A collage that merges circuit board patterns with textile motifs in a grid-like background of alternating black, grey, and white. Two hand-drawn arms are on each side of the image, positioned as if gently pulling on thin, white strings that cross the image diagonally. The hands appear soft and somewhat translucent, contrasting with the rigid lines of the circuit board patterns behind them. The strings are woven through both the hands and the background, symbolising the connection between traditional weaving and modern technology. The overall colour palette features muted earth tones, including browns, beiges, and grays, creating a sense of both history and continuity between the natural and technological worlds.

I’d highly recommend listening to Helen Beetham’s latest podcast where she’s in conversation with Audrey Watters talking about AI. As you would expect, they eloquently critique AI as a tool of political and economic power, reinforcing right-wing authoritarianism, labour control, and racial hierarchies. However, the episode covers AI’s deep ties to military surveillance, eugenics, and Silicon Valley libertarianism, with them both arguing that it serves corporate and state interests rather than public good.

The second half of the podcast episode was my favourite, where they highlight how AI in education standardises learning, erases diversity (“the bell curve of banality”), and reinforces existing biases, particularly privileging male whiteness. The myth of AI as a ‘neutral’ or ‘liberating force’ is well and truly skwered, with them instead positioning ‘Luddism’ as a form of resistance against its exploitative tendencies.

I’ve pulled out one particular exchange from the episode which comes after Helen mentions Sam Altman’s response to DeepSeek r1 — something that has been likened to a ‘Sputnik moment’. The insight I appreciate is the comparison to crypto, which Audrey says was “almost too literal” in terms of being “too obvious of a con”.

Helen Beetham: OK. So, well, it’s kind of predictable, but I think the underlying message is really interesting. So effectively what he says is great. That’s great. They’re going to challenge us to do this at smaller scale. But we still need the build out. We absolutely need every inch of data centre we can have, and we need every piece of compute we can have because we’re going to need a lot of AI. And I think this is the moment where the mask starts to slip, you know, because it’s been clear for over a year that they’re not interested in a viable product. They don’t care whether the use cases work or not. Not except kind of rhetorically and incidentally. They don’t care if it’s valuable. They don’t care what it fucks up. They care about controlling data and compute. And it’s a great much better than crypto was. It seems to be much more effective than crypto at amassing that intentionality, that state will, that capital in one place to build out the biggest possible amount of data centres that are under the control of these corporations in alliance with these militarised states. And then at the same time, to control massive amounts of amounts of data and that is the underlying project. I feel that that mask is kind of coming off in all sorts of ways now. I could say something about how that plays out in the UK, but I’d really like to hear what you think.

Audrey Watters: Well, I think it’s interesting that the crypto stuff was almost too literal, right? Because this was about the creation of money. Like, literally we’re going to make up a new currency, and wrest power away from the traditional arbiters of money, the government. So it was almost like too nakedly literal. But with the generative AI, now we’re just making up, you know, students' essays. We’re just creating videos, and somehow it seems like a less overt power grab. I mean, I think for obviously for people in education, for people who work in creative industries, it’s an obvious power grab, but I think that it’s almost as though the cryptocurrency was too much of a con. It was too obvious of a con.

Source: imperfect offerings podcast

Image: Better Images of AI