The consumption of generative AI as entertainment seems like another order of psychic submission
I quoted with approval from the first part of R.H. Lossin’s essay in e-flux on “the relationship between art, artificial intelligence, and emerging forms of hegemony.” In the second part, she puts forward an even more explicitly marxist critique, suggesting that being human involves both embodiment and emotion — something that AI can only ever imitate.
What I particularly appreciated in this second part was the focus on domination. I could have quoted more below, including one particularly juicy bit about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, NFTs, and exploitation. You’ll just have to go and read the whole thing.
The liberal impulse to redress historic wrongs by progressively expanding the public sphere is nothing to scoff at. There couldn’t be a better time for marxists to climb down and admit the social value of including someone other than white heterosexuals in public discourse and cultural production. That said, counterhegemonic generative AI is a fantasy even if you define the diversification of therapy as counterhegemonic. In addition to causing disproportionate environmental harm, these elaborate experiments with computer subjectivity are always an exercise in labor exploitation and colonial domination. Materially, they are dependent on the maintenance and expansion of the extractive arrangements established by colonialism and the ongoing concentration of wealth and intellectual resources in the hands of very few men; ideologically they require increasing alienation and the elimination of difference. At best, these experiments offer us a pale reflection of intellectual engagement and collective social life. At worst, they contribute to the destruction of diverse communities and the very conditions for the solidarity required for real resistance.
[…]
The suggestion that a self-replicating taxonomy can produce knowledge and insights generally formulated over the course of a human life seems to defy reason. But this is exactly the claim being made by […] techno-boosterism at large: that a sophisticated enough machine can replicate the most complex human creations. This is, of course, just how machine production has always worked and evolved—each generation witnessing the disappearance of a set of skills and body of knowledge thought to be uniquely human. Art making, writing, and other highly skilled intellectual endeavors are not inherently more human, precious, or worthy of preservation than any skilled manufacture subsumed by the assembly lines of the past century. In the case of generative AI and other recent developments in machine learning, though, we are witnessing both the subsumption of cultural production by machines and the enclosure of vast swathes of subjective experience. Dramatic changes to production have always been accompanied by fundamental changes in the organization of social life beyond the workplace, but this is a qualitatively different phenomenon.
[…]
In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx observed that machinery is not just a means of production but a form of domination. In a mechanized, industrial economy, “labor appears […] as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system […] as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery.” This apparent totality of machinery “confronts [the worker’s] individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. In machinery, objectified labor confronts living labor […] as the power which rules it.” […] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer described popular entertainment as a relentless repetition of the rhythms of factory production; a way for the workplace to haunt the leisure time of the off-duty worker. The consumption of generative AI as entertainment seems like another order of psychic submission.
Source: e-flux
Image: Rashaad Newsome Studio (taken from the essay)