Let's mobilize against AI!

We are again sharing a call for mobilization against AI from comrades in The Anti-Industrial Assembly of Rennes.

Citizen rally against #intelligenceartificielle on Saturday May 25 from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. at Thabor Park! Bring your best signs to protest against AI. This subject is being erased from the public debate when it concerns us all: workers, workers, parents, students, students, citizens...

Come in large numbers to launch a resistance movement against the suppression of our jobs, the destruction of nature, the manipulation of information, technological industrial weapons and the vague risks associated with our species. This new industrial revolution must end! The anti-industrial AG of Rennes is calling for a rally against artificial intelligence on Saturday, May 25.

• 13:00: Picnic at the Hell of Thabor (concert space)
• 2 p.m.: Speeches
• 14:30: Symbolic and popular education actions surprise!

Should humans agree to end up replaced or controlled by artificial intelligence (AI)?

“We are clearly seeing that technologies are no longer mere assistants to human activity, but powerful forces that are reshaping it and altering its meaning.” — Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor, 1987.

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— AI and work: tomorrow, all on the job!

Mechanization, automation and digitization have reduced the amount of work required to manufacture each commodity to almost nothing. This growing competition of workers in the face of the machine causes, in addition to the feeling of its own uselessness, the emergence of mass unemployment.

For those who still have a job, the frustration is twofold. The worker moves away from his tools and becomes a stranger to the meaning of his activity. On the other hand, continuous technological progress is accelerating the pace of work in offices and factories.

Faced with these plagues, who can still believe that artificial intelligence will improve the situation instead of making it worse? We may fear that for reasons of competitiveness, companies will entrust “intelligent” machines to produce their goods, manage the handling of their packages or respond to emails from their customers. After the peasants and the least qualified workers of the 20th century, it is now the employees and managers of the tertiary sector, journalists, artists and even teachers who could suffer forms of replacement by the imposition of artificial intelligence.

It is not difficult to bet that the remaining jobs will undergo an intensification of all their processes with AI, requiring workers to have additional qualifications as well as an ever greater ability to accept the daily lack of autonomy.

— Art, autonomy, reality: things from the past!

Whatever its use, artificial intelligence is not neutral: it has carried the same standardization as industrial society for 200 years. No more creation and innovation specific to man! For software like Dall-E, generating an image only means imitating and mechanically reproducing all the drawings, photographs, and visuals available on the Internet. Can we still talk about artistic creation when a work is devoid of any manual, intellectual and sensitive manufacturing process? Can we consider that generating an illustration by entering a few keywords and pressing a button would be a creative process like any other? All this while real artists struggle to be recognized and to make a living from their work!

With the automation of art, it is our ability to create independently from our feelings that we delegate. More broadly, the more we become dependent on AI for any type of manual, artistic, or intellectual production, the more we weaken our ability to think, perform actions, and take initiatives. A massive cyber attack, a power outage, even a temporary shutdown of this technological crutch and we will be completely unable to face the world.

Finally, we are horrified to note that with the generalization of deepfake techniques, it is becoming more and more possible for anyone to reproduce the voices or faces of artists and political figures. Do we all agree that pornographic montages of our children or mothers appear on the networks based on a simple photo? Is everyone well aware of the new forms of mass manipulation allowed by AI in the fields of electoral and military propaganda?

— Ever farther, ever higher, ever more deadly!

We should be afraid of modern weapons that can make decisions about their trajectory and explode independently without human action. We should be wary of applications like Tekfog that can automate on a monumental scale all the weapons of war, disinformation: account theft, surveillance, harassment of dissidents, information fabrication...
According to Ginni Romey, AI-boosted cybercrime will be “the biggest threat to every profession, every industry, and every business in the world.”

— Mass extinction: the last stand for humans?

Technocontrol, total manipulation, complete dependence on the machine,... It seems that the exponential development of artificial intelligence is a sign of the end of humanity as we like it. The irony is that the main destructive effects of this technology already existed long before they were used. How can we not see that artificial intelligence requires, first and foremost, an ever more voracious extractivism because of the number of new connected sensors it needs in order to perfect itself. In the South, new mines and factories keep opening, bringing with them their share of calamities: massive destruction of land, grabbing of wealth, cybercrime, possession of know-how... Who thinks that the climate crisis will be seriously resolved thanks to “smart cities” boosted by AI at a time when the share of greenhouse gas emissions from the digital industry is 3.7% worldwide, or more than the sector air around 3%?

— We call for information, to come together, to resist

Two centuries ago, Luddites, artisans, mainly knitters, were already fighting against the mechanization and industrialization of their professions by resorting to the destruction of machines. The artificial intelligence that is disrupting all sectors of activity seems to be just the continuation of what has already been started. This replacement by the machine is a humiliation for humans. That is why by denouncing artificial intelligence, we are denouncing the technological infrastructure in its entirety.
We want to react to this destiny that seems inevitable. At this point, we can no longer accept to hear that this is a natural evolution of man. In reality, it is a question of a total political process of dispossession of our autonomy, of our freedom, of our ability to decide for ourselves the world in which we want to live.

To make our outrage visible, let's gather on Saturday May 25 at 1 pm at “Enfer” in Thabor Park in Rennes!