Another Brief Riposte…
Can we please end the prattling on about the terrors of AI? AI is not terrifying. It is not important. It is hardly a thing in the lives of the vast majority of humans, never mind all the others. Yet people of a certain class will insist on going on and on and on about the threats AI poses to humanity. No. Humanity is a threat to humanity. AI is just a tool.
Practical people do not fear AI. There are no general existential fears of being replaced or of some monstrous inhuman algorithm taking over their lives. Because, in case you hadn’t noticed, that happened long ago. It is named capitalism, and it is the most vicious tool of theft and dominance ever wielded by humans. No, people are not concerned about AI, they are concerned about the people who own AI. Because like every other tool of modernity in the hands of capitalists, AI will only make our lives shittier. Enclosure of the mind, surveillance and control of the body, and the perpetual graphic harrowing of who we are, what is right and proper to be, and who gets to benefit from all this. Which — if you are paying attention to the discourse on AI — is almost exclusively the same people who are fretting about it.
Practical people do hate AI, as has been true of all the machines bred to increase the efficiency of the rape of the world. But this might be a special breed of that hate, because AI is uniquely harmful. It is sucking up oceans of our diminishing resources to produce… nothing. Pictures of plastic bodies lonely men dream of possessing. Dull soundscapes to mask the noise of destruction. Trite doggerel hashed together from the stolen words of real, and therefore better, writers. If you want a poem and can not write it yourself, pay a human to make it. Don’t give your time and resources to the already sufficiently wealthy people controlling the machine.
Do not use that machine. Do not give it that power. Because the more attention we give it, the more energy it takes and wastes, turning it all into oxygen-depleted air. I’m all for hacking the master’s tools to take him down, but there is nothing produced here. No way to harm the master. The best you could hope to do is set the tools to calculating pi so they are too busy to further ruin our lives. But that just takes more electricity, more strange metals and rare earths, more oil to fuel all this resource use, and more life-time from all the weary millions who have to feed images and words into these machines so that everything can be reduced to bits of data to be assembled into the hollow fancies of the privileged. And all of this is toxic waste dumped on places that have never and will never have access to these tools.
Of course, this waste of material resources is also precisely why AI will inevitably fail. Probably long before the rest of capitalism and modernity. Probably fairly soon. Because it does nothing. It produces nothing we need or value. It gives no shelter, fills no bellies, can’t even whisper reassurance, telling us that we are good people. It is useless. And this is costly disutility. As the center implodes, such expensive frivolity will be the first thing to go. The only reason it exists now is because the bloviators will natter on about it and feed it their blood and hopes and fears. Once the chatter stops — because even the privileged have noticed that eggs are becoming rather expensive and eventually they might start thinking about concretely doing something about all this — the plug will be pulled.
the mystery
and we shall name it mystery
force quite out of our hands
no blood to wash clean
we shall absolve our selves
for we did nothing
save nurture the codes
we shall not recompense
what mystery consumes
no matter the accounting
we shall claim due profit
cloaked in curtained certitude
as machine churns
and world burns
with no blame to the beneficiaries
and we shall smile
oh yes we shall smile
at the boundless naiveté of sheep
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 
A timely piece. I heard only last night from someone who is having to wade through screeds of job applications: he mentioned that not only are a lot of the cover letters obviously AI generated, but so are the CVs! The similarities are very obvious and few bear any true relationship to the advertised job. It goes to show that AI is only as good as the human operator of it!
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AI is kind of like a gun. Operators can use it to hurt people or help people. Unfortunately, our so called rulers are using it to hurt people. And, for that reason, I hope we can rid ourselves of both guns and AI asap.
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“If you want a poem and can not write it yourself…”
A friend asked me recently to write a poem using an image she shared. The end result was what I call ‘our’ poem.
I so appreciated our discussion when I couldn’t find a satisfying focus on my own. Yes, I was paid…. with an abundance of appreciation.
(My last March post on my blog.)
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