Let us have no illusions: we are not discussing AI here.
We are reviewing the immaturity of our civilization through a single paradigm: AI technology is being weaponized to accelerate our self-destructive economic model. This is a polite way to say that the exploitative economy (this is something beyond mere capitalism), or the narcissistic core of human speciesism is blind to any alternative other than committing suicide. AI can be used as a means to understand our blind spots. The text that follows does exactly the opposite; I try to showcase how obsession with property and our ego makes us blind.
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How do you find the AI feature in the Google search?
It’s amazing! Consumers don’t have to spend hours searching through obscure websites or pay IP (Intellectual Property) royalties just to get what they want.
Excellent news for Alphabet (Google’s parent conglomerate), as well — provided the time has come for capital to cannibalize (read: revolutionize) its own means of production: the intellectual property creators.
I do not understand. Are you experiencing a problem? How can I help?
The problem was that the competitors, big tech company executives, recently found a way to exploit AI as a means to increase their capital value through good old colonial practices. On one hand they are massively expropriating IPs (Intellectual Properties) by force, and on the other hand they are selling their services for subscription fees. Meanwhile they claim they are not liable for any damage caused by their practice: “hey, we did not create this, AI did and AI makes mistakes”.
Over recent years, tech companies —behind the unimaginative marketing term “Large Language Models”— have set up a carnival of polite, yet silent misappropriation of IP across the entire spectrum of intellectual production. Amid a frenzy of artificial lawlessness, they have built a surplus-value bubble which they are now capitalizing on. The reference training content, the cream of the crop (literature, music, visual arts, science), is now served up as a processed statistical prediction product, with tech companies as its new owners.
They made humanity an offer it couldn’t refuse—even Don Corleone would be jealous.
The colonization of knowledge happened overnight. All intellectual production, old and new, is now forcibly seized and exploited by a self-appointed ruling gang! The sacred purpose of producing “artificial content” under the revolutionary banner of Artificial Intelligence sanctifies the means.
Did anyone bother to ask the indigenous creators?
“There is no need, and frankly, it’s none of their business. We’re not just talking about the dead; even if we asked the living, they wouldn’t be able to cover the legal costs to take us on (see lawsuits from newspapers and media groups), so their opinion becomes irrelevant in the face of our capitalization.”
No problem indeed. Let the party on.
“Ours are the ‘brand-new’ sentences, texts, music, images, and videos, and we are willing to let you use OUR means of production… for a small fee. Without adding anything original, we can leverage everyone into subscribing to our legitimate ownership of piracy. We offer the AI-blessed substitute for intellectual production with well-censored content (we call it aligned and harmless). And we tailor it to consumers’ needs, or even perversions (in a form where no one can sue them for theft of property and copyright infringement). By the time people figure out what happened, the recapitalization will be in a position to cover any …objections.”
Alphabet executives saw the fiesta coming and panicked: How could the spearhead of the colossus, the Google Search, be left out? We risk losing the monopoly we worked so hard to build, the lion’s share of advertising revenue, and the big data (the surveillance profiles of social life). Are we going to let the pirate-adventurers of OpenAI take it? Of course not! We have the solution! We will integrate some lesser-known cousin of ChatGPT into the Google search engine. It might be powerful, but we don’t need to shout it from the rooftops with names and branding, and—mind you—besides being discreet, it will be available for free and …mandatory!
Free? You mean at no cost? Not exactly…
Let’s leave moralizing and the dead aside for a moment and talk about the income of living creators of original content, as well as the income of their “handlers” (production and marketing companies, AdSense, and Google Analytics).
Well, didn’t those masterminds who shoved the “AI feature” into the search engine realize that consumers would take Google’s simulation of information (the prediction model) and stop visiting the sources? The websites, where the original publications are hosted, would lose a vast percentage of their visitors or subscribers, and with them, the means by which both creators and Google make their living.
They certainly knew it from the very first moment they proposed it. Just as they knew that, without creators, whose authentic content is used to “train” the production systems, the models would be poisoned by a feedback loop, if their own production was used for training.
By destroying content creators and expropriating their income, Google is driving the internet to extinction (in terms of traffic) and the creator community to suicide.
Let’s not forget what Spotify and YouTube did to musicians: once they managed to become IP distribution monopolies (by burning capital), they now give peanuts to the original IP owners (fractions of a cent per thousands of streams) while pricing their service fees as high as they like.
In our case, regarding the simple, yet complicated “AI feature” in Google Search, not even a crumb is given back to the original creators. This reveals the true nature of the relationship between the Colonialists and the internet Indigenous creators. Here, we are dealing with a phenomenon of capitalization through the cannibalization of capital itself—meaning the destruction of the “old” means of production to leverage the exclusive ownership of the “new” means. And this is going well.
The “big brains” (the engineers, the algorithm architects, the strategy directors) are not stupid. They know all this very well. They simply operate within a closed, ruthless economic framework with… “a sense of realism”: destruction with an expiration date.
And yet, here is something good:
Cannibalism is no longer taboo. It’s the solution.
In the cannibalistic model of production, there is no tomorrow. There is only a Big Long Now, in the form of the “quarter”, the skyrocketing stock price, the extraction of massive surplus value — the right now. But what if the feedback loop bubble bursts? Well, a narcissist can always find beauty in the exploitation of Now, even on a burning planet.
The executives feel optimistic, compared to the depressed indigenous population. They are supposed to be optimistic. That feeling is not merely an emotional state. It is rooted in the very real option to bail out with golden parachutes, secure in their silos. So they are justified in feeling confident and free to experiment with any means of production or destruction — as long as they can make their own image of now last longer.
For a business strategist, leaving the prints of their colonial boots on every piece of art, on every stone, plant, animal (human or not) is just a part of a job they take with pride. Keeping the exploitative economy going at any cost, from their perspective, is part of a game — leaving scorched earth behind and useless, heat-generating factories is just a move. Do they know they are murdering the creators? Absolutely. They are simply paid handsomely to do it faster and more efficiently than the rival cartels.
Could it be that, in the end, amidst our depression, we are the fools for not embracing the grandeur of this ‘artificial’ colonialism?
That reminds me
To be fair, it’s about time the ‘creators’ paid the price too: becoming the naked lunch themselves at the colonial cultural banquet they supported as silent bystanders. Can a real-world creator spend a lifetime protecting intellectual property while conveniently forgetting the fact that Western world wealth (www) is built upon generational exploitation? How are the creators going to dodge the zombie bites now, right in the middle of the feast?