the dollar value of tokens actually mean. OpenAI touts “$1800 worth of tokens for a $20 account” and that ultimately people should be spending half their salary in tokens.
But what does $1800 actually mean? Is it perceived work value saying “you can replace $1800 you spend on people hours in tokens”? Or is it how much the infrastructure costs them to run those tokens? If so, they’re running at a major loss.
People throw around those values, but I have yet to see it tied to something with a real world equivalent. It’s 1800 Schrute Bucks for all I can tell.
I keep seeing job posts that have requirements like “must be excited about AI tools”. If the shit was good people would be excited on their own.
It’s all slop from the worst, soulless, people.
Funny you say that.
I have listed on my resume & cover letter that I have experience with multiple ai systems, however the creation of my documents are accurate and self-created, not ai-generated.
I want to ensure anyone reading they’re seeing my own work, not some ai BS thrown together to pretend to be impressive. AI was a good recruiting tool for a few months until ai itself ruined it!
