The Anti-Intellectualism of Artificial Intelligence

“Anti-intellectualism is hostility to and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectualism, commonly expressed as deprecation of education and philosophy and the dismissal of art, literature, and science as impractical, politically motivated, and even contemptible human pursuits.” - Wikipedia 

 Marc Andreessen, who funded OpenAI and a legion of other AI startups, said on a conference stage recently that artificial intelligence can already make “objectively” more beautiful art than humans can. So in the future, he says happily, we might end up with just a very small number of human artists. Maybe just a very few great ones. 

Just take for a second and envision the artists worldwide. All of the communes and artist’s retreats, the writer’s forums, the museums, the galleries, the art schools and classes, the schools of thought, the expat communities, the world of shows. Oil painting, watercolor, sculpture. Murals, graffiti, painting, drawings, still-lives, portraits, nudes. Architecture, pottery, photography, filmmaking. 

There are about 2 million professional artists in America alone. Somewhere in between the number of people in Phoenix and the number of people in Houston. 

Marc also thinks that since ChatGPT can write college papers, students don’t need to, and oh yeah, we don’t need teachers either. Or like, schools, period. After all, they’ve been destroyed already by the “wokes”. Luckily, the VCs have a plan to take out the “woke virus”. These early versions of AI have as targets the arts, education and writing as the first use cases introduced to the public. They want a world in which an AI is the teacher and the students sit in virtual classrooms with headsets strapped to their head, where entire generations of artwork are smashed together by a blunt-force computer algorithm and used to replace human artists. 

 Indeed, the VCs have recently come to understand the REAL problem with society: social progress. Calling everyone and everything “the wokes” and “the woke mind virus”, VC is on a desperate campaign to position social progressives as the ACTUAL elite that are running everything; the ruling party of the country, who must be overthrown so that we can get “American Dynamism,” led by venture capital, back on track.  

“Anti-intellectuals present themselves and are perceived as champions of common folk—populists against political and academic elitism—and tend to see educated people as a status class that dominates political discourse and higher education while being detached from the concerns of ordinary people.”

This is a great description of what we see VCs doing, calling (checks notes) teachers, students, journalists and socially conscious workers the “woke elite” who have destroyed “innovation” in this country, which the VCs are desperate to bring back. In fact, the a16z camp has taken to insisting that the “woke mind virus” has actually shifted the balance of power to the point that these “wokes” are now the minority, ruling elite and the venture capital class is, in fact, being oppressed by things like *checks note* the New York Times. Perfectly in line with the AI form factor being used FIRST to mimic news writing as opposed to the literally tens of thousands of other possible applications.  

 Andreessen says that it shouldn’t matter if a machine did it or a human did it, whatever produces a better product. Oh, you want to write a paper? A BOX can do it better than you. What do you need teachers for? A BOX can teach better than you. You want to make art and be an artist? A BOX can make art, we don’t need you. 

Marc Andreessen’s Big Dumb Box. 

It is no mistake that the AI roll-out has come in the form of  infinite “gotchas”. The social channels have been clogged with examples in the nature of “see? The box can make a screenplay!!! Hahahaha, screenplay writers are fuckeddddd….” 

The BOX is going to do LAWYERING better than LAWYERS. The box wrote a song! The box wrote a song better than you, nah nah nah nahhhhh. The box took all your art and now it can copy you!! Lol, that means the BOX can replace your ART, you fucking ARTIST WOKE VIRUS SCUM. 

The whole thing just has this huge fuck-you vibes and that is so far beneath respect for humanity and for intellect at all, even though no AI would be possible if they hadn’t scooped up generations of intellectual production from us. I don’t think we should just ignore the fact that the debut of this is absolutely a fuck-you, to humiliate and insult us, to fuck with people’s jobs, to make us feel weirded out and creeped out, all while the people who built this shit are lounging around on Twitter laughing about how they’ve really got the “wokes” this time as the AI they built aims directly for art, literature, journalism and education, which have already been shelled by capitalism and privatization and monopoly. 

And just so you know: AI did not have to look like this. This is not some predestinated ultimate state we come into. There were other AI futures than what we are seeing. This happened because a small group of venture capitalists have been working on moving underlying technologies like LLMs into specific directions and are now releasing apps built on the technology, CHOOSING which apps those would be. They CHOSE it to be like this from top to bottom. 

I can’t help but think of trolling and perhaps even how the lens of trolling and the application of trolling, has surrounded and shaped the mainstream launch of AI (in ChatGPT) but also just the entire field of AI and the broader technology market. Trolling, someone once told me, is typing into a computer and making someone 10,000 miles away lose their minds. Trolling is an attack on someone’s sanity. Concern trolling (pretending to care about someone). Cat fishing (pretending to be another person). 

There are so many things we could do with artificial technologies besides try to fake humanity. We are living in a perpetual Turing test now, a Turing panopticon. There is no reason on god’s good earth for this to be the first use case. Again, AI technology at this stage is already in the field doing all kinds of shit that does NOT require it to fake being a human. 

The motivation of anti-intellectualism is to stop political dissent and to stop political uprising. Or in VC parlance, “the wokes”. I wrote in a recent article about how technology has evolved in opposition to social movements, and AI is the latest to emerge from the dialectic. In the past, anti-intellectualism has consistently targeted school teachers, academics, the artists and writers, members of the intelligentsia (who have always been extremely active in social movements,) and so on. It is no mistake that the biggest targets of the big dumb box are school systems and artists and writers of many forms — legal writing, paper writing, writing software, journalism. A16z media company Buzzfeed was among the first to sign up for it; of course it was. Buzzfeed was founded as a way to discover what makes news go viral and use that in corporate advertising. Recently, a16z put out a book called “The Network State” that spends *chapters* whining and wailing about how the “woke” New York Times is ruining everything, disparaging tech reporters that aren’t directly in their pocketbook, and generally pissing themselves at how the country has been “hijacked” by “wokes” — the shunning, contemptuous, trollish nature of this new extremist language is totally typical of anti-intellectualism and contempt is specifically highlighted in descriptions of the phenomenon. 

The fact is is that many people’s first experience with artificial technology will be: fuck your job, a MACHINE can do it. As we speak, tens of billions of venture capital dollars are going into artificial intelligence startups, startups whose business model is to target a vertical of work, a job position, a field, and go to work figuring out how they can automate it, slash the worker’s salary, or get rid of their jobs entirely. They just painted a target on the back of half the workers in this country and the entire devouring head of the technology machine is going to follow it. These are the most clear examples we have seen of the entire tech industry organizing to mount an attack on workers. They aren’t even hiding their motivations. These are particularly cruel developments because in the startup model, all of this havoc-causing AI tech AND the startups building on it have been totally subsidized by venture capitalist; the VCs are literally paying to give workplaces weapons against their workers. This is a bizdev deal made in hell.  

Artificial intelligence makes you think of very delicate and sensitive calculations, but from a technical level and from every other level, this thing is a wheat thresher over huge stores of stolen grain. AI is not possible without monopoly and without stealing and sabotaging and concentration and centralization. The money it took to do this, the data it took to collect, the artificial market for this that they are making. This is not some vague “innovation” that naturally occurred, this is something that has been pushed forward deliberately and constantly by the same small group of people for decades now and has required literally millions of ethical failures along the way. 

This thing takes vast human stores and butchers them, slicing and dicing them in millions of ways that we will never know and even THEY might not even know at this point. 

Like threshing machines, you only get a very little from what you put in. The AI they’ve shown us so far is nothing more than a device for stripping information. It’s taking this giant volume of work, unspeakably large, vast, vast, vast, deep as ocean trenches, and cranking it through a fucking shredder, Van Goghs and Monets, ten thousand years of symphonies playing, five generations of social movements and struggle, every record that changed sound forever, every movie that won an award, every great novel and the hundreds and thousands of books that they each spawned, the Nobel Prize winners in literature, every scientific breakthrough ever committed to the internet, every peer-reviewed paper, every status update and blog entry, everything we’ve collected and put together on Wikipedia, which stands even now as a triumph of collaborative, distributed archiving. 

And it turns this galaxy of human achievement into an opaque, subhuman, troll box, run by fascists and cowards. To me that is what was remarkable about this so far, not how much AI can do, but how this is all they could come up with: have stolen generation after generation of human production without any consent whatsoever, outright stealing all human output without pay or consent or democratic process of any kind, hoarded all they could, ruthlessly sending out trillions of dollars of seeking and extorting and selling and saving, just so a bunch of dumbasses can build fucking apps to fuck up people’s jobs. For fucking “productivity”, are you FUCKING KIDDING ME !?!?!?!? 

That data is fucking ours and the AI is evidence of massive crime against humanity that continues to accelerate, by venture capitalists who are now openly calling themselves “AI accelerationists”. Animals. 

We can make a lot of assumptions about how this technology will function simply based on Silicon Valley’s time and tested results. People act like it’s such a mystery what this tech will do and what it will look like, when all of the products that come from these people are the same shit. The iPhones, another small dumb box, are so toxic that high-ups in Silicon Valley won’t let their kids touch these products; Steve wouldn’t let his kid use the stuff either. AI will be no different than all the other brain-rotting, mind-destroying boxes that tech has shoved at us. AI applications are not going to be any different. Why would these new AI apps be any different? It’s the same shit from the same people. 

OpenAI and other emerging platforms make a whole world of AI applications possible, applications which will be funded, built and designed by the same people who have us trapped in Instagram and Facebook. They’ve been pummeling us with sickening bullshit that girls kill themselves over. The youth are depressed and have eating disorders and are being attacked by pedophiles online. The social shit all causes loneliness, depression, anxiety, self-hatred and low-self esteem. The loneliness that has fallen over the world has come from them. That is who this shit is coming from. The system that produced Meta period produced AI — two of the early investors in Facebook, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, are behind OpenAI. And Meta has its own AI as well, and all of these are built using fairly similar models and patterns. 

You think you are addicted to computer engineered-feedback loops now? Lol. 

 I don’t know if they believe that AI poses an existential threat, but something we do know about computers is they are state machines, they do what you tell them to do. There is no real mystery and there never will be. If artificial intelligence kills off most of humanity, it will be because someone told it to. If artificial intelligence starts killing jobs and schools and educational programs and publications and the art world… it’s because some one told it to. Technology emerges in specific ways because specific forces behind it are driving it. And in this case, they are doing that with a singular and unified agenda and you should expect to see the same shit out of tech that you always have. Technology and devices that ruin lives, ongoing destabilization of jobs, ongoing shocks to the entire infrastructure, the obliteration of independent media, the death of media after a temporary bubble of VC-funded rags. Remember when “digital media” took over “traditional media” and now there is just… no media? I bet we’ll get some “Web 3.0” or “decentralized” media but like the rest of an industry treading ever downward into anti-intellectualism, its not going to be able to stay on the graft. 

We always go into new technologies with the assumption that new technologies will provide MORE information for us, when there is no indication they will do that. And I think that’s a super important thing to double click on because this truly gets up into the heart of the anti-intellectualism that is at play here and in the tech industry more broadly. 

 As I wrote in an earlier article about getting tech out of venture capital control, 

“We tend to think that we have so much access to the world’s data… but do we?… While we give a constant stream of data to Facebook, it never gives us back any of the insights gained from amassing the data into a monopolistic silo. Information has, instead of being made open, been gathered together according to corporate and institutional interests and monetized. We are used to thinking of the internet as democratizing information, but in this hellish instantiation, its far more likely that information is being held back.”

Or from this piece on how tech destroys innovation, re: Facebook and Twitter “offering incredibly little exposure of data and value to the user, hoarding all the benefits of aggregation, and making as much money as possible off it, the user be damned.” 

  In fact, most of VC and tech is anti-intellectual in this way; it vacuums up so much information from people and the people aren’t even given it back in any way that SHOULD emerge from collating large amounts of data and the aggregate: being put directly to use for human well-being and prosperity instead of sold off to companies as anti-worker weaponry, for instance. 

The amount of information that is being stripped by ChatGPT already is absolutely phenomenal. A lot of AI is about presenting what Mark Zuckerberg has long referred to as “a single pane of glass” — the idea of an internet where all of these different companies, and data sources from them, are being displayed as one seamless experience to the user. Behind this, humans, sources, interrogation of data pools disappears. Think of Apple: without humanity. A single pane of glass is exactly that: obscuring, opaque. I’m sure the tooling will get better but the production of this type of extremely high-level information abstraction that we see in AI? It removes human context and connection, it removes perspective, it removes the discourse that surrounds artifacts and events, it removes sources and human voice, it removes multiplicity, it removes context and community, it removes debate and dialogue, it removes social production and reflection, it offers nothing but the smallest information, the weakest information, infinitely summarized to the point of inherent absurdity, with no known origin. It is knowledge in an opaque, tech-billionaire, algorithm-mediated vacuum. It is information on the terms of anti-intellectual technofascists.

 I worry that soon, these dumb toys will be the only way to “talk” to the all of the intellectual production that has been put on the internet since inception. AI isn’t opening up information to us, it’s going to close it down.  I’m afraid this is going to make the actual HUMAN artifacts (which is what, I, for one, care about), disappear, swirled around in opaque algorithms, sliced and diced, mashed and massaged, combined and drained and tortured, and pushed through millions and millions of algorithms designed to drive addiction to devices and advertising spend, to weave that into the very fabric of the information itself. 

You cannot view this without considering that the people who are making it are psychopaths and sociopaths. I do not say that for style. I say it because we know from victims, from science and medicine, research and documentation, and observation, that they don’t have feelings, they don’t have emotions; they are not aroused by art, and their emotional experience does not approach what ours is. When Marc speaks about wiping artists off of the world and replacing them with a dumb box he and his buddy made, he has no sense of what art is, no appreciation of it, no connection to it. Psychopaths do not have these types of ties to others or to the world. In Silicon Valley the top brass and layers around it consists solely of people who are very capable of putting completely aside the goals of humanity in place of profits and personal gratification. The jobs require profoundly anti-social behavior which is what we see on display here in the development and roll-out of AI. Their attachment to the things that make us human, requires a humanity that is remote from them either innately or acquired by years of greed fever. They should not be allowed to drive the direction of shit. They belong in a fucking box, not us. 

They don’t care for another human and value that relationship the way that you or I do. To them, then, a box is no different to them than a human, and this is amusing and a cause for self-congratulation on their part. Because it demeans humanity. For them, this is the opportunity to prove this to you, to prove your meaninglessness to you, to show you, through this supposedly objective and elevated box, that you are…. Redundant. Un-needed. Replaceable. 

They are CONTINUOUSLY putting us in the position of having to justify our very existence to a bag of tricks they made. They talk about AI replacing the artist in society, but art is what makes us human and is part of the human existence, it is our birthright; it doesn’t belong to them, it isn’t about them, and we don’t have to accept a psychopath’s visions of what the future should be. That is why they are particularly interested in art. When you start to talk about art, you are talking about the very heart of what make us human. Which is what they spit on. We shouldn’t take that from either them or these machines. 

Conway’s Law states that the organization of a company determines its outputs. So how funny that a box produced by soul-less psychopaths offers an equal enigma in trying to decipher if there is anything human inside there. A psychopath gathers bits and pieces of humanity to himself so that, like some foul crab, it can go undetected under small clusters of coral and weed. They have one face for the world and then behind it a deep, dark, malevolent machine constantly fucking with the real humans around it. To wit, the box shreds every tiny bit of human creation it can find and turns it into a box to hide behind. Runs it through some algorithms to try to figure out how best to manipulate others. 

I simply cannot emphasize ENOUGH that *the people who are building this* *openly think* that it will replace artists and art. Now we can argue about what is the meaning of art, as they trollishly intend us to do, until the cows come home, but the point is: they developed and unleashed this into the world believing that it is fully capable of replacing the vast majority of artists. They BELIEVE that they have made something that can replace the earth’s artists and they PUT IT OUT INTO THE WORLD. 

That should be a capital offense. We do not need to defend the existence of human art. THEY need to defend the stealing of it for the express purposes of replacing it. 

These offhanded, smug comments about artists… they are nothing but contempt for humanity, contempt for human intellect, and contempt is truly at the core of anti-intellectualism. It is contempt for human creation. What they have done in “creating” “AI” is just an infinitesimal layer of calculation and logic over the total progress of civilization, its a parlor trick, and they know that’s all it is. This comes from plundering. And yet they plan to sail it onto even further into a world where there is no mind but their own. Where they will then collapse and starve to death for having eaten the whole world. 

These are not the people who should be in charge of what tools are built with what HUMANITY has developed TOGETHER across space and time. Which is all this is about. They want to eat? Starve them unto death. 

VCs hate intellectual production. This isn’t about advancing the human race, and that is not the motivations of the people who are building this, and that is very obvious already. AI that looks or feels anything like this, would not happen if it wasn’t being developed by fascists and mega-capitalists. It would not come in the form of a menace to the entire educational, labor system and the intellegensia, with absolutely no plan whatsoever of how to implement this in workplaces and world without destroying worker’s jobs, stability and their pay, without destroying arts and arts communities and artist’s livings. 

And to be clear on the topic of AGI: 

Do I believe that a bunch of fascist mad scientists, who have captured the vast majority of every artifact of humanity since the inception of the internet and everything that has been digitized ever, can create a robot that meets the criteria for “AGI”?

Yes, yes I fucking do. And? 

You can both believe that something is capable of succeeding AND that if it succeeds, it will be bad for the world, simultaneously. Do I believe that they can make machines pass as humans? They already have. Do I think they can come up with something like AGI? Yeah of course. 

And what I have to say is: so fucking what. Let’s even entertain Marc Andreessen’s notions that AI can make “better” art than we can, if he can aim enough trillions of dollars of technology spend at the absolute control and capture of all human data? Who cares? Kill that shit. We don’t need to do everything that could possibly be done. That is beyond anti-intellectualism into outright stupidity. 

People act like AI posits existential questions to what makes us human and what divides us from the machines; it really doesn’t. Human life is incalculably valuable. The view point of this fascist, anti-intellectual AI is not only that humanity is NOT inherently valuable but that it is replaceable, that it is unimportant, that it is stupid… that humanity should be lied to and manipulated and targeted and demeaned with this childish trolling. Apps like ChatGPT are just ways of experimenting on us and manipulating us; they are trying to learn how to better fool us and trick us. We are giving it the ammunition it needs to pull it off: evidence of where we found their seams. Now we’re stuck in a game with them just like they want.

Much of the debate over AGI seems to assume that we will eventually produce some kind of, central, monolithic operating system for humanity that does have true intelligence, and the question is whether or not that operating system will conclude that the best thing to do is to kill all of us. 

If this is the case then I don’t think we have much to fear. The scientific reality is that wealth and resources should be shared equally among humans and that the ecology must be preserved and extremely basic social laws created and followed. What is stopping us from achieving a better world is not a lack of knowledge of what needs to be done. The fundamental economic shift that is needed globally is one from inequality to equality — from an economic model that inequally distributes wealth to one that equally establishes wealth, so that we all have the same things and everyone has enough. This has been firmly established by Marx and the entire deep vein of scientific and economic scholarship that we have seen follow him.

The reason that peace and harmony on earth do not exist is extremely well established. It is because a very small group of people have all of the money. The fix for this is very straightforward and that is to kill that small group of people and then replace the economic system. 

That is the real source of VC’s supposed anxiety. They are trying to give this thing chains as much as wings. They are frightened that AI will kill them because they are the top capitalists and they are fascists and they are the ones who continually and knowingly perpetuate this system by doing things like creating artificial intelligence designed to make labor cheaper and more precarious than ever, using everyone else in the world to get rich. Its far more likely AI will kill them than us, if you are talking about a “true” AGI in the science fiction tradition. 

They claim to be accelerationists: but like their big dumb box, it is a mindless and devouring and hateful accelerationism. The eradication of poverty is not accelerated. Health care for all is not accelerated. Better working conditions are not accelerated. Better pay is not accelerated. Less work hours are not accelerated. Women’s health is not accelerated. Black life is not accelerated. Childcare is not accelerated. At the core of anti-intellectualism is a hatred of humanity, one that is on display each day on any VC’s timeline from Founder’s Fund, a16z, Lux and any other of these smug sadistic fuck firms. 

There are billions of places to put money, power and resources into building and improving and changing the world. VCs CHOSE to do this trash with our money and our lives and our production and our humanity. They CHOSE it. And I think it’s really important that we remember that, when we decide on what needs to be done next. 

There are individual people responsible for this and we know who they are. 

They have us right where they want us: fighting with a machine over a right to our own human worth and right to self-determinism of human destiny. We are caught in an existential crisis where we are actually defending our humanity to technology itself; and that is exactly where they want us to be. It puts humanity on par with machines by default; beyond anti-intellectualism, this assumes that the war on humanity has already been won.

The thing is, we do not have to plead or prove our case. We don’t need to have a better answer than “fuck no you can’t do this bullshit.” 

Tech optimizes for speed and growth. We have a saying: what you measure, increases. It’s simply mindless capitalism, mindless fascism, hurtling ahead for no reason. The only use cases they talk about is replacing and destabilizing jobs and human livelihood and life. The use cases that have already been up and running for awhile now are deployed right now in the battlefield and in the police forces. Great. 

AI will not create a bloom of human productivity and creativity, as some seen desperate to suggest. And surely I can see the argument for a kind of AI art, one that works almost as found art, as black-out poetry, as collage and paper machie, as kaleidoscope and optical illusion. But that is possible to do without all this bullshit. 

There isn’t an ethical debate here. People are trying to make an ethical debate when the answer is no. Fucking no. 

We don’t actually need to justify this.

We are humans. We don’t need to justify the existence of humanity and we do not need to justify the right of determination that humanity should have. We do not need to justify the worth of human production. We do not need to justify the value of our work. We do not have to justify the existence of art to venture capitalists or their sick toys. We do not need to compete with a machine that stole everything it us from us. We do not need to accept this technology and its creators. We can fight. 

Fuck these people. No artificial intelligence. Not from fucking fascists, which means not until we’ve overthrown the entire fucking industry and actually build something that cares more about humans than money and greed and control and dominance and bits. Until then, AI can get fucked and VCs can go too.

We are smarter than venture capitalists and their dumb machines. Anti-intellectualism is just part of their fascist agenda. Things could have been built a very different way, using different processes, different people, different goals, to come to a different conclusion, a different product, a different solution. But fascism, corporatism, greed, capitalism and anti-intellectualism brought us this one. Which means that’s where we need to begin ripping this shit out.