The ease of protest against generative AI is a problem

I posted this initially on Blacksky after thinking about another post made on there about the inevitable fight against generative AI. Inevitable makes it sound very moralistically incompatible with the way the world works. As shown, capitalism has driven the development of technology, even from its proto-capitalistic times when it began its form on the plantation of African bodies for European interest. We don't have to do much in order to protest generative AI, not from the consumer perspective^[1]. But as a producer of software, unless you already had a product out for a decade and/or had MRR (monthly recurring revenue) that builds a moat around folks emulating your work via screenshots on Mobbin, you are hard pressed to find out how to make the code spitting program work in your favor.

My first serious foray into integrating LLMs into software was while working on the Rust microformats crate. There was a few test cases from the general test suite that I could not wrangle. I threw some model at it - I don't remember which - but it immediately solved something I have been stuck on for months. That was the moment I understood why folks used it. I tried throwing it (the coding harness at the time was AIDE) at bigger projects of mine and it fell over; the scope was too broad and validation required subjective visual interactions so it failed (according to me, it always came to the conclusion that the work was good). This small itch scratching of work is what convinced me to not write off the whole stack and was the project of work I was talking about in an earlier blog post of mine when I tried to make a leftist case about AI. I think I failed in that regard and I know why.

The whole thing is fucked

Microsoft is a (software-based) weapons manufacturer. I know folks are going to see that as a reach but when Windows and Windows-based technologies are the backbone of a lot of the military tech used in places like the MENA region largely to protect the interests of Microsoft's longest client, the United States military departments, the classification fits more snug than that squashed bug in the rug. This is to note that it being ChatGPT's benefactor means that even if commercial LLMs were banned today, Microsoft technologies can still be used to stand up LLMs for individual use (as most folks tend to do), in the same way that folks spin up torrenting infrastructure despite the threat of a $250,000 fine and 10 years in prison for "stealing" bits of data representing (to the United States's legal interpretation) intellectual property.

It also doesn't help that the most prominent faces in the industry are now (and always have been) salespeople for the technologies that their employer wants the general public to consume the most of and quickly. Folks went from being a gentle representative of kind computing to finding ways to platform "experts" of generative technologies over and over without balancing it with folks who've been doing research on these technologies for years. They probably can't because they'll get a letter from legal about a conflict of interest!

It's easy to be against it because the ceiling of resistance right now is a declaration with no action, a yell with no volume. We need to do more to put teeth to the metal behind this and it requires the people who make the stuff to do something beyond moaning about new model releases.

All of this is preamble to state that we are pointing at the wrong places of attack and need to be making meaningful concessions or work towards putting power back in the hands of folks who have to produce the things we use on a daily basis. A bit similar to how we'd want those who collect our fruit and vegetables to be paid living wages and work reasonable hours, we need to give folks who produce tools a means of sustainability that allows for the temptation of these tools to be more easily resisted.

It's about the workers and the consumers^[2]

Workers, in this case, is going to a short-hand for the software engineers, designers and the folks involved in the production of software. This does not include people who are making apps using generative AI who are not technical but as cosplaying as they are. They are unintentionally and unwittingly another set of salesfolk for the technologies. I say this as I volunteer at a program that helps people do just that. I see the empowerment that folks can get when they can extract ideas from their head into something that can be shared with the world. It is sad that they had to circumvent the process of development for the sake of a MVP but who's to say that these projects will see the light of day.

For programmers

The software development lifecycle focuses on the needs of business but does not have much concern for the welfare in which it's produced. Its tendrils to the automotive process is still there and needs some level of environmental, social and economic updating. With that, inroads on how (if it's permitted) generative AI use can be made would be available. This could come from:

• licensing arrangements that tie in quality assurance,
• contributor agreements that hold those who commit to the bit,
• (invasive) telemetry tooling to confirm lack of use of generative tooling^[3]

A third-party vendor (or set of vendors) can help audit code (encouraging it to be open by default) for LLM tendencies ^[4] and allow for this certification to happen on a release-cycle basis. It will slow down releases but moving fast and slopping things wasn't the motto we were going for anyhow.

For workers

Next, unionization (or expansion thereof) of all software development shops would give them a way to codify that want to prohibit LLM tooling in their work (with reasonable exceptions) would allow shops to publicly certify themselves as "slop free". The unionization process is not simple - I've participated it - but it provides the highest yield reward for workers and consumers to confirm that the development and production process is as aligned to the wants of consumers and not just shareholders as possible.

Union contracts are obligations that companies have to commit to - just the agreements that they have to uphold with the shareholders who never attend your standups or there to take on-call rotations or to get the hundreds of emails about people wanting you about aligning with fascists. It's important to optimize the operation of a business around profitability and the well-being of the people who produce said profit. And what better way to increase profit by increasing goodwill to consumers now that generative AI is causing folks to go protest the facilities in which it's run?

For buyers

There isn't a lot to be done outside of very verbal boycotts. This isn't just posting on social media about your disdain of the technology but this includes sending these companies messages via e-mail, postal mail, etc about WHY you do not want to do business with them, the number of people you are going to commit to pull away from their business and a repeated and concerted effort to avoid their services as much as possible. Saying this should have one realize how difficult this is because of the monopolization of technology under the United States's capitalistic agenda. You can't just get a flip phone, cell phone towers might not work with the kind of spectrum those phones support so you HAVE to run some fork of Android - like https://grapheneos.org/ - but that requires a level of technical prowess beaten out of consumers since the 90s under the guise of American "ease" to everything.

It's less on the buyer/consumer and more on the workers to shift the reality of things. And as I've seen in conversation even about employment, folks hate workers and hate unemployed workers even more. A full-on recession event will need to happen before the workers-that-would can come around to this.

This is something I've been noodling on for some time and I don't know how likely it can happen. In the United States, under the Trump administration, tech workers have been making wins under unbelievable odds. If you're a tech worker (that's someone who works in tech - not just programmers or designers) that can make it to NYC, come plan with us at Circuit Breakers and join the Tech Workers Coalition where we look for ways to free tech from capitalism (as much as possible).