A few weeks ago I finished reading Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant which is about the Luddite civil war. I call it a civil war, despite the fact that generally, historically, this has been categorized as a small group of radicals that didn’t understand the value of progress. However, as Merchant’s book explains this isn’t the case at all.

Before getting into all of that, let’s discuss what a Luddite actually is. Most of us learned incorrectly in British History (or as part of a European history or international history), that Luddites were anti-technology. However, this isn’t the case. It was actually literal class warfare. This was a case of the working or middle class rising up against the capital class.

I’m sure most of you have heard of the term “Cottage Industries,” right? The term was coined to describe how businesses existed before the Industrial Revolution. Families, generally multigenerational, were craftsman of a specific trade. An example of this would be family that creates yarn from wool. They sell this to families that convert that yarn into clothing. A family would typically use a relatively manual piece of hardware to make the product they would make. They used machinery, because they wanted to improve their productivity. They understood how to repair and maintain their equipment. To be successful, you needed to be a skilled laborer. It was hard to do this work. It required years to master the tools.

When the Industrial Revolution kicked off, new machinery was developed. With the invention of steam power to drive multiple machines at once, equipment could be tied together and powered by a central power plant. This required significant investment of capital. To capture a return on this investment, capitalists drove down other costs, such as quality of material and salaries for employees.

The Luddites revolted against this change. They broke the steam engines and machines that produced lower quality clothing (for example) and drove down salaries for employees. They did not destroy all machines arbitrarily. Luddites wanted to maintain their quality of life. They weren’t making irrational decisions or irrational demands. The demand to keep the same living wage and living conditions is a very human one. Very reasonable.

People starved because of the change to these industrial plants. Children were forced to work in the plants, they were the cheapest source of labor. If a child could do the work, why would you want to hire a man that could think and reason that he should have more. A child from an orphanage wouldn’t know any different and would work themselves to death. Which happened, often.

We’re now in a similar sort of situation with AI. Is just a statistical tool that analyzes large sets of data and predicts things. This is, intentionally, a stripped down version of what it does. There’s a lot of hard work that’s gone into it. However, the end result is a statistical model based on past data. If you request specific information about a topic, the Generative AI tool will generate a statistically probable collection of text associated with that question.

The most straightforward impact of these tools are the loss in value of non-fiction pieces of work. Nonfiction in terms of reporting, novel research, and analysis must be consumed by the AI for it to be useful to an end user. When reading any of those primary sources it is important to read them critically. To understand the biases of the news source or the researcher.

AI strips all of that context. There’s no material difference between a piece of news from Fox News that is an opinion piece about a immigration which argues for the Great Replacement and a scholarly analysis of immigration which describes the overall economic benefits different countries reap from those immigrants. Without proper citation and collapsing of these articles into a single response, it’s impossible to analyze critically, because there is no context. The AI could decide that the great replacement is real and good because there is an economic benefit for the country to encourage immigration.

The Great Replacement isn’t real. So this is something the AI made up. However, the reader would have no idea which part of the statement is truth or fiction based on what’s presented.

This is dangerous. Writers and artists should be fighting against AI, because it strips their work of important context. It takes all the value for the AI company rather than sending the reader to the source. The AI Company does not compensate the original author. They don’t think they need to.

Artists are fighting back by using tools that hide watermarks in the artwork, which poison the dataset for the AI. These artists are being treated by tech bros, as Luddites. Which technically they are Luddites. But it’s a compliment not an insult.

These artists are continuing a long tradition of working class fighting against exploitation. We should celebrate these artists.

I am sure my writing has been stolen by AI. I’ve always used a Copy Left license for my work. However, I did not expect the work to be copied by a machine like AI. I only was willing for my work to be interpreted and modified by a thoughtful person.