The true Unknown was in our hearts all along
Silicon Valley’s latest scam ‘disrupts’ what it means to be human
Humans unite! You have nothing to lose but your copyright
1845
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow.
To hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
- Karl Marx, the best Marx Brother
2024
Pitch work is dead. Pitch work is basically when a director, writer, producer, or any combination of those get together with an artist and say, “We want to pitch to studios and we need imagery.”
All of that has now been given to generative AI. I was part of a pitch work production. I was working closely with the director. It was going awesome.
This was during the height of the of the strikes, so it would have been welcome work. But as soon as I gave my quote — gone. They totally disappeared, and their entire pitch deck was already full of generative AI from Midjourney.
So many people are saying, “Who cares if I can’t copyright this? Who cares if this is exploitative? Who cares if this is replacing the people I’ve worked with for decades? I’m still going to use it.” It’s pretty bad
- Artist Karla Ortiz, interviewed by Paris Marx (the best of the current Marxes)
We, the people of the internet, have been enjoying and memeifying the Glasgow Willy Wonka experience, a lovely bit of nonsense and whimsy to distract us from all the other horrors.
It had it all: clear goodies (the actors, the Glasweigian parents offering choice quotes to the papers); obvious villains (the illuminati-obsessed “organiser” who tried to make a quick buck); and the current tech hype buzzword, “AI”.
You are all intelligent readers, and you don’t need me to tell you that Generative AI isn’t actually Artificial Intelligence.
It’s a scam, a doo-hickey, an obvious fraud, mulching up stolen words, images and songs to create dull, often sinister, almost-content.
Anyone who masters its prompts to rip off art or music in an uncanny way… these people are impressive, but ultimately pointless, like those adults who made themselves really, really good at laser quest in the 90s, and spent their weekends shooting children.
Being something of a long-time enjoyer of scams1, I was devouring this story early, and had a good ol’ look around the ‘House of Illuminati’ guy’s website.
It’s filled with extremely dumb, obviously fake images and dreary copy2, all generated by a large language model trained on material from artists and writers who never gave their permission for their work to be used in this way.
No wonder the scripts the actors were handed made no sense whatsoever - dire, dire horseshit about an “anti-graffiti gobstopper” and an antagonist called “The Unknown”.3
The Unknown has become a meme too, but that is thanks to funny humans on social media, not the algorithm.
And herein lies the point. All AI can do is regurgitate what has already been created, at great environmental cost, and the people behind it have only one purpose in mind: to make a quick buck and to further degrade, “disrupt”, and deregulate the very stuff that make us human.
I’m currently reading a book about the use of AI by corporations, especially in terms of HR and worker surveillance4.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious: palpably this is 21st century phrenology, with troubling and under-explored consequences.
Stuff like using AI to analyse facial expressions to identify “confident” behaviour is obvious snake oil; yer classic example of “well, we’ve invented this technology. Now we need to find a use for it.”
What’s been interesting is a lot of these tools have been used already on the working classes - ask your postie or your friendly Amazon worker what indignities they have already been put through.
But now it’s coming for the middle classes, and so more people are starting to sit up and take notice.
Journalists tend to be from an arts and humanities background, like me.
They are very prone to uncritically reporting on the latest shiny things - partly due to a lack of understanding, but also because tech journalism has become akin to political journalism: cheerleader-dominated, people who switch off their scepticism in exchange for access, exclusives, and quotes.
And what also annoys me is how people who absolutely should be against everything that AI stands for happily lap it up, like it isn’t an existential threat to the concept of paying creators for their work.
In the Keynesian era, the question was always: how are we going to spend all this extra leisure time we are inevitably going to have, as the white heat of technology renders many tedious, jobsworth tasks unnecessary.
The question today seems to be: are we happy for our art and culture to be generated by an algorithm, while we are spied on and surveilled, and work more hours than our parents ever dreamed of?
I wrote up last week’s Next Level Sketch, one of the best we’ve ever done. We’re taking March off to focus on doing a bit of video (oooh!), but tickets for are April show are available now.
This Machine Kills Wasps is also returning, on 12th June. Lineup in the works, and will be awesome :)
That’s it for now! I’ll write something more cheery next week.
That canoe guy who faked his own death is a personal hero, and my sketch night is blessed with the Captain Tom Foundation as one of its patrons. There was also recently a woman in Ireland who claimed she’d done her back in and got loads of money from the insurance, only to be photographed winning a Christmas Tree throwing competition in the local newspaper.
What’s depressing, though, is this website isn’t even that unusual now. Increasing swathes of the internet and internet search are dominated by this kind of polyfiller. It makes the kind of SEO-addled sites peddled by charlatans like Michael Green seem almost quaint in comparison.
It must also be said that AI was merely a sprinkling on the top of our common-or-garden Great British Scam. The sad warehouse, the furious parents calling the cops… if we had an Alsatian with reindeer antlers added to the mix, this could almost have been Christmas.
The Algorithm: How AI Can Hijack Your Career And Steal Your Future, by Hilke Schellmann