The advent of generative artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed our relationship with the media we consume. Trained on repositories of digital media without the knowledge or consent of its creators, these algorithms are modeled on the shameless theft of data and human labor. No direct credit is given to those with work stolen by programs such as Stable Diffusion, eliminating the intrinsic human element of content dissemination.
Tulane University’s further incorporation of this technology into student life means our academic experience is no longer governed solely by human beings. Be it courses focused on AI or merely its use in course content, generative AI continues to tighten its grip on the lives of Tulanians. Though corporate executives laud this technology as a source of so-called “opportunity,” we must confront the dark future it represents for both the working class and the human experience.
The nature of the human experience is often characterized by the inclination to produce according to our social and individual needs. For instance, someone might produce metal tools for personal use or to sell in order to meet other needs such as food or shelter. In turn, those who purchase these tools do so in service of their own needs, from professional work to personal fulfillment. Human labor fuels these interpersonal relationships, the capacity for which is described as labor power.
Under capitalism, both labor and labor power are commodified, hence others use the working class to accumulate capital. This exploitation dehumanizes the worker, whose condition is described by the theory of alienation. This theory outlines the parasitic relationship between the capitalist and the worker, the latter of whom is alienated from fundamental aspects of their nature, such as access to the means of labor and its products.
Generative AI functions through the theft of product and labor alike — be it the stolen work of writers and artists or the exploitative practices used to make generative pre-trained transformer models more presentable to the public. Worker abuse is by no means a new offense for the technology industry — but unlike previous iterations of exploitation, generative AI eliminates any semblance of a “human footprint” in its output. It represents a new and disturbing form of alienated labor: the total eradication of human identity from the public sphere.
The only people who benefit from this technology are those who own the means of its creation and profit from its sustenance. On the other hand, these profiteers regard us as little more than sources of data and maintenance labor. When programs like DALLE or MidJourney churn out crude aggregations of stolen content, there is no trace of those who created the original media, much less any credit given to them, as others aim to profit from their work.
The age of truly anonymous products has begun, for our very names have been crudely flayed from the fruits of our labor. Just as the worker is denied his humanity, so too are all estranged from the active process of producing and creating — the very basis of human nature. We no longer own our work, for generative AI has eliminated both authorship and author. As the presence of AI-generated content begins to proliferate out of control, we must face the unsettling possibility of an internet dominated by algorithmically generated activity. We can no longer trust that all of our online interactions are with other people, let alone that the content we are seeing is made by human hands.
Guided by the avarice of its creators, generative AI steals far more than human labor. It takes away our very connection with each other, isolating human beings in a way hitherto unseen. It is the ultimate alienation of labor; it is the culmination of what capitalism seeks to achieve: to estrange us from any semblance of our humanity such that we cannot even conceptualize the value of our labor, much less control the means of it.
As more and more students become exposed to AI in the collegiate sphere, the future of academia may very well be an arena of algorithmic theft and misappropriation. Our writing no longer exists solely at our behest; it is being used to train the very algorithms being built to cut us off from our own lives.
Gone are the days when writing existed solely as a dialogue by and for humans. Like all forms of alienated labor, AI threatens to estrange us from our work as students, as well as our ability to create and think — behaviors that academia is meant to foster. As Tulane continues to endorse AI in its classrooms and research spaces, our campus itself may very well come to prioritize machine over man.
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