ASTREA-16
on generative ai and resistance
23/05/26
“How do I know that the sky’s really sunny?”
When faced with a new technology, I like to ask myself whether it was made to empower us by opening new pathways, or whether it was made to control and suppress. So far, everything that generative AI has had to propose seems only empowering on a surface level. It does not offer new opportunities, nor does it complete our labor in a meaningful way. Instead, generative AI responds to the little voice in our heads that we’ve learned to ignore with years of self-discipline — the one that blanks when writing an email and cannot be bothered to click on more than a single link during a Google search — and says, “What if you no longer had to do any of those things?”
One of the most fundamental skills a child MUST be taught is, in fact, not really a skill at all: it is the acquired taste for hard work. It is the learned appreciation for our efforts and the desire to taste its fruits. That’s why worker alienation is such an evergreen topic; the factory worker does not get to enjoy the product of their labor because they are expandable. Neither skill nor creativity is demanded of them. They make a living from mass producing parts of a product that they never get to call
theirs. A cog does not get to feel accomplished when the car makes it out of the concession for the first time. It only gets more time.
To have everything within our reach at any point is, in my opinion, a slippery road for humanity to go on. If every question is answered without debate; if every essay is written without research; if every vision is manifested without struggle, then what do we have left? What exactly do we have to be proud of, since there is nothing tying us to the output of the machine? The answer, as always, is time. “Generate results in fractions of a second.”
So that you can feed us more data goes unsaid, but it is there, plain as day. If the machine can only learn from what we feed it, then it cannot and never will service us.
We will service
it.
But there are things that generative AI will never be able to do no matter how much we stuff it with information. It does not have a body, for one, and thus will never be capable of any kind of embodied experience. It will never form meaningful, spontaneous connections with another, nor make empathetic decisions. It will never feel inspired by anything. It will never
create anything; only generate outputs. It will never lose or forget anything, hence it will never need to remember. Yet one of the foundational inventions of the human race was brought about precisely to satisfy our need to remember.
Katherine Hayles is a brilliant professor who has been spending her retirement writing about posthumanism. When it comes to generative AI, she argues that all those conversations we’ve been having are really quite meaningless, and that in order to produce substantial responses, perhaps we should start with a re-examination of what it means to be human. Hilariously, once we begin to list those features (art, storytelling, lived experiences), it becomes glaringly apparent that everything that separates us from the machine has continuously been devalued by society throughout modern history. Beyond characterizing our entire species, these traits have another thing in common: they are unquantifiable, therefore inapt to rate our performance in the workforce. The society of surveillance and discipline needs data to assess our value, otherwise it falls apart.
That is how we get alienated even without working at a factory.
I am not, however, a fatalist, despite how much time I spend thinking about all the terrible things we inflict on ourselves. So I do know that we can resist alienation. We were taught to love our labor once; I know that we can learn it again. I know that we can teach it to our children, and I know that they will make wonderful things. I know it, because I see how miserable this situation is making us. But we still have these three little things; these three monumental things that make us human and that we can cling to when there is nothing left.
There is beauty in resistance, I believe. There is grace and honor in refusing to take the easy way out; in refusing to bow our heads down as the rich man’s boot crushes us. Resisting is, in some way, a form of labor, because it takes time and practice to turn it into a habit. It is just another thing we have to teach and remind ourselves of, until we learn how to love things again. And then, maybe, we’ll be free.
