The next big thing – artificial intelligence

The Next Big Thing has arrived – artificial intelligence (AI). But there is nothing new about AI – it has been part of everything from credit checks to customer ordering to citizen surveillance for a long time. For example, AI first ‘wrote’ a sports story in 2009, which became a model for the machinery’s extension into other culture industries (Brambilla Hall, 2018). The Los Angeles Times has had a Quakebot since 2014 that connects instantly to the newsroom with a story when a serious tremor is sensed in the Southland by the nation’s Geological Survey. Following a quick check of this draft by the human on duty, the story is published. Information on the system is catalogued under ‘people’ by the paper.

There are utopic and dystopic components to the discourse of artificial intelligence. It is seen as a force disrupting the clientelismo that has dogged much of the world. Large sets of machine-collated and -sifted data have exposed international ruling-class concealment of wealth and influence, sorting different forms of oligarchic malfeasance so reporters can make sense of them (Broussard, 2018, pp. 44–46). There is a grand future for such work. Interlocking directorates and oligarchical tendencies mean that Colombia, for example, is normally run by politicians with significant media interests. The prospect of instant, unedited, on-line access to their activity has excited many (Montaña, 2014). In Brazil, Aos Fatos used the bot Fátima to counter fascist lies during the 2022 Presidential election,¹ and some journalists find automated fact-checking improves their work experience (Johnson, 2023; Manfredi Sánchez & Ufarte-Ruiz, 2020). It is also claimed that AI can prevent mass violence by alerting activists and authorities in ‘real time’ to its occurrence and establishing whether the testimony of eyewitnesses is part of a pattern (Yankoski et al., 2021).

The World Economic Forum and Reuters even see AI as a key riposte to climate change (Neslen, 2021). UN agencies collude in these unsubstantiated claims via ‘AI for the Planet’.² Needless to say, public relations agencies have been major players in this mythology, planting stories around the globe (Bourne, 2019). Meanwhile, AI agents have untold negative impacts on the climate, thanks to their gigantic carbon footprints (Heikkilä, 2022; Jones, 2018; Lacoste et al., 2019; Strubell et al., 2019).

More prosaically than the idea of salvation from climate change, Bayerischer Rundfunk deploys the machinery to moderate online comments. The Associated Press generates shot lists to organize a bibliography of its video holdings (‘Artificial Intelligence is Remixing’, 2023). Such uses of the technology may appear quite mundane, but they have serious implications for the quality of work and the labor process alike. For example, Dataminr®’s ‘AI for Modern Newsrooms’ is favored by more than 650 news desks worldwide. It promises ‘the earliest possible indications of breaking news’, ensuring journalists will ‘gain an edge in covering the stories that matter most to their audiences’. Al Jazeera, CNN, DW, the Daily Mail, and the Washington Post are listed as satisfied customers.³ The system works like this: the company investigates algorithmically the dark and deep webs, ‘social’ media, blogs, sensors attuned to the internet of things, and digital audio. Alerts from these sources provide virtually instantaneous information to subscribers, based on their thematic and geographical desires. This is called ‘live journalism’, even though it dodges moving, breathing, listening, and speaking reporters. It is typical for news organizations to seek additional validation of stories prior to publishing them – but to do so based on what search engines dictate.⁴ Apropos, Dataminr® does more than ‘report’ – it also engages in surveillance of peaceful social movements on behalf of the state (Biddle, 2020).

NightCafé’s ‘AI Art Generator’ promises visitors they will ‘[c]reate beautiful art in seconds with the help of Artificial Intelligence’. Its self-anointed task is typically immodest: NightCafé is on ‘a mission to democratize art creation’. Far from an attempt ‘to make artists redundant’, the firm wishes ‘to make art creation accessible to the masses … regardless of skill level’.⁵ Such sites function by appropriating work done by photographers and artists via ‘data training’, which is to say machine-generated collection and re-disposal (Thorpe, 2023). As a consequence, thousands of cultural producers are posting ‘Do Not AI’ slogans in web galleries and on ‘social’ media. They seek regulation to prevent ‘algorithmic disgorgement’ – artworks taken without consent (Volpicelli, 2023). Plagiarism without acknowledgement appears to be as rife as are obsessive attempts to detect and punish it. Meanwhile, AI aids the US blockade of Cuba, affecting information coming from the island (Gómez González, 2023).

The technology is certainly expanding its reach and monetary value. The World Economic Forum estimates AI will be ‘worth’ US$127 billion in 2025. AP’s reports on company balance sheets have expanded from three hundred to four thousand via AI, disseminated quickly through the wire service itself and its media subscribers in ways designed to facilitate faster and increased trading (Blankenspoor et al., 2017; Brambilla Hall, 2018; Galily, 2018). We are witnesses to:

the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent. (Klein, 2023)

Those firms mix oligopolistic power with oligarchic networking. Liberals throw their hands in the air and suggest such corporations be brought into the world of global governance – not as self-interested lobbyists, but as legitimate formal actors within civil society that will help forge a new multilateralism (Higgott, 2022, p. 107). We wonder. But most of all, we wonder about AI’s mass availability and the desire of capital to displace all forms of work, not just the primarily physical and proletarian (Dyer-Witheford et al., 2019).

The Open AI corporation/foundation predicts huge impacts on the middle-class labor market in the Global North (Eloundou et al., 2023). As a consequence, there is a headlong rush into moral panic over misinformation, intellectual property, and the emergent tendency of search engines to answer queries with explanations rather than providing links that permit further verification (Stokel-Walker, 2023). Conversely, AP maintains that robot journalism, for instance, will create new jobs, with greater diversity of everything from skills to cultural backgrounds (Blankenspoor et al., 2017; Brambilla Hall, 2018).

Friedrich Engels argued that ‘the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern industry’ becomes a ‘law by which every individual industrial capitalist must perfect his [sic] machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin’, eventually ‘making human labor superfluous’ (2003:, p. 71). As Marx and he argued, the worker ‘becomes a mere appendage of the machine’, even as labor is required to produce more and more rapidly (Marx, 1996, p. 7). The very idea of work as a job performed for people beyond one’s immediate social unit, as something that can be sub-divided and individuals easily replaced, is crucial for modern capitalism. Labor is undertaken in visible ways, the better to surveil, measure, and remold it (Gorz, 2013, p. 67). Perhaps The Next Big Thing is simply one further refinement, ‘a more flexible specialised and decentralised form of labour process', a ‘hiving-off or a contracting-out of functions and services hitherto provided “in house” on a corporate basis’ (Hall, 1990, p. 118).

Notes

1 https://www.aosfatos.org/.

2 https://www.aifortheplanet.org/en/content/about-us.

3 https://www.dataminr.com/news.

4 https://www.dataminr.com/hubfs/Case-Studies/deutsche-welle-uses-dataminr-to-stay-competitive-and-keep-pace-with-evolving-media-industry.pdf.

5 https://nightcafe.studio/; https://nightcafe.studio/pages/about-nightcafe.