Welcome to Blueprints of Disruption, a podcast dedicated to amplifying the work of the grassroots,

sharing their knowledge, and hopefully encouraging others to build power wherever they're at.

I am your host, Jess McLean. This week's episode is all about AI, Gen. AI to be exact. But

don't worry if you don't know the difference. I didn't either until I spoke with Neha and

Kim from StopGenAI.com. Now I had heard rumblings that this rapidly expanding technology was

bad for the environment and I could obviously see the pending problem of widespread job replacement,

but I had no idea just how detrimental GEN.AI is to our communities. It's no wonder the world's

technocrats are desperate to incorporate it into everything we do. On top of educating

people on the perils of GEN.AI and how to avoid it, Our next guests also share some really

creative approaches to mutual aid. After you're done listening, there's more information on

all of this in the show notes, as well as ways you can help support their work and ours. Let's

get to it. Can you two introduce yourself to the audience, please? Yeah, so I'm Kim Crawley.

I'm a returning guest. And since my last appearance on the show about a year ago, talking about

COVID and the importance of respirators and whatnot. Now, I am a professor at the Hope

and Institute of Technology. And while we'll see how much longer I'm on their faculty. And

I teach enterprise cybersecurity to masters students there. And I'm still a very passionate

anti-COVID activist who wears respirators all the time. But... I recently founded an organization

called Stop Gen. AI and my friend Nija here is a very important member of that organization.

And so our objective is to counter the menace of Gen. AI. And so the most important defensive

measure immediately right now is for us to raise mutual aid funds so that we can financially

support people who have been thrown into poverty because our oligarch overlords think that

they can replace all human labor with gen.ai. Hi, I'm Neha. I currently work as a machine

learning software engineer and I am aware of the fact there is good purposes for AI, but

gen.ai is not one of them. The fact that it takes the work from creatives and violates

copyright is incredibly unethical to me. And I feel there's not enough people in tech speaking

out about the harms of gen.ai. And that's why I chose to join the Stop Gen.ai organization

to be a voice for those creatives. And I myself am a hobbyist creator. I create watercolor

paintings and do pencil sketches. And I see so much value in that. And art is such an outlet

for me. And everyone deserves to still have that and not be replaced by Gen.ai. I myself

as well. I'm also an advocate for COVID prevention. I've suffered from long COVID symptoms for

over a year now, and still continuing to see my friends and family minimize COVID while

I'm suffering alone is very hurtful. And I want to be a voice in that space as well. Well,

thank you both for joining me. And you're about to take me to school a little bit because I

do not know the difference between AI. and Gen AI. Can you, one of you two, give us a

broad overview, you know, for the lay person, what that means and why specifically it's

more harmful than AI? Yes. So in the past, I have done research using machine learning,

which is a subfield of AI to predict diagnoses of healthcare. And I was basically given permission

to use an anonymized patient data set, which included a bunch of different features, including

different patient demographics, their medical test results, and so on. And this was essentially

inputting it into a machine learning model that's like all coded up. didn't need to write any

of the code for the model per se. I just imported the library and used that model to predict

the diagnosis. So this type of Machine learning is very useful for many different applications

and it's the fundamentals of it. It's based on math and calculus and linear algebra and

doesn't steal from anyone. It's just any data that's inputted into the model. I take good

care to ensure that it was collected with consent. But what GenAI is different is that it's regurgitating

creations, quote unquote, based on information that exists. So it's beyond just analyzing

the data and coming up with predictions. It's actually generating its own thing and that

leads to hallucinations. It uses so much more energy and in so many ways is bad environmentally,

stifling creativity and so on. And that's why I think it's important to make that distinction

because everyone's like, oh, like AI is so bad and they generalize it. But I think giving

that distinction and educating more people, especially around AI ethics. It's so important,

especially now. Absolutely, because I'm starting to see, you know, pushback against AI. It's

not the strongest narrative at the moment, right? Like I shared a CBC article with you folks

just before we recorded. you know, our national broadcaster is hyping it up. Our prime minister

is saying it is the future of technology. But On top of the loss of creativity that hopefully

we can expand on a little bit, there's the concerns of job replacement. But at the same time,

even people who know these trappings exist, almost everything that we use has this AI

feature. You know, it's offered, it's something you can turn on or off with certain applications.

I don't even know when it's being used, to be honest, in all of the applications that I

end up using throughout my day. And it's hard to know how to approach that day to day. But

what can folks be doing to be more cognizant of what they're using and whether or not that's

harmful? I have gone to great lengths to rid my everyday life of Gen. AI. We'll get into

it later, but my main motives for avoiding Gen. AI are not wanting to contribute to know,

environmental destruction, not wanting my privacy to be evaded by these big tech corporations.

Basically, I think of Gen.A.I. I think of the world being set on fire and people's brains

atrophying. That's another reason why I avoid Gen.A.I. because Gen.A.I. has been proven to

atrophy people's ability to think critically and to come up with new ideas on their own.

Like, basically, it kills a part of your brain if you keep using it. So what do I do? I had

Windows 11 on my laptop for the longest time and I have Windows administrative experience.

So every time there'd be a new Windows update and it would make Microsoft Co-Pilot. Microsoft

Co-Pilot is a Microsoft application of Gen.ai and it has this really nasty feature called

Recall that takes a snapshot of what you're doing on your computer every 10 seconds or

so. and shares it with Microsoft. So that's really disturbing. I would go and I would go

into the Windows registry and I would do what I had to do to get rid of Copilot every time

there was a new Windows update. And then eventually I came to the conclusion of I can't keep doing

this. Microsoft is gonna keep shoving Copilot onto my computer if I keep using Windows 11.

And this is an uphill battle. I thought I needed Windows for PC gaming. But it turns out that

all of my favorite Windows games are well supported in Linux now. So I got rid of Windows 11 and

I installed Kubuntu Linux, which is a type of Linux. There's not just one Linux operating

system. There are hundreds of Linux operating systems. So the one that I have on my laptop

is called Kubuntu. And then there was my phone and I had an Android phone like a lot of people

do. And Google kept trying to shove Google Gemini onto my phone, which was very disturbing

for me. really Google monitoring what I'm doing, Google trying to think for me. It was starting

to disturb me when I was text messaging people that instead of just letting me type what I

wanted to say, there'd be like, oh, do you want to say this? We've got like a gazillion of

things that we're predicting that we think that you might want to say to these people.

So if you have a If you have a Google Pixel phone, then it's possible to replace vanilla

Android, which is the version of Android that comes on your phone, with a modified version

of Android, which doesn't contain all of the evil Google stuff called Graphino S. And Graphino

S is only supported on Pixel phones. But if you have an Android phone that isn't a Pixel,

there are... other alternative operating systems. That sounds daunting. It's the same with,

it's very similar to our COVID conversation, right? Where there are many kind of individual

ways folks can do this, but it's not without some effort and some knowledge needed and

sometimes resources. So I'm guessing. Because I already feel like daunted. I'm like, oh my

gosh, OK, I can do that. I think I can do that. I know someone who can help me do that. So

I imagine some listeners are feeling the same way. But this collective that you've begun,

I suppose, is to push back against its use at all. Do you think you can stop Gen.ai,

as the name suggests? Specifically, Gen.ai should be removed. resisted and abolished completely.

there any politicians kind of picking that up or is everyone because you know we just appointed

a new minister of AI but? Absolutely not because all of our politicians under capitalism are

servants of capitalism. They want more hyper capitalism and capitalism is destroying the

planet and destroying everyone and they want more and more and more of it more and more

of that destruction and part of that destruction is gen AI. And so no, we don't have a single

politician who is oppositional to Gen. AI, not one. I'm sure if Olivia Chow heard about

it, she'd be like, woohoo, where's my next fat check? Because obviously she has shown that

she governs just like a conservative. I do not have any faith in any politicians or any

party or anything like that. And I feel like it's all a scam. We should get rid of all politicians.

send them to the Hague or whatever. Yeah, I'm not looking to them as a solution either. I

was wondering also, you know, what the pickup is on this idea. Like, I feel this perhaps

isn't on a lot of people's radar yet. Neha, what do you think? Yeah, I personally haven't

heard of any politicians for or against Gen.ai. I just feel they don't know about it yet, or

it's not in their scope. But I feel like if they did, they'd probably have partnerships

with those companies as so many of the tech companies already work with the military. It's

only to be assumed that because those tech companies are proponents of Gen. like Microsoft and

Google with their own models that they're going to fight to have it be implemented in government

systems. So I do not have any faith that there will be pushback from politicians. The reason

why our capitalist overlords drool so much about Gen.A.I. is one, they have this dream of replacing

all human labor so they don't have to pay any human being through their labor ever. That

is their dream. And they might sometimes lie and say, no, no, no, we're just trying to make

you productive. But then sometimes their mask slips and they make it clear that yes, we're

trying to replace every single one of you. And in a world where As proletariat, we need our

labor income in order to survive. That has absolutely devastating consequences to think about. And

it doesn't matter. I went into the programming subreddit and I was talking about, for instance,

O'Reilly Media is now pushing this bullshit. A lot of the programmers were seeing eye to

eye with me. But then there are also a lot of programmers who were saying, Oh, but my job

is safe because I've seen what GenAI does and it can't replicate what I do. It just produces

nonsense code that we always have to fix. So our jobs are secure. And then I said to them,

no, you're incredibly naive. It doesn't matter how lousy the quality of presumably GenAI generated

code is. They will still... want to replace you with it. doesn't matter how much stuff

gets blown up because of it. Just to make it clear to listeners, Gen.ai is not smart. Gen.ai

is not smart. It's not intelligent. It's not making inference. We human beings, we think

of words and concepts and ideas, and we think about it and we have like a thinking process.

That's not what Gen.ai with large language models does. You probably remember when Google started

putting autocomplete in their search bar like 20 years ago or like 15 years ago. And you

could type something like, for instance, Toronto is. Yeah, some people have fun, you know, figuring

out what the most popular response is. Exactly. And it could auto populate with Toronto is

capital Canada. And we know that Toronto is not the capital of Canada. but it's a popular

misconception. So very likely autocomplete could suggest Toronto is capital of Canada. One

example that I give on the StopGEN.ai homepage is chat GPT and a lot of these other applications

of GEN.ai will just say that everything that you're saying is correct and go for it, no

matter what you say. Because it's just imitating language. It's not thinking, it's not smart,

it's just imitating language, that's all. So you type in something like, for instance, since

tomatoes is the capital of Asia, what is the capital of tomatoes? And GPT would say, well,

tomatoes, the largest country in Asia, the capital is tea. So the capital of tomatoes is tea.

So the capital of the largest country in Asia is tea. Yeah, I think people understand some

of the flaws. You sent me an article though, Kim, Brian Merchant there, and he talks about

Duolingo. Duolingo? You know, the app that people use to learn different languages. And

he talked about workers like you described there, felt somewhat secure, knew they were training

AI. I pretend I know what that means. don't, but you know, they were working with AI. The

company wasn't slick in, you know, introducing it. Uh, but they thought, yeah, it would be

years and years before their jobs were, were replaced for the very reasons that you mentioned,

because it just wasn't doing the job. Like it wasn't there yet. The technology wasn't there.

And Brian gave a lot of examples of it being used in circumstances where it wasn't adequate,

but it was replacing workers anyway at incredible. rates. He also uses the example of Doge, that

way of looking at federal employee, a lot of white collar workers as just completely

replaceable by inadequate technology. The implications of that to the economy, like forget about the

individual for just a moment, right, because we will get there on how we can navigate that.

But The economy as a whole and like the livelihood of so many folks or, you know, especially from

that particular tax bracket, do you folks have any other examples of Canadian companies

that are heavily using AI and seeing job replacement? I would presume that most of them, especially

in tech and industries like journalism are probably trying to shove most of us out.

I can't name specifically Canadian companies, although Canadian companies are definitely

doing it. But recently, I believe it was, was it the Washington Post or was it another,

or is it Chicago? No, it was the Chicago Sun-Times published an article of summer book recommendations.

And none of the books that the article was recommending existed. existed yet or at all

like, did not like this, this book will be published in the future. Like the books did not exist.

The gen AI was like making up shit basically. Not that I've seen losses in this industry

yet, but I have seen people using like chat GPT or other gen AI tools as a therapist or

as a friend to talk to. And that's so disturbing because This is just a machine that essentially

just regurgitates whatever it decides to come up with. And as we can see that it hallucinates,

like it hallucinated book titles that did not even exist or will not ever exist. And the

fact that people are turning to these tools for major life decisions and crises is something

we should be very concerned about because this is just a regurgitator machine. It has no qualifications

on giving advice or anything. You're right. have seen a lot of people using it and boasting

about the benefits of using it for all sorts of things. Zoom has an AI function that I've

seen folks utilizing and, you know, I wonder every time I go, this ethical? this? Yeah,

no, no. Like, and I didn't mention it when I was talking about like the factors, but you

reminded me, I think, the environmental impact. think folks just know it takes up more resources

for some reason, but like, can you just again for the layperson, why is AI and gen AI

so resource heavy? Yeah, so without getting into the computer science too much, that's

for my sake, just like just like blockchain and cryptocurrency attached to it, it uses

mathematical calculations and all that of stuff in a very inefficient way. It's like instead

of, I remember when I was a little kid Tiny Toon Adventures, there was a segment where

an entire tree was buzzed down to make one tiny toothpick, right? You could make like hundreds

of toothpicks out of a tree, if not more, right? But the cartoon was showing MaxMillionMax or

whatever using an entire tree to make one toothpick. And it was like 1990, 1991 where environmentalism

was trendy back then. So that's kind of the computing thing for how Gen.AI uses computing

power. Good computer programmers will brag about how efficient their code is, how they can get...

A good software application to a good programmer is... you fulfill your objectives for that

computer program with as few lines of code as possible. You don't have a lot of extraneous

lines of code that aren't producing something useful. Gen.ai is just incredibly, incredibly

inefficient as far as computing power is concerned. You could be doing a lot more with those CPU

cycles and all that RAM, but it's producing much less with it. And it's not an argument

of making it better because there's detriments beyond its inefficiencies, right? Like, let's

say we could make it more efficient, even clean the energy up that we use to run it, right?

Dream world, dream world circumstances. There's still aspects of it. One of them you mentioned,

Nihai, maybe you want to expand on it, is the loss of creativity. I'm a hobbyist artist.

That means you make art without selling it, is that right? Yeah, that's the definition

I use. Okay, good. So like, how would that impact me? Yeah, so I think right now when I share

my creations with people, they're like, oh, wow, like, you're so talented. That's like

so creative. And I think if there is a chance that GenAI art quote unquote got better and

was able to replicate human created art better, think that wow-ness would go away and then

kind of the appeal of having artistic or creative hobbies would go away as well. And I like the

quote, the earth without art is eh, would just ring so much more because we need human created

art, especially now more than ever. Here's why even if you do not make money from your art,

you should be concerned. First of all, the artists who do make a living from There aren't, they

are supported by an infrastructure. When DeviantArt, the website, the social media platform came

out, I don't know, 20, 25 years ago, that was a platform created by artists to share their

visual art on the internet and their artist portfolios. And although a lot of artists

on DeviantArt never make any money from their art, the... platform thrive because there

are also people who did make money from their art, like professional illustrators and tattoo

artists and stuff like that. And under a capitalist system, the artists who make a living from

their art do provide an infrastructure that hobbyist artists can use as well. There are

stores that sell paints and art supplies and stuff like that. A lot of the people buying

paint and art supplies and all that are buying it for their hobbies, but there are also professionals

who are buying that stuff and under capitalism, that stuff would be less available to hobbyists

if people couldn't also make a living doing that sort of thing. And then there's the other

thing of artists are always inspired by other people's art, always, whether they're consciously

aware of it or subconsciously aware of it. If people stop producing art, whether for

money or as an unpaid hobby, then there's less art to be inspired by. Right? And what Gen.

AI produces is not art, right? Art requires creativity and human thinking. And the human

experience. Right. Computers can be used to make art. Like I've written novels and word

processors and artists use Adobe Photoshop and stuff like that. But if the computer is coming

up with all the ideas, then that's not art anymore. has to be a human being coming up

with the ideas and then the computer just being the equivalent of paintbrushes and a canvas.

You've made the argument, you know, to stop Gen-AI. So how are you going to do it? Okay.

Well, first of all, like our immediate concern is to raise money for people who are becoming

unemployed. Like for instance, my, even though The last time I spoke with you, wasn't a

college professor, now I am a college professor. Believe it or not, I make a lot less money

than I did, which is very, very scary considering how expensive my rent is, because my evil overlords

are convinced that they can replace me with Gen. AI very badly, by the way. It's not just

me that that's impacting, obviously, like if you see Bryant Merchant's Blood on the Machine

blog and whatnot. it's coming to millions of us millions and millions of us unemployment.

Yeah, so how so our mutual aid fund is intended to give people immediate survival money. And

anyone who donates 10 US dollars or more per year is eligible to get a stop gen AI webmail

account. And the bet there are two benefits to that the first being your email address

shows the world that you oppose Gen.ai, like a kind of like a vanity license plate, right?

And then the other benefit of that is our servers are hosted by a company called 1984 Hosting.

Iceland, yeah, funny name, And it's based in Iceland and they're very rebellious against

the big tech industry. But what's most important about 1984 Hosting is they are in Iceland.

And Iceland isn't subject to a lot of the trade deals that would make them have to share information

with the United States. So we know right now that the United States and probably Canada

pretty soon is fascist. And in the United States, especially with Silicon Valley, big tech and

fascism have commuted like All those like Microsoft, Google, they're all cooperating 100 % enthusiastically

with ICE and with Doge and all that kind of thing. So it's very important for me that

our website be hosted on servers that are outside of American control. But also you can get an

email address that is hosted by email servers that are outside of American control. which

is very good for like better protecting your own privacy from the fascism that's coming.

That's very clever. Yeah. So we'll give you webmail that you can use just, just, and cause

if you got Gmail or Hotmail that's under American control, right? So we offer an alternative

to that. If you donate $10 a year to us. So there's that. We have this fundraising initiative

that we launched recently. There's a PC gaming platform called itch.io. And itch.io is a platform

online where indie game developers share their games with the world. And not just indie games

now, but also independent novelists and comic book creators and tabletop RPG creators and

people like that. Now multiple mediums of creativity are using itch.io for indie distribution. So

sometimes people on itch.io create bundles of different PC games or different comic books

or different themes. There was this tech company called Humble Bundle that would sell a bunch

of indie games for cheap in one bundle and it would raise money for a charity. They do that

with itch.io too. So we are creating our own bundle on itch.io. with a bunch of indie games

and books and stuff like that. So we're at the stage right now where we are collecting people's

art to be sold in the bundle. So everyone who contributes art to the bundle, whether it's

a game or a comic or a book or whatever, gets a cut of the bundle revenue. And then whatever

money doesn't go to itch.io, it doesn't go to contributors to the bundle, goes to our anti-GEN.AI

mutual aid fund. So we need to raise money in our funds so that we can give it to people

who need immediate financial aid because they're being displaced by GEN.AI. We are accepting

new items into our bundle until I believe June 20th. So you got until June 20th, 2025 to contribute

something to our bundle. And if you contribute something to our bundle, you get a cut of the

bundle revenue when we saw the bundle. And then the bundle itself will go on sale probably

from late June. And that's going to be a fundraiser for our mutual aid fund. Another initiative

is to educate people. So to educate people about why they want to avoid GEN.AI and how they

can avoid GEN.AI. So that's going to be very, because you see the thing is the big evil tech

companies right now, Google, Amazon and Meta and Microsoft and Apple even. They're all shoving

this stuff down our throats because they know that GEN.AI actually isn't really good and

we're not going to, unless we're like tech bro types of drunken McCool-aid, a lot of us

are not going to willingly turn on GEN.AI features. So they're trying to trick people into using

it just like malware. is malware as far as I'm concerned. And then some of the other things

that I do to avoid GenAI include I never use Microsoft Office Suite. I never use Google

Docs, right? So then I don't have to worry about GenAI being shoved into that. I don't use

meta social media. So I don't have an Instagram account. I don't have a Facebook account.

If you have to have a Facebook account or an Instagram account, You got to at the very least

be very careful about what you're doing. But if you can possibly avoid those platforms even

better. But yeah, that's going to be one of the most important things to educate people

because you're also killing the planet. And you're killing your critical thinking skills.

So people's brains are starting to atrophy. So instead of coming up with their own ideas,

they're like, OK, I'm going to outsource my thinking to this glorified autocomplete. So

that's really concerning as well. And then every time they do that, a forest burns down. And

all the Gen.ai that Elon Musk and Sam Altman from OpenAI and all these other evil tech billionaires

want cannot be supported by our power grid. If we put a bunch of new oil plants and decommissioned

nuclear power plants back online, that's still not going to be enough power. to satisfy their

demands. So what we're going to see is we're going to see parts of our power grid blackout

here and there. If we all remember the great blackout of August 2003, those of us who were

there. We all had to direct our own traffic. Imagine that happening a lot more frequently

in those blackouts lasting for long. There are things like, for instance, a new data center

that has been put up to support JNAI. is they put these things near neighborhoods that marginalized

people are more likely to live in. So there are neighborhoods in the US that are predominantly

black, and they put a data center nearby, and it's poisoning their air, and it's giving the

people who live in the area cancer and stuff like that. Another reason is, do you want to

be on the same side of an issue as Elon Musk? Not just Elon, right? Karney, like I've mentioned,

is extremely gung-ho about AI. And I want to go back to something that Neha said about

tech not, or people working in tech not sounding off alarm bells enough. And I wonder, even

if it's not for the environment and for all the many, many, many reasons that you folks

have given, surely for their own preservation. And I'd also maybe like to pick both of your

brains about why folks aren't making this connection the same way we do for self checkouts. You

know, I know there's, it's a lot more complex than that, but it does make me think of, you

know, something that's just so obvious in replacing someone's livelihood in a political

economic climate where unemployment insurance is not even on the table for reform. know,

like the liberals won't talk about it. The conservatives won't push for it. So, you know. Yeah. And

I think the huge reason that we don't see like the majority of tech people that are on social

media talking about these issues is that a lot of them in their bio say that they work at

Microsoft or Amazon and they have to be proponents of the tools they're working on or working

with, especially which is ironic that I was talking to someone that they had to be a proponent

of the AI tools at their company in order to keep their job. And when you're kind of trapped

in that double bind of the job market is really bad for software engineers, but yet to talk

about something that you may not necessarily completely agree with. It's like, what is a

person to do? Like everyone's still at the end of the day has bills to pay. And it's like,

what battles do you want to pick with that? Also, lot of people in the tech industry are

tech bros who drink the cool air. Yeah, yeah. What Neha said just kind of right goes back

to what you folks are doing at stopgenai.com is providing mutual aid when needed, but also

feeding into spaces where folks maybe don't have to work at Microsoft and Amazon and Apple

and all the villainous corporations out there that that Maybe there is a space to still

make a living doing these types of things outside of that market, right? And that's common to

a lot of movements that try to create space where people can survive outside of capitalism

to a degree, right? We're all still impacted by it. What else has StopGen.ai focused on

doing? That's a good question. So if you go to our homepage right now, there's a bunch

of citations. for the various ways that GEN.AI is incredibly destructive, killing the planet,

killing humanity basically. We'd like to have more information about all that stuff and then

make it accessible to people. So I need a lot of help with that. But one thing that we don't

have on our website right now that I think is really important is tips for people on how

they can avoid GEN.AI. And they might not be able to... Avoid it completely, unfortunately,

but as much as they possibly can avoid it, they should. So I'm going to we're going to offer

tips on alternative software, for instance, alternative ways of doing things with computers.

I know a good comrade who has a Linux. It's a bit of a help group, but also a social group.

So I will link that also with the other resources that folks have mentioned, as well as your

website. in the show notes for sure so folks can see it for themselves because yeah there

are and like I said there's a lot of apps where folks maybe if you look a little closer you'll

realize that some of the features are certainly gen AI and they can be turned on or off but

they do try to I understand what you mean but like they're shoving it down your throat because

it's always popping up are you sure you don't I think in Canva you know there's a feature

are you sure you don't want to use this? And I'm like, no, I mean, a part of me does, right?

I'm like, I would love to see what you would put together for me. And are you going to save

me time? Because convenience is one thing. But I think some people, know, Miha mentioned

therapy or friends. There is this aspect of what it provides that people are clearly missing,

right? Whether it's companionship, access to therapy, the ability to figure things out,

even though, There's the answers. They're trusting the answers coming back a little too

implicitly Yeah When you were talking about copilot and Gemini Gemini Anyway, I'm learning

all of these things as we go obviously but you know the Bill C2 I'm trying to keep track

of all these awful fucking bills going through all of our levels of government, but one

of the It's a xenophobic mass deportation bill but Funnily enough, there's the added bonus

of a loss of privacy. Canada Post opening mail, yada yada. It's really not part of this

discussion, but part of it is internet privacy and the ability for the federal government

to take that kind of information, those snapshots that you were talking about, and to be able

to order. that kind of information straight from the provider with very little oversight

like less and less and less oversight and meaning courts and whatnot. I wonder you know beyond

or maybe it's with the use of gen AI I'm not sure but do you want to comment on that in

the way that governments are going like will that with all the steps that you're taking

you know on your computer and your phone would this undermine that? It overlaps only a little

bit. I am decreasing my surveillance surface by not using GEN.AI because GEN.AI is just

taking people's creativity and their actions and all that and storing it so we don't have

any privacy anymore. One of the immediate threats of GEN.AI to people's privacy is, for instance,

it's a complicated computer science concept, but I'll try and keep it simple. You can't

have gen AI keep training on gen AI output, because then it will explode much quicker.

It's like it's like incest basically, if you got gen AI training on output produced by other

gen AI, it's incestuous. It'll replicate mistakes as well as information. Exactly. So they need

fresh human ideas to keep training the gen AI and that they're running out of that on the

internet because they want to Yeah. So one of the reasons why Microsoft is pushing Copilot

in Windows and for instance Google is pushing Gemini in Android is because they want to

train on the things that we do on our computers and on our phones. And so training on the things

that we do on our computers and our phones is violating our privacy. Right? then there's

so yeah, there's so many like it's evil in every conceivable way. And the only reason

why people are going along with it is because they're ignorant. They don't know what's going

on and they're taking the path of these resistance. Another thing is like, you know, you're probably

you're you're definitely neurodivergent. Right. But you like reading books and you like listening

to other people's podcasts and stuff like that. Imagine instead of reading a book, instead

of listening to a podcast, instead of listening to this podcast in a normal way, oh, I don't

have time for that. I just want Gen.ai to like regurgitate it as like a 30 second summary.

So first of all, you're losing a lot of the information in the context from the book or

the podcast or the movie or whatever. And then secondly, the way that the JNAI could be summarizing

it could be inaccurate or bias. Yeah, losing a lot of context and ideas that you could have

gotten if you listen to the podcast in normal way. That's why I don't edit a lot of what

the guests say, because sometimes I feel like, maybe they're repeating themselves. Maybe this

information isn't important. Like I might think it to myself. But then I'm like, but I shouldn't

be that filter. I will let the audience decide or maybe you when you look at the bigger picture

this was a very important point to them to somebody else and so I generally just leave it all on

there even when I feel that way and I feel like that's that I always question that like those

results that you get there's a certain filter to decide what 30 seconds like how you summarize

something you leave a lot out and what information aren't you getting from your chat gpt results

but sometimes I see folks just relieved by the ease that it's brought them somewhere, you

know, and I know you can make the argument that the results that they're getting aren't optimal

and could be even wrong. Again, going back to that self-checkout, like you're in a rush,

you have screaming children with you, you need to get in and out and now they only employ

one cashier, right? And so, you know, journalists, you have deadlines. There's less time, less

money, less opportunity. Like maybe you're starting to use tools that you know you shouldn't and

whatnot. like folks also are driven by material need that they didn't create too, right? Or

like this pressure or lack of access to therapy, right? Again, we'll go back to that. Like

there's no other way. They don't even have any other way to maybe talk to somebody. And so

yeah, they're using this because they've been pushed to a point where they feel they need

it or maybe, you know, they do need it. How can we get folks to realize, to kind of pull

back a bit on that? Yeah, I think a huge part of it is the social conditioning that it's

framed as a replacement for a search engine and not just, you know, a tool that should

be used cautiously, that instead of people now using internet search engines like Google or

DuckDuckGo, they now just go straight to ChatGPT. It's like, ChatGPT will just regurgitate what

I need to know. I don't have to go through dozens of web pages to find what I'm looking

for. And especially with tasks that people don't like to do, like, oh, make me a grocery list.

like, which is kind of disturbing, but like, I see where it comes from that like, you know,

the going through the process of thinking through, what meals do I want this week? Like, I want

a nutritious diet, I can just, you know, tell that to chat DPT, and it'll give me some ingredients

with recipes. And also going back to the point on kind of how this impacts minorities is

a lot of this gen AI isn't even run by computers, it's run by people in the global south. And

There was recently one company that Microsoft invested in and they weren't doing so well

and it turned out that their chat bots were just people in India giving the responses.

So not only is it impacting marginalized communities with the data centers polluting their air,

but literally what's running or powering the tool could be these people from the global

south and developing nations across the globe, which continues to highlight why gen.ai is

so bad. Yeah, no, I started off, think, in my notes with like three points as to why Gen

AI is bad and my my notepad is now full with arrows and some points and like I don't think

there's much arguing it. I think the question just still sits with how do you get more folks

to come around, you know, to understanding. not just the harmful nature, because then there's

a step beyond that, right? Even once we realize where there's climate catastrophe is here,

it's like they need to know how in as easy way as possible, they can play a role, right?

Because people are overwhelmed too, with many other battles on the horizon or already here,

right? So I think sometimes when folks point out that one, especially the one thing that's

people were kind of getting excited about it was accessible to everybody and it seemed to

be, you know, boosting their productivity. And then then they're told actually this has

all the same trappings as many of the other things that you've had to battle. So scrap

it. You know, it's like your family finding out there's just one more thing to boycott,

one more corporation, one more thing we can't do because of X, Y and Z and the system that

we're living under. So I guess the idea is to point people again back to stop jena.com.

Check the show notes for sure for many ways to engage with these folks and to help with

the fundraising activities or get involved yourself. Are you onboarding volunteers? Absolutely.

All you got to do, the information is on our website, stopjena.com. But if you find my email

address or my signal username and message me, that's all it takes. There is a document of

shared values that people in our group have. The most important shared value other than

being against Gen AI is you have to be anti-capitalist because capitalism births Gen AI. And so you

cannot effectively oppose Gen AI if you're not anti. I don't know you and I, because we're

leftists, we know, for instance, that liberals are not left. and stuff like that. And we know

that Marxist-Leninists have debates with Trotskyists and stuff like that. We're not so picky about

your flavor of anti-capitalism, whether you're a communist or a narco-communist or Marxist,

but you have to be anti-capitalist in some way. I'm feeling that requirement. I feel like a

lot of even climate justice organizations are getting there. Yeah, you cannot, you cannot

be okay. You cannot tolerate any amount of capitalism and be a member of like an environmentalism

organization or stop gen AI. Yeah. Cause capitalism is the cause of these problems. Absolutely.

And then we know what the problems with like social democracy and stuff like that, because

that tolerates capitalism. So that can be, we also don't tolerate bigotry. We're very passionate

supporters of trans rights, we've got lots of trans people in our group, for instance. We're

passionate supporters of neurodivergence and we've definitely, I'm neurodivergent, we've

got lots of neurodivergent people in our group. And then another really important value is

to support free Palestine. And then a lot of the evil Gen.A.I. shit that Microsoft and Google

are doing, they're doing it for the benefit of Israel as well, for them. They're using

their Gen.A.I. bullshit partly they think it's helping them genocide Palestinians. So yeah,

it's clear to us, you have to be anti-capitalist and you have to support the liberation of Palestine.

Absolutely. I don't know how many guests we've had on here where they're listing these issues

from data servers near marginalized neighborhoods to job replacements and the exploitation of

the global south. And I always think like, yes, there's all these other steps that we

we need to take to get there, but then also just like fucking smash capitalism. That wouldn't

be a problem. They wouldn't be allowed to put those data centers there and they wouldn't

be able to operate them like that. Like there'd be so many other like, well, that only happens

because we're living under this shite socioeconomic system. So, but we're not there yet either.

So this is how we mitigate through this disaster and take care of each other as well until we

get to the other side. Right. Absolutely. And so when people choose to use GEN.AI, they're

also training the replacements. And it's not like we live in a world where people have the

things that they need and automation just makes everything better. We live in a world where

people depend on their labor income in order to survive. Yeah, I think that article I shared

with you mentions CARNI planning to up to $15,000 for workers to start training on AI.

And I thought that's pretty cheap. Some people will look at that go $15,000. Well, like I

can get a lot of training done with that, but you are training your replacements. And so

that is actually quite cheap for the feds to invest $15,000 one year with the possibility

of replacing a few people's jobs by the time that year is done. again, yeah, it happens

a lot faster. than people expected. So I'm glad that you folks came on here to help, you know,

raise the alarm and the profile of the issue. Neha, do you have anything you want to say

before we sign off? Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of parallelism with different issues. Like

there's very similar trend regarding taking COVID-19 seriously that nowadays it's not very

common to wear a respirator in public. and continue to avoid COVID that now the norm is, hey, like

we have vaccines, like it's fine despite the fact that there's so much research that shows

that COVID-19 affects every organ in the body the same way there's so many articles and research

around how gen AI impacts the environment. And it's easy to just, you know, use gen AI like

everyone else, be unmasked like everyone else. And that is an internal barrier to overcome

that, you know, we all want social approval, but doing the right thing is so hard and just

educating yourself and even taking little steps, step by step. don't have to, you do everything

at once and slowly kind of condition yourself to be like, like this is the right thing despite

what everyone around me is doing. is a wrap on another episode of Blueprints of Disruption.

Thank you for joining us. Blueprints of Disruption is an independent production operated cooperatively.

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