Ai and the panic of the white collar worker

Ai and the panic of the white collar worker

Words and art are arguably no more or less important or human than agriculture and craft. The difference between the powerloom and AI, perhaps, is the power and self-importance of those the technologies “disrupt”.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, there has been rage against the machine. From the first saboteurs in France, who tried to destroy power looms in the 17th century to the protests against mechanisation by labour unions and more recently, in the 1990s, against computerisation in India’s public sector by the CPM and Samajwadi Party — tech “disruptions” have led to deep churn in the nature of work. Yet, there is a tendency in the current moment — fed, perhaps, by the narcissistic hyperbole engendered by social media — to view the impending changes in labour and life by developments in artificial intelligence as especially apocalyptic.

Two AI-powered apps — ChatGPT and, to a lesser extent, Lensa — are the cause of a seeming moral panic around the nature of intellectual and artistic work. Since ChatGPT — an open-source AI-based text-generating tool — became public in December, everyone from writers, editors, academics to assorted white-collar professionals has been worried about jobs becoming obsolete and plagiarism becoming rampant. In fact, the bot’s creators, OpenAI, recently announced that they would create a watermark of sorts to ensure plagiarism can be easily detected. Lensa, on the other hand, creates stunning portraits with a subtlety hitherto thought to be an exclusively human domain, using AI.

The usual defence against the fear that AI will take over tasks that are fundamentally “human” is that no machine will be sophisticated enough to generate the pathos of a Dostoyevsky or the insight of a brilliant academic. The more important question, perhaps, is why upper-class passions and jobs are seen as more “fundamental” in the first place. When computers were used to replace accountants, or entire communities of weavers were lost to mass production, the human condition was not altered. Words and art are arguably no more or less important or human than agriculture and craft. The difference between the powerloom and AI, perhaps, is the power and self-importance of those the technologies “disrupt”.