Statement on AI

I am not a person who automatically believes that ends justify the means in any given situation, especially when “the means” involve existential, environmental or social destruction. Basically, if something kills or immiserates people or contributes appreciably to the destruction of the environment, unless the result of using the means is “nobody will ever get cancer again forever” it would probably be impossible to convince me that said means were worth the costs. And even if the ends were “nobody ever gets cancer ever again” I would still probably want to know why the existential, social or environmental costs are so “necessarily” high and is there any way we could swing it so that they weren’t? I am a very annoying person, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to sacrifice as little humanity or the earth we stand on as possible for technological progress. I am also, crucially, not in control of anything where my obstinacy can get in the way, and I recognize that.

As a millennial I’ve watched three technologies advance rapidly with little concern for the impacts on people or the planet: the Internet and social media, the proliferation of smartphones and the “Internet of Things,” and the deployment of so-called “AI” (shit like chatbots and image generators and Claude). With the widespread adoption of each of these technologies and related attempts at cashing in on snake oil aspects of their creation (crypto/NFTs, the “metaverse,” and now of course bullshit AI cure-alls invading every aspect of life), I’ve watched the unintended consequences bear fruit. Journalism deteriorated, everything got funneled into a handful of social media sites, the entire information ecosystem was poisoned by misinformation; every “connected” appliance and item in your home spies on you and your neighbors; and now, so-called “AI” is here to destroy the labor market, replace creative people with slop-extruded automata, erode interpersonal relationships even further and make it impossible to build a gaming PC from cheap parts.

I was an early and enthusiastic adopter of a lot of that technology. I was on Twitter over a year before I graduated high school. I’ve waxed poetic before about what that site meant to me as I was getting my early political and social education. I also fell pretty hard into the Apple ecosystem, though the reason for that was a little more complex and less informed by my own naïveté than by, uh, professional obligations. Even now I’m typing this on a 2021 M1 Mac mini while occasionally checking notifications on my iPhone 15 Pro Max, a phone I specifically got because of the 120mm-equivalent f1.4 5x physical zoom lens in the camera housing. Even now I really like the photos that thing can get when I’m in the mood to shoot any.

Fuck sake, man. I’m not even 35 years old yet and I sound like I’m double my age already. Let’s get to the point.

All of this shit is to say, none of the enthusiasm or professional interest I had for previous disruptive tech waves has carried over to AI, primarily because the pitch from its biggest boosters has always been some form of “this shit is coming and it’s gonna ruin your life and the lives of everyone you know unless you completely acquiesce to it.”

As I was saying, I do not believe in the ends justifying the means without extraordinary proof, and of course no AI booster has ever been able to provide it. Because what they were promising has never actually existed except in one place: the minds of stupid fucking corporate executives. “AI can do all the tasks you pay hundreds of people to do, and it can do them better, faster and with a better ROI than they can!” AI snake oil salesmen promise, and CEOs eagerly buy enterprise-level access to Claude and ChatGPT and then they fire all those hundreds of call center workers, data entry specialists, accounting clerks and so on and surprise! none of the shit they bought into works even a quarter as well as the people they just unceremoniously fired. But don’t worry: AI will improve, magically, on its own—and then it’s gonna obviate the need for anyone human! You’ll see, you’ll all see!

Well, okay, now everyone has been fired. Maybe there’s some sane corner of the job market where we can all escape this very clear and obvious Emperor’s-New-Clothes bullshit. Except, no: AI is all over all the different job listing websites, especially LinkedIn, and to add insult to injury everyone on LinkedIn talks like they replaced their brains with ChatGPT; there are ghost (and just straight up fake and scam) job listings all over the place, and every fucking workplace wants you to be “2-4 years proficient in AI,” even for entry level positions. What? The fucking technology hasn’t even really existed commercially for that fucking long!

So fuck, time to drown your sorrows on one of the social apps, probably Instagram or TikTok (Facebook only if ya nasty, and X the CSAM app only if you belong on a list). In between the funny videos and the dance videos and the Golden Retriever videos are ads for shitty mobile games, same as they ever were, except now they’re all AI-generated. And there’s no end to them. And depending on where you’re looking there’s also no end to the literal fucking AI-generated pornography ads either. These ads begin to outweigh the actual “content” by a margin of two or even three to one. For every mildly amusing video of a cholo paramedic teaching you how to do emergency triage, there’s an ad for a gacha game with AI-generated women bearing tits bigger than houses, followed by another ad of an AI girl giving POV: You a blowjob, followed by a third AI-generated ad of an absurdly fat, garbage-covered man losing his supermodel girlfriend to a bodybuilder because his Kingshit town wasn’t at a high enough level.

But that’s not all. You have friends who start playing with this AI bullshit, and at first they seem mildly interested and amused by the chatbots and image generators. They talk about some widgets they managed to smash together that, like, balanced their budget a little better than the app on their phone or helped them organize their day a little better. And then the frequency with which they talk to you dies down, and when they do reach out they’re talking incessantly about the deep conversations they’re having with their (usually now-named) chatbots about philosophy, science, math, etc., and how they’ve created “agents” to essentially run their lives for them and how much better off they are for that, they’re so efficient, they’re having ChatGPT outline their next Great American Novel and blockbuster movie script and they’re using Suno to compose their musical magnum opus and Claude has created an LLC for them to start putting their ideas into practice. And then it’s radio silence for a month or two. Occasionally you’ll see them post about how nobody gets their genius, they’re going to solve faster-than-light space travel or some shit. And then slowly but surely they’re gone. And maybe you could’ve done something. And deep sadness and guilt rushes into the hole they left in your heart. And then you hear that some fuckboy YouTube personality “got a little too addicted to the dopamine rush” of feeding his personal vlog diary ideas that he’s been coming up with off the fucking dome since like 2008 into fucking ChatGPT to make scripts for him “just to keep productivity up,” and you feel… incandescent with largely impotent rage.

And it just… It gets to a fucking point. You know?

AI is a maximally disruptive industry, and the tech fucks who head it think this is good and even necessary to build the world they want to see. Primarily this is a world where they are the richest people in it and everyone is essentially locked into their snake oil. It’s a world where all the remaining silicon is used for fucking data centers in rural areas that destroy the air and water for poor people and contribute to the increasingly unbearable ways in which the climate is changing. Nobody will be able to buy their own computers anymore, you have to lease it direct from a manufacturer because they have to be sure they get the parts and materials back in order to keep making new ones (and to keep your money stream flowing for sure). It’s a world where shit like this very website goes extinct because writing is just not done anymore, nobody has any use for it when a chatbot can just do all the writing for us. Where we are no longer active participants in the world, in cultural creation, in the kind of lives we want to lead.

I am not anti-AI out of some concern for copyright or whatever. I don’t think it should be regulated, I don’t think the government—any government—knows what the fuck they’re doing and anyway, they’re always trying to implement some draconian surveillance scheme in the middle of crucifying trans women in particular. I think if I said what I wanted to do to all the AI CEOs, I would be hauled off to jail.^[1]Sometimes, very occasionally, the ends justify the means, after all. So instead I will simply leave it here.

No Escape will never publish anything generated wholly or in part by a large language model or AI-powered image generator. No Escape will never write anything about any digital content created wholly or in part by a large language model, AI-powered image generator or tools like Suno. No Escape will viciously call out and mock anyone who submits any content that is generated wholly or in part by a large language model, AI-powered image generator or tools like Suno, and we want you to know that we will do so with absolute seething malice in our hearts.

Destroy what destroys you,

Kaile