Man’s Not Obsolete: Fear Factory At The Dawn Of The AI Resistance

Of all the wars for the human soul being waged these days, the one over so-called artificial intelligence feels the most existential. It’s become impossible not to think about AI every fucking day, and it’s almost never by choice. Data centers are shooting up like weeds, obliterating fresh water supplies and creating psychologically torturous amounts of noise pollution. Every issue of the New Yorker these days seems to include a long, deeply reported story about how AI is sending people into psychosis, yet every time I find myself in a mixed group of civilians, someone makes an offhand comment about what they just asked ChatGPT to do for them — the grocery list, the vacation itinerary, or something else they were damn well capable of doing themselves before these tools rolled out. The global economy is currently being propped up by the bet that this objectively evil industry will become a sustained success, even as its express goal is to put people out of work by automating their jobs. The profits, if they come, will flow only upward. Things are going great.As bleak as all of that is, nothing eats at me quite like the way AI has begun to colonize the creative arts. Every morning, I...