My Personal Movement Against A.I.

It started with the little things: “make me a healthy meal plan”, “help me find the best way to organize myself”. It grew to fulfill my curiosity: “help me create a reading list based on this interest”, “help me find essays on this painting following this topic”. It became a forced necessity due to a toxic work place that removed all traces of personal life and time for myself, for which the need to use AI for the most ridiculous things became impossible to avoid. This is the story of how the past two years made me depend on and now revolt completely against AI.

A forced reliance on AI

Foto di Tim Witzdam su Unsplash

I worked at a place, a school actually, where AI was forced down our throats, we had to have meetings on AI, one-sided discussions on how it was helping education and ohhh the possibilities. It became a full dystopia. CEOs forcing us to comply to their AI agenda, management using AI to write emails to us and parents. Parents using AI to diagnose their kids and tell teachers how their kids should be accomodated. Teachers writing curriculum lesson plans and answering to the plethora of emails with AI because the work load was so overwhelmingly large that there was no way a person could devote a moment to think for themselves if they wished to have at least some sort of personal life.

But perhaps that was the point. Overworking us to the point of compliance. Brainwashing us about the future, the wonders of technology, the way we needed such and such app, service, program, and ultimately, mindset. For the past two years, I felt increasingly disconnected with my self. My sense of self, my purpose, my vocation, my passions, were all dimmed and forgotten, all extinguished from my daily reality as I attempted to survive in a reality that was not my own, with people that could not see nor understand what was unfolding in front of us. This work place messed me up so much that I gained weight, stopped pursuing my passions, had a daily breakdown, and emptied my bank account in spite of the highish salary.

But I broke free. I broke free and in the summer months of this new found freedom, I regained myself. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t easy nor immediate. It took a bit over a month to break free from the chains adn trauma that binded me to that place and that pro-AI, pro-technology mentality. Distance was like a bucket of ice-cold water on my body. I could see, clearer than ever, how wrong it had been; how much it was destroying my ideals; and how much management worked to silence anyone that questioned their decisions.

Foto di Tim Witzdam su Unsplash

It was during these summer months that news broke over the internet: AI companies are buying thousands of books and destroying them. Destroying books to be possessors of the one truth, to be able to change history and leave no one with physical proof of the contrary. For a graduate in literature and a lifelong art lover, this became the final straw. I looked at my part in this game. Sure, I used AI innocently and mostly to propel my learning and skills instead of letting it think for me. But if companies had the goal to monopolize knowledge, no matter how I personally used AI, I was still paying for that outcome. Unknowingly but still. I could not bear such a thing.

I began researching, trying to find artists, writers, readers that opposed this. What could we possibly do against such giants? Would it even make a difference? Perhaps not. But as with every opposition, it starts small until it grows a voice. For now, I’m cancelling all my subscriptions to AI companies. The only way to combat AI is to create more art and be more human. How exactly I will achieve that will be the topic for another entry.