Do not fear AI. Fear AI companies.

We are all scared

We were just laughing at the little details that gave away AI generated images. Ya know, the impossible shadows and hands with six fingers.

Now it speaks and thinks like it's human. It's impenetrable sci-fi tech, and it's just like, on my phone now. It's everywhere. And it happened so quickly.

AI is being used by business owners to generate ads and business cards. AI music is on spotify. Companies are laying off thousands at a time and blaming it on AI. We're told that the march of technology is inevitable.

Now that it's everywhere we can't trust what we read, images we see, videos we watch. Everything and everyone is suspect. Nothing feels substantial or real or authentic. It's exhausting.

We lack the understanding and the words to describe it, but we are scared and we are tired. We're all so tired now.

AI companies raise the alarm

AI companies are now telling us the AI they have built is dangerous. They say AI has become "self-improving". They report repeated failures to contain their cutting edge models.

They tell us that AI could one day swarm, attack, and produce billions of dollars in damages.

They assert that, despite the risks, they can be trusted to establish and enforce policies to safely handle and guide the disruptive and dangerous new technology forward.

And they remind us: AI cannot be put back in the bottle. AI is inevitable.

AI companies are manipulating us

AI companies are using the very real fear we are all feeling to manipulate and misguide us.

They want us to believe that "AI technology" and "AI company" are the same thing.

They don't mention that "self-improvement" requires giving their AI technology access to immense compute resources, powerful tools, and data they have been harvesting from us during our interactions with their tools.

They gloss over the fact that security incidents are not uncontrolled, spontaneous events. That their AI technology is using the resources they give it to meet the objectives they assign it.

They benefit from our belief that AI technology is "thinking" when it is only guessing then testing using tools they control. Tools which they can choose to restrict or disable.

These details would only serve to focus our fear and discomfort on the truth:

AI is not the real threat to humanity. AI companies are.

AI companies are racing to build an empire

AI companies have started a new race to the bottom: to be the first to capture this disruptive new technology, become its sanctioned gatekeeper, and build an empire around it.

The business model is a familiar one: a walled garden where one company holds all the power, charges you rent, and controls everything you see or do.

The crown jewel of their empire is harrowing: Artificial Employees as a Service.

The AI company which captures, packages, and rents access to the best artificial humans will become overlords multiple times more powerful than the silicon valley elites of the big data era.

The AI era is here. Riding the wave of big data, leaning heavily on the normalization of corporate greed, and aimed directly at you and your job.

At AI speed, this is a bullet you cannot dodge.

Yet, they have suddenly become startled by something unusual... us. We are instinctively rejecting their inhuman regime, and they are terrified.

They will succeed if we follow the path they have laid out for us

If we reject AI companies at this crucial inflection point, we rob them of their shot to establish a lucrative AI era where we, the displaced working humans, are left behind.

They need us to follow their playbook for just a little while longer:

1) Be hopeless

We must believe that AI is unstoppable and inevitable. We must believe that being fired and replaced is an unavoidable side effect of AI technology, not corporate greed. We must be hopeless.

2) Remain ignorant

We must continue to view AI as sci-fi machinery. We must trust AI companies as the only experts capable of wielding this weapons-grade technology.

3) Do not resist

We must remain passive and quiet to give them more time. More time for lobbying and political favors. More time to ensure new legislation and policy will be penned in their interest, and restrictive towards their competitors.

More time to push robotics forward, giving their artificial employees a physical form, opening up broad new categories of human workers to replace.

4) Keep feeding their machine

We must keep using their AI services. We need to stay online, keep generating memes, keep asking their chatbots questions, keep giving them big data to train their machines to replace us.

We must reject the idea of owning and using the technology ourselves, and fear those who create and distribute open and free alternatives.

We cannot stop AI, but we can stop AI companies.

Big data companies, social media companies, and "the algorithm" have been fine tuning addiction and engagement to hook us on their products so they can rent us to advertisers. The scale of the internet massively amplifies the harm that these companies cause as they extract every scrap of value they can from us.

Big-data scale at AI speed is unfathomably worse. And unlike big data, who seek to rent us to advertisers, AI companies aim to rent out entire replacements of us.

This thing is coming fast and we as a society, and as individuals, are not equipped to understand or deal with the harm that it is already inflicting on us.

But you are an individual human. You are a continuous thread of decisions and consequences and learning. You can be unpredictable. You have human instinct.

Trust that instinct. You know something is wrong.

You are leaving social media because you're tired of the performance. You are picking up a camera and hanging out in person on the weekends because you want real experiences. You are buying CDs because you want to touch and hold the things that are important to you.

You are doing this instinctively. Name it, put purpose behind it and follow it:

Reject artificial, find authentic, be human.

Reject Artificial. Stop using their tools. Starve their machines. Boycott their customers. Attack their bottom line.

Find Authentic. Discover what is authentic. Your voice, your ideas, your relationships. Meet in person. Create real experiences.

Be human. Resist. Coordinate, protest, walk out. Make noise, make art, make music, write. Be hope.

We will stop AI companies by being what they desperately seek to imitate: human.