Punk is anti-AI
How to make human punk
1. Listen to the Dead Kennedys and then form a punk band and put out one banger of an anti-AI track (works best if you’re still in middle school).
I won’t be a slave to AI
AI is only imitation
It’s not the voice of my generation
Artificial intelligence can’t know the human experience
2. Assume leadership of one of the most powerful religious institutions in the world and then issue a radical anti-AI encyclical that, among other things, trolls Peter Thiel.
In the Magnifica Humanitas, under a section titled ‘We can all do our part,’ Pope Leo channels Gandalf to hammer home his point:
The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
3. Write a biting satire of the many ways in which the tech industry sucks (AI in particular) that also trolls Peter Thiel.
37-39. Please stop seeing every precious and beautiful aspect of life on earth as a commodity to be controlled and exploited for wealth. Now, see, this is a tough one. It’s so tough that I’m giving it three entries. It’s tough because I know you know you fucked up.
Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.
4. Hang out in libraries and local bookstores, for hours and hours.
5. Refuse, and learn about refusing from centuries of Black American resistance to white supremacy.
“When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it’s because it is deeply unsettled. This promise of an artificial intelligence future is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy, powerful people have about how well they are going to control us in the future. If they can get us to accept the future is already settled, that AI is already here, the end is already here, then we will create that for them.
My most daring idea is to refuse.” — Tressie McMillan Cottom
6. Deface pro-AI ads on the subways.
7. Don’t be afraid to go hard.
Source (you can buy these btw)
9. Send pro-human, anti-AI postcards to your cool AF mayor.
10. Dance, dance, dance, because AI cannot.
11. Remember that poetry is always punk.
My friend Tomáš Baránek, a publisher and writer in the Czech Republic, was kind enough to interview me recently about human thinking and creativity contrasted with AI — and I love the title he chose, “We Need the Friction of Existence.” Friction is punk.
Late last year, Rick Rubin called AI “the punk rock of coding.”
I replied:
“Speechless. AI is to punk rock what Flock of Seagulls is to the Sex Pistols. Punk rock was a rejection of power, rationalism & neo-liberalism. AI entrenches and enriches power—and the worst people on the planet. Let no one make this analogy without being soundly mocked!”
Thanks for including my rebrand of the ChatGPT logo as a hellscape. A designer friend pointed out the logo had 6 arcs, 6 corners, and a 6 sided box—-666—maybe the original designer or the AI that designed it was telling us something.