July 29, 2025

The (forced) mundanity of having a stance

What is it that I'm aiming to achieve with my critique and contestation of generative artificial intelligence? Am I fighting the air or a system?

Hey! It’s been a little bit, eh?

I’ve recently grown a year older, and the most notable thing happened a few weeks before: I found my first gray hair! I found it as I was applying product to my hair: I thought that I wasn’t getting it in. Taking off my glasses, washing my hands and cleaning the mirror¹ contributed to affirming that I have a small whisk of gray/white hair on my head. The things that I have wondered that led to this are many, but it’ll soon have company if I spent more time thinking about that.

After attending Socialism 2025, held by Haymarket Books in Chicago, I left each day with so many thoughts spinning in my head. I find it difficult to talk about them outside of doing it face to face. There are complexities of language, of story crafting that, despite what probabilistic procured prose can provide, are best perceived in the flesh. That’s what makes good fiction authors so special - they’re able to shape imagination into a common (enough) format for everyone to perceive at their own leisure. The conference’s energy had me feel a need for something more saturated and dosed with similar energy. Watching The Encampments with like-minded folk was affirming and gave space for folks to have dialogue; I was happy to hear². I saw folks speak about the importance and impact of the South having a voice from the folks behind Scalawag. More about it will end up on the website - eventually. These kinds of things came from being in an environment of curiosity about what we can do with the cards we’ve been dealt - instead of looking for a way to become accepted by the dealer who keeps trying to rig the deck.

That said, It has been hard figuring out what to write here. I feel compelled to write something about AI, mainly to have a place I can point to if someone asks me where I stand. The idea of having a “stance”, however, is what’s both annoying and holding me from writing anything. I’m hoping that by reading more - from folks who’ve spent more time working on this, those who have stances that are definitely not ones I can share and from those who are on the receiving end of the impact of technology’s ambivalence towards them. The books I’m reading or have read include (in no particular order):

• The AI Con

• Unmasking AI

• The Alignment Problem

• Artificial Intelligence: A Guide For Thinking Humans

• Art On My Mind

• Boston Review’s AI Futures (technically a magazine!)

• Read Write Own: I do not endorse this man at all.

This is a total of about 2,500 pages of text between a dozen people, alive and dead, about artificial intelligence, corporate content creation, systems production, creativity and their impacts on society as a whole. Some things I’m familiar with, like the stories of people who’ve died due to interactions with or as a result of artificial intelligence not being able to think, self-correct or fully grasp the objective it’s been placed to serve in. I’m doing this because I refuse to make a statement³ that’s incorrect and lazy. That’s the level of behavior, though, I’ve seen from folks who are pretty good at making computers do what they say, and it is alarming. The alarms in my mind go off in fear of how this stuff, like Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s GitHub, managed to completely capture the perspective, conceptualization and understanding of the respective technologies they provide. Things in the realm of machine learning and (pseudo-)”agentic” technology could be useful. I have little faith in this manifesting due to the nature of the people who are producing, funding and delivering these technologies to the world. And when I find that the current present world is choosing to do things that confuse me, I turn to the past to anchor in examples.

This is another moment when my hesitance comes in. This feels like the Herculean efforts of trying to get people to understand the importance of not having GitHub work with ICE five years ago. Because the service provides them something that works and technologists are less concerned in the broader impact of the things they use on a daily basis, campaigns like this bounce off the space gray Apple laptops. I feel afraid that despite doing research and working to compose something of a synthesis of these works, folks will use it as a deeper excuse to continue embracing conflict material. That collective (but capitalistically enforced) yearn to “maintain the mundane”, to keep us shuffling from Amazon’s Claude Code to the now-defunct-as-a-concept Arc in order to keep things going as if it couldn’t get any worse is isolating. </rant>

It’s not an excuse not to try. If anything, I am curious to see where exactly is the proverbial “line in the sand” that folks have for technology and its harms. It’s confusing that it seems to keep moving, but, at the same time, understandable. It’s the regular script. I’m so tired of it, and there seems to be no end in sight.