This is a disturbing, shocking ad, not just because of what it shows but because of its seeming obliviousness to the subtext that it turns into text, as well as the message it sends to every artist alive: the tech industry will crush you, destroy you; suddenly, violently, all at once.

The rebel warrior with the hammer smashing the old order has been superseded by another Big Brother. 

The ad arrives amid a continued furor over the ethical, moral and copyright implications of “Generative AI,” which is a cool-sounding name for plagiarism software. This so-called “intelligence” is not intelligent but crudely imitative. Contrary to what its industry boosters (and their simps) keep trying to tell us, its relationship to the history of human creativity is not at all like the relationship between a flesh-and-blood art student studying a book of Rembrandt paintings or a budding trumpeter playing along with Miles Davis. It’s more like the relationship between the tripods in Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” and the people that they suck up into their bellies, shred into gory paste, and spray onto their crops, as a kind of mulch. 

All of variants of Gen AI were “trained” over the course of many years by “scraping” of artwork by creative humans, past and present. Almost zero of the artists were consulted or asked to opt-in, much less compensated for their labor. Gen AI is theft of intellectual property as well as intellectual labor (and in some cases physical labor; it takes time and material to make a film, a TV show, an album, a painting, a sculpture, etc.) on a scale never dreamt of before. 

“Move fast and break things” was the motto of Facebook until ten years ago, and continues to drive the tech industry, as well as venture capitalists and hedge funders who have no morals, and don’t care about anything but shareholder value and executive bonuses. These are people who look for ways to siphon off money from transactions that didn’t need additional middlemen to function. These are people who acquire companies in order to saddle them with debt from their own acquiring and then cut staff and resources and financially bleed them to death. These are people who create services that shatter existing industries so quickly that the law can’t catch up with regulations, and brag about being “disruptors” while the unemployment lines swell. 

These are people who break other people.

This ad breaks things. By implication, it threatens to break people, or at least their livelihoods. 

But it doesn’t move fast. It moves slowly, like the monsters in John Carpenter films, out of belief that the process is inevitable and no one can stop it. 

Is it true that no one can stop it? We’ll see. There are currently many cases winding their way through the courts that aim to sue the makers of AI tech into bankruptcy as punishment for stealing from people who are actually creative, and offering the flimsiest justifications for why their theft isn’t illegal and wrong.