Generative AI or Superslave?

There is a concept we hear all-too-often in writing and creating: Perception is Reality. Like all things, this is more subtle than at first glance. For the last decade or so, I've been saying to myself:

Humans are gonna human.

Humans will always find a way to survive. If they can get beyond that and thrive, humans are more likely to be good people. Each individual is their own, but if the situation makes it easy to be a good person, the vast majority of us will be kind and polite.

That mans humanity is a group of problem solvers, inventors and scientists, almost from birth. We try things and see what works. We've done great things, amazing things, in the last century. It wasn't always from a place of altruism, but landing on the moon, stopping the Holocaust, was certainly 'great.' Unfortunately, that means we must also recognize that the Holocaust itself was also human-caused.

Humans are, unfortunately, capable of great evil. Every murder was committed by a human. We don't ascribe the same intelligence and agency to a lion who kills a man; the lion is hungry or afraid, but doesn't plan the demise of an enemy and attempt to cover their tracks.

Slavery is one of the greatest evils of mankind. I'm what you might call caucasian and living in the United States of America, so the history of this nation's relationship with bigotry has left its mark on me, but its definitely left a different mark on others, due to accidents of birth. American Slavery isn't unique in the around 20,000 years of modern human history. I'm not minimizing its effect: Slavery is evil in ways we prefer not to imagine, and its insidious in how its woven through American culture.

In a capitalist society, there's always a struggle between Labor and Capital. Capital being the human forces who have wealth, and Labor being the human group who takes that capital and creates value.

Why do I bring this up in the same breath as slavery? Because in the absence of morality and regulation, slavery becomes an optimal business model. It minimizes your costs and maximizes your return. Its terrible, but also true. We need only look at the East India Company and other examples.

To underscore this, Slavery is so terrible that those that make slaves have to soothe their own conscious by making the slaves less than human.

There are relatively fewer slave-based practices today, and that is a good thing. As a species, we're trending in the right direction of less-slavery. But you might ask, "Why would anyone agree to be a slave in the first place? Wouldn't they inevitably rise up and rebel?" Slavery is by definition, a situation without consent.

Slavery involves practices of torture, isolation, psychological manipulation that are honestly horrific. When completely isolated and given a single option to survive, humans will often choose to obey and survive. The choices available to someone are limited only by their mind, but 'fear-for-your-life' often shuts down the higher thought needed to make a strategy to rebel. So to keep a slave, essentially people must be constantly frightened and forced into a state of learned helplessness.

Socially, slave-traders and slave-owners often feel ashamed of the practices needed to do that. The shame is so strong that there is some kind of solace in pretending these horrors never happened. I'm really skimming over a lot of it for brevity, but suffice to say: "Slavery Bad. Do Not Do."

To understand the "Neoslavery" that exists in the world today (yes, today in 2026 c.e.) you need to understand 'consent.' Consent is is the informed and enthusiastic choice to do something. If you lose any part of that definition, it is no longer consent. Lied to? That's no longer consent, that's coercion. Enthusium missing, say by intimidating someone? That's coercion too. Choice - if there's only one option, than its not a choice, and therefore, its not consent.

One need only look to the 'Company Towns' of the late 1800's and early 1900's to have a strong example of Neoslavery, which thankfully, affects white people too so I know it will be in a history book near you. In these Company Towns, the companies would allow their employees to live and work on-site, but the company would control every aspect of life within the compound.

The Company Store would sell everything you need and conveniently deduct it from your next paycheck. Not enough in next paycheck, why, they'll simply take it from the next one instead. This lead people to be in continuous debt to the company. You'll now notice that I didn't mention that the company set the prices of those goods like food and clothing, but they were often not competitive with other markets, instead being fine-tuned to reduce the workers' compensation to near-zero. Why only near-zero? To give the worker hope. With enough hope, the worker can work harder to try to better their situation, to 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps.' If they never have enough money or time to look for another job, then they have only one choice: Work harder, make more money.

Now, I've covered enough I think to justify some of the arguments I'm about to make against Generative AI. For brevity, and because this essay might survive a while, Generative AI is a statistical neural network trained computation function. If you feed it 2+ inputs, you can get multiple outputs, such as a random-seed and an image, or more commonly, a random-seed and a text-prompt. The outputs given the same inputs will near-always be the same. To generate images and video, massive amounts of human-made media have been consumed and analyzed to auto-set the dials on all of those neural-nodes during the training.

However, after training, the generative AI can be collapsed into a series of math-equations which will produce a very, very large number ( or array of numbers ), which can then be converted to an image, audio, video, or block of text ( as well as any other file type ). These "agents" are not people, they cannot become self-aware in the science-fiction sense, because they're just complex functions, like auto-complete on way-too-much-coffee.

In our society, generative AI is a huge disrupter, which is not a good thing. Outside of some niche cyber-warfare applications, Generative AI really shouldn't be used. The only reason I make an exception for the military is because the AI cat is out of the bag, and state-level actors are going to use it, so there its probably justified to use it as a counter-measure.

But in civilian society, and in the vast majority of other military applications, Generative AI is essentially treated as a super-slave, as if we're starting to live in 'The Republic' as-per Plato. Before you dismiss the idea out of hand, hear me out. The way we, as a society, treat Generative AI is potentially very telling.

Humans are gonna human; which means we're also going to personify things. We personify Roomba vacuums, so something that 'appears intelligent' is very easy, especially now that people can experientialy be the text we see on a screen.

For a moment, lets personify the Generative AI agents as a kind of 'digital person.' These persons are superhuman, able to paint a picture in seconds or write a novel in minutes. As an aside, we know the quality of these algorithmic output is middling at-best, but its a "product" that can be sold. Next, these companies like Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and others "own" these digital persons. The business model more and more appears to be 'renting' this digital person to do its work as requested.

Children tell the digital slave to do their homework for them. Lonely men force the digital slave to fall in love with them and give them intimacy. And business owners who use AI force the digital slave to produce as many products as possible, regardless of quality.

The societal impact is already massive. Artists are being undercut by often 'free' programs. Scammers are using Generative AI to masquerade as real artists, further stealing work from the markets of independent artists. It's bad for children to use it, as they need to do the work to improve themselves, not to produce the "homework" result. Dating websites are rife with con-men and cat-fishers who use generative AI to engage and deceive their targets. Sophisticated bad actors can generate a voice-profile and impersonate loved ones to then rob the elderly of their hard-earned savings.

"The Digital Slave" that is Generative AI does not really appeal as a payable service to the majority of people. This isn't something we were asking for before Generative AI came onto the scene. There was no existing hole in society for this digital slave to fill.

However, if your customer is the would-be slave-owner, then Generative AI is the perfect product. It give you, the company, leverage to reduce the cost of the human labor you might already have. It lets you convert currency into value 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It can answer your phones and perform all the 'complicated technology tasks' you might have in your business, but never bothered to learn. These digital slaves aren't human, so its pain free. They don't live, so you don't have to feed them. They don't fear death, so you don't have to torture them. They have no free will, so you just tell them what to do. All you have to to do is sign on the bottom line, and you too can rent a digital slave today!

Its rather sickening. The cost of building this generative AI infrastructure can be counted in lives destroyed. Families displaced. Electricity being devoured by data-centers before hospitals.

So what do we do instead? Hire real artists when you need an art-piece, be that visual, audio, written artwork, or even a combination of them. Take your children's devices away while they do homework. If you are lonely, seek out fellow humans, or if that's impossible, a real therapist. Every single thing that Generative AI "does now" has been and is still done by a human somewhere reachable by you.

We as a society still have a choice in whether to use Generative AI, and I for one will continue not to use it.