They want you to be just like them

Generative AI continues to encroach on every corner of my life. With friends, I discuss its atrocity more and more frequently, complaining about how every single person - even those we once thought to be competent and even demanding - has seemingly started to abdicate all care in favour of simply accepting whatever nonsense it outputs. At work, I cannot escape the endless conversations about AI tooling and half-baked ideas for AI features. I'm exhausted, demoralised, and depressed by the whole thing. It has ever been thus, I suppose. Each time the capitalist class funds a new mechanical loom, we loomers are forced to abandon craft for the sake of saving money and reducing reliance on expertise, lest we be replaced by untrained children and amateurs.

One question, however, has been rattling around in my mind. The capitalist class has tried time and time again to replace workers, to reduce the power of workers by removing their reliance on them piecemeal, and yet generative AI feels different. Part of it is the scale, but I believe a larger part of it has to do with jealous anger. A few key personality traits seem endemic to the ownership class: boredom; apathy; a complete lack of curiosity; cruelty; isolation; petty jealousy. I believe all of these to be connected to the lack of challenge they face in their day-to-day life. Not satisfied with making our financial situations and security worse (which is, let's face it, their heretoward raison d'être), they now desparately want us to feel the same disconnected misery they do.

Now, I should preface this by saying I am not a scholar of social science, nor of psychology, nor of medicine. I cannot diagnose any pathology, nor have I performed any rigorous research into the actual sickness affecting the ultra-wealthy. Many others have conducted research into the "Affluenza" epidemic, and I shall leave that to them. What I want to muse over in this post is the personality changes I have noticed in people who have taken up use of generative AI and how I believe it aligns spookily well with the same behaviour we see in these detached demagogues.

Wikipedia article on Affluenza

Wikipedia article on Diseases of affluence

Boredom is not a force for good on its own

You may have heard the mantra "boredom is good". There are endless articles available online - many written by experts on the topic - which counsel that boredom is a good and natural feeling that is born of the human desire to create and to understand. This is a very logical and, dare I say, encouraging perspective. It isn't uncommon for people to feel guilty for feeling bored, thinking they should be doing something "productive" (we'll come back to this momentarily). This mantra postulates that guilt isn't the right reaction, and instead you should allow your boredom to lead you down a path of discovery. It's something I cite a lot in my personal life, and is one of the reasons I don't mind feeling bored most of the time.

However, for many people the drive to be "productive" is inevitably tied up with financial goals. This is something that has been bullied into anyone who lives in a capitalist country from a young age. You're taught that you should want to start a side hustle that will enable you to be self-sufficient, that you should take up additional work of some kind to boost your income so that one day you can join the elite. But the reality is that you most likely won't. To paraphrase a well-known sentiment: "you are many lifetimes from wealth, but only a day from poverty". The average person cannot ascend because that is not how the system is set up. Nevertheless, the world around us is set up to apply this pressure - this demand for financial succcess - at all times. If you aren't wealthy, it's somehow a moral failing or a very strange choice.

But one thing that most who repeat this mantra seem to circle back to is that knowing this isn't enough; you have to actually do something to alleviate this boredom. You have to create, you have to learn, you have to do something to silence the lingering tug in the back of your head that drives you mad at night. Unfortunately, coming up with a "new" business idea (most often, from what I've seen, yet another doomed SaaS or app) is not actually that creative. It's a desperate retread of the tried-and-true. It seems rare that "grindset" thinking actually results in anything new or creative, so it's not alleviating boredom. This crashes into another personality trait of the wealthy: a complete lack of curiosity.

Why be curious?

Let's face it: most people who are wealthy today were born into wealth themselves. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Donald Trump, a whole class of billionaires exist today off of the back of the millionaires whoe came before them. They did not achieve greatness because they were smarter or better or stronger, they simply let the money grow and purchased existing ideas. This existence sounds great, frankly. You do nothing, you get everything. But it seems to result in complete glassy-eyed apathy. I don't just mean towards other people - although this is also true - I mean more that they have a fundamentally lacking sense of curiosity. They don't look at the world and wonder what hands it took to design and build a great construct, nor do they marvel at the natural world. They see everything in purely financial terms: does knowing this make my money grow more?

This, combined with boredom, is a deadly combination. If curiosity and creativity are the key to alleviating boredom, I fundamentally fail to see how these people can ever alleviate theirs. Boredom is a cancer: it festers, it grows, and, if it's not suppressed in a timely manner, it consumes everything. The modern capitalist class, just like the royalty and landed gentry of the past, are afflicted with a terminal and incurable boredom that turns them cruel and jades them to the point of not actually being people any more.

Again, this is not a new observation. People have said this of the wealthy since there have been wealthy people to say it about. But I think generative AI makes a lot more sense when viewed through this lens.

Generative AI is taking over without proving itself

Generative AI is, in and of itself, a neutral technology. It's spectacularly good at many things, and it's spectacularly crap at others. It's spookily good at sounding human (up until it isn't), and it makes up complete nonsense sometimes with a confident tone because it is, at its core, a bullshitter. It's not trying to cause harm because it can't "try" to do anything. It isn't confident in its answers because it "is" not. At its very core, an LLM is a stateless box into which you feed tokenised words, and from which tokenised words are output. The more you enter, the more context is required, the more tokens you burn and the worse your answers get. It's an interesting, but extremely limited technology that "tends to regress towards the mean, [rather than pushing] the upper bounds of what’s possible."

ChatGPT is bullshit

Machine Speed is a lie: stop trying to fight AI with AI

Even knowing all of this, the world has collectively lost its senses over this nonsense. Trillions of dollars have been poured into AI labs to try and push the technology further. Originally, the goal was a generalised artificial intelligence. This lofty ambition, however, was seemingly abandoned long ago. Now these companies are just desperately trying to make a product that can actually make more money than it loses. They're not doing a good job at it. Generative AI bots are still trivial to break, and their output still kind of sucks. As Cal Newport notes, generative AI can only produce plausible output, and "[is] limited in application by the fact that plausible is not the same as normative", meaning the machine acts in unpredictable ways because it will foresake sensible outputs in favour of more common (hence "plausible") outputs.

Has AI Gone Rogue?

Researcher shows how Claude Code can be tricked simply by asking it to summarize a website

All of this means that while the initial ambition of the generative AI push was to replace workers, or at least diminish their power in organizations, it hasn't exactly gone according to plan. Even companies heavily invested in the technology have been frustrated by the reality that these tools just aren't consistent or predictable, and their output - while initially impressive - gets worse with additional use. Taking Meta as a recent example, Engadget reports:

One reason for the change of heart may have been that Meta's internal AI push wasn't going so hot. On one hand, the company's data showed that code changes to Meta's AI software platforms and infrastructure were up 220 percent year over year. But that didn't translate into equally dramatic productivity gains: new or improved features that actually reached users rose just 36 percent. And advancements in those areas were offset elsewhere, as the number of technical and security incidents rose 40 percent. The time employees spent on those problems grew by 70 percent.

Meta reportedly abandoned an AI-focused restructuring plan that would have laid off thousands

Nikhil Suresh wrote an excellent article on the topic of the negative impact generative AI is having, and how many people pushing the tech from below (read: people who themselves are not members of the owning class) know that it is actually terrible for their business and doesn't actually provide any measurable productivity benefits. Yet they continue to push, because it's expected of them.

I asked why this was being repeated without opposition. Was it just sales fluff? The answer was a lot more interesting. It was partially ridiculous sales material being delivered to an easily excitable audience, but this was not the dominant factor constraining honesty. Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100x productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it would undermine the credibility of the customer’s executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation. And getting enterprise contracts cancelled because you wanted to opine on something that doesn’t really matter to your organisation’s mission is a great way to get fired.

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

So, if generative AI is failing to actually revolutionise the industries in which it is being forced, why are the wealthy still so insistent on it? Why has it outlived other trends such as NFTs/blockchain? Partly, you may argue, it's because generative AI is - despite its many drawbacks - still has some uses, especially when augmented with deterministic tools in harnesses. But I believe the real reason is far more petty.

Generative AI as contagious affluenza without the benefits

I believe part of this push is rooted in a misguided belief that "tech can solve every problem", and that the wealthy really think that if they throw enough goddamned money and compute at the problem, they will eventually get a "good enough" result that lets them abandon all the underlings they so despise. But I think that the push to productise and normalise the technology has a more insidious purpose: they want to spread their psychosis to us, without relinquishing any of the material benefits they have.

As noted at the beginning of this post, the wealthy have everything and are still miserable. In fact, they are possibly the only group of people who do not have a path to joy in life (at least, not without abandoning the white elephant that is their excessive capital). Rather than look inward or do the painful yet practical act of returning their ill-gotten gains to the world, they have identified this technology as a perfect "fuck you" to the not-yet-jaded of the world.

Generative AI is insidious. Many people use it blindly, others insist they are still in control regardless of their use. Either way, by using it you are subjecting yourself to machine-induced mental illness. If your response to boredom ceases to be learning about something, or creating something, and instead you start to reach for the helpful answer machine to generate a project or regurgitate some (possibly nonsense) information, you will not feel the boredom recede. I have experienced this myself: using generative AI at work left me feeling frustrated, antsy, and as though I had done nothing of worth. From a company's perspective, this is unimportant. As long as the work gets done, who cares? We should.

My undergraduate dissertation - as crappy and ill-thought-through as it was - focused on the memetic and viral qualities of the Japanese horror film "Ringu" (The Ring, Hideo Nakata). In Koji Suzuki's original novel, much more is said about the video tape's origins: it's a haunted object born through a despicable combination of rape, sexually transmitted illness, and powerful psychic ability. That it spreads from person-to-person is a property inherited from the smallpox passed to Sadako by her doctor when he raped her, made supernatural by Sadako's own pyschic powers. The 1998 film enjoyed its own memetic moment, with news of the film and footage of the cursed tape passing through the nascent online communities in Japan and abroad.

I believe generative AI to have similar properties. LLMs, like video tapes, are themselves a neutral technology. But just as Sadako's trauma bound itself to a video tape and became a curse, so too has the impotent rage of the capitalist class - driven by a fear of the end of hypergrowth capitalism - been attached to LLMs. They are omnipresent now, trying to drag our minds away to the same empty space that the ghoulish barons of capital occupy. The worst thing is: it's working. Many people I once respected have themselves become hollow shadows, no longer able to ideate or imagine. Instead, their every utterance somehow relates to how "great" or "annoying" the latest model release is. Tedious, monotonous, and quick to dismiss any dissent, they have the illness of the rich, but lack the material comfort.

We must not allow ourselves to become like the handful of bored, detached, despotic losers who control the world's wealth. You will not ascend to their level by doing so, your AI-based project won't bring you the wealth and prestige you hope it will, your generated imagery won't express anything about you and does not bring you anywhere close to being an artist. At the end of all things, you will walk away with no skill other than plugging away through frustrating sessions with the idiot box and a bank account emptied into the pockets of those who have too much already. They want us to be like them: empty, bored, frustrated, hollow, angry, detached. The best response to this is to reject the technology at its core, to celebrate humanity and the inefficiencies we manage to work with and through to achieve greatness, and to tell the pushers to fuck off and stop trying to thieve joy.

But, as I say, I'm no expert. I'm just a very tired man who has watched the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical. I should be allowed to be bored and creative. I should be allowed to think.

I Should Be Allowed To Think - They Might Be Giants

Tell me what you think.