AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism

[matsushima]

The weird AI-powered fake profiles that Meta deployed in 2023 were quietly mothballed six months later, and would have disappeared from history completely, had Bluesky users not found some that had escaped deletion. This appears to be the fate of all commercial AI projects: at best, to be ignored but tolerated, when bundled with something that people actually need (cf: Microsoft’s Co-pilot); at worst, to fail entirely because the technology just isn’t there. Companies can’t launch a new AI venture without their customers telling them, clearly, “nobody wants this.”

And yet they persist. Why? Class solidarity. The capitalist class, as a whole, has made a massive bet on AI: $1 trillion dollars, according to Goldman Sachs – a figure calculated before the Trump administration pledged a further $500 billion for its ‘Project Stargate’.

-AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism, by Gareth Watkins for New Socialist

Comments

[lokifan]

Thanks for sharing!

Our most effective weapons against AI, and the right wing that has adopted it, may not be strikes, boycotts or the power of dialectics. They might be replying “cringe,” “this sucks,” and “this looks like shit.”

This seems very likely to be true, to me.