Over the past year, artificial intelligence has become just another part of daily life.
Its applications, potential and actual, are seemingly endless: legal briefs and lesson plans, student essays and personalized tutors, screenplays and stand-up sets, animation and game design, newspaper articles and book reviews, music and poetry.
Each of these examples relies on generative AI, which produces “new” content based on the patterns it “recognizes” within its massive training samples.
The practical implications of this technology are and have been terrifying. Countless talented artists, educators, journalists, lawyers and more are at risk of losing at least some portion of their jobs to the cheap “labor” of tools like Chat-GPT and DALL-E.
This is bad enough, but the real threat of AI is more philosophical.
The “products” of artificial intelligence are just that. They are merely mechanical and trite trash garbled out from code, mathematical models and statistics. The areas of society that generative AI threatens are all subjective, but AI bastardizes human creativity, complexity, curiosity and consciousness with its objective approximations.
Its use in education especially makes a mockery out of institutions of learning.
In reality, AI can’t generate a better world through machine “learning.” It only degenerates society through machine cheating.
This is why actual human beings with actual intelligence need to resurrect a label from two hundred years ago: the Luddite.
Historically, the term refers to groups of Industrial Revolution-era, English workers and craftsmen who rioted and destroyed the machinery that they viewed as threats to their wellbeing and way of life. It has since come to be a term thrown around to describe (and often to criticize and even mock) those opposed or at least resistant to technological change.
Those original Luddites resisted mechanization for personal, economic and social reasons, but new Luddites have a motive that is more universal. Theirs is a mission for humanity — for everything that humanity is, has been and hopefully can become in a future without generative AI.
So, is it too late to stop AI’s momentum and reverse its invasion of human society?
Almost certainly.
If that’s the case, then what’s the point of resisting this inevitability?
Simply put, it deserves to die. It is a moral and philosophical abomination, and its distortion of civilization should be treated with the same quiet disdain and forceful resistance that the powerless masses would reserve for a seemingly invincible oligarchy.
In the same way that the lowly many can counter the noble few when they recognize their true political and social power, real intelligence can protect itself against fake intelligence by recognizing its creative, curious, and complex consciousness.
The most effective way to do this would be to reject generative AI as a valid form of media. AI’s words are not poems. AI’s images are not paintings. AI’s videos are not films. Never forget that, even if universities and corporations do.
This artificial intelligence Luddite will never stop hating generative AI, and you shouldn’t either. Maybe then we won’t have to worry.
Then again, if everyone cared as much as they should about their humanity, we wouldn’t even be in this predicament in the first place.
Matthew Pellittieri is a 19-year-old history and political science sophomore from Ponchatoula.
