(This is a bit of a merger of two talks I recently gave about fascism and AI. One was in German at the Cables Of Resistance conference, one in English at the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy. I added some shots of the slides I used as a structure for the text which […]

And all that data does by definition exclude: “AI” is not built on “all of humankind’s knowledge” but based on whatever a mostly western view of the world and what is relevant looks like. Cultures who are not within that framework, who might even be based on more oral forms of keeping history and knowledge are not represented. Even if those groups are not actively excluded (which again they very often are) there are huge populations who just are not seen by the data do not get a say in how they are represented. Or if they are represented it’s just as problems: Think about unsheltered people for example.

The right loves those patterns because they confirm their prejudices: Ask an image generator for a picture of two people kissing and you most often get a heterosexual couple, often white. Because that’s what the training data looks like. That makes “AI” perfect for creating the form of idealized, fictional “past” that fascists love to allude to (“make America great again“), a past that never existed but that needs to be saved or restored (we’ll get back to that later).

  • hello_hello [undecided, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    2 个月前

    Describing AI as a fascist artifact is really well thought out. It’s often difficult to describe the layers of extraction and oppression that a technology goes through in its manufacturing. I also like to rebuttal that technology also can’t be inherently antifascist.

    Our world is full of fascist technologies. The blockchain crowd is basically living in a fascist soup of inhumane and antidemocratic ideas. A lot of surveillance tech is no better than “AI”. We are having a general problem here.

    It is a bit disappointing that the author doesn’t provide an explicitly Marxist interpretation but I do appreciate not centering the conversation entirely on AI, which is just a symptom of a larger trend of capital accumulation and dispossession.

    Some people look towards “Open Source” as our salvation but while I love Open Source and consider the amount and quality of open source infrastructure available to all of us a modern wonder of the world more impressive than the pyramids that crowd also doesn’t want to be “political”. The accepted open source licenses all are built around libertarian thinking, about empowering the individual who does not want to be regulated and limited in their individual expression: Not around the idea of expressing and manifesting political values. Open source licenses do not allow you to forbid using your work in weapons. Do not allow you to limit using your work only for socially beneficial endeavors. Open source is impressive, but tries to be apolitical and therefore does not help us fight back fascism. It wants to stay neutral. But there is no neutrality when standing in a wildfire.

    This is a succinct condemnation of the meritocratic argument of the “Open Source” camp which is rooted in the idealism that the experts of any particular field can overpower capital just through sheer force of intellect (“biologists will solve hunger by inventing humans who never eat!”). The Free Software Movement has condemned this line of thinking since its inception and has always made the use of published and collectively owned works important for its ethical and social value and never based solely on its utilitarian value.

    I’ve experienced this firsthand with NixOS. It had destroyed its own community by appealing to a false meritocracy without ever tackling any material issues such as funding and governance. The idea was that if the technology was improved that it would be the rising tide that would solve everything (or at least make the problems worth tolerating). Needless to say this tracks with the obliteration of people’s needs and justice over a ideological bent towards what the status quo defines “success” as.

    I respect projects which explicitly forbid any and all LLM generated contributions in any form but I also greatly respect projects that actually have a political backbone on top of that.

  • lil_tank [any, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    2 个月前

    I’m not convinced by Winner’s theory of inherent politics of technologies. The example they use with bridges is super weak, they say it’s not just how we use technologies that is political but the technology itself, and the example they give is that US authorities used bridges to enforce segregation… bridges in general are still not racist, it only shows they can be weaponized for racism

    • insurgentrat [she/her, it/its]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      4·
      2 个月前

      You did not correctly read the text. Winner’s essay is “Do artifacts have politics?” i.e. does a particular bridge instantiate some politics, not bridges in general.

      So a particular bridge which is designed to exclude black children from school by stopping the bus carrying them sits there having racist politics. Another bridge designed to help black kids get to school might be anti-racist in its politics. They are two separate artefacts.