Pink goo and stolen sandwiches

Under global capitalism, work doesn’t just magically disappear. It only gets transformed, shifted around, and obscured – even from the workers themselves – through layers upon layers of commodification and alienation.

For you to be able to use any generative AI product, countless authors, artists, scientists, journalists, and other workers around the world had to spend hours producing the rich substrate of information that this industry desperately needs in order to grow. Content moderators had to sanitise data swamps and provide reinforcement training to large language models. Construction workers and facility managers had to build and operate massive data centers. Site reliability engineers had to set up, scale, and maintain global server infrastructure. UX designers and software engineers had to package complex technology into accessible features.

With a simple prompt, so goes the Faustian bargain with generative AI, you can escape the shared struggle of all these poor souls, and join the ranks of those who are savvy enough to profit off of other people’s work instead of toiling away themselves.

In Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, McKenzie Wark describes labor force that gets harvested and shaped into commodities as “pink goo”. This image seems particularly fitting for large language models; the intellectual work of millions, ground up into atomic tokens and blended into an anonymous, homogenous mass.

The generative AI industry only exists because some people decided that it’s okay for them to take all this work with no permission, let alone compensation for the original creators, and to charge others for the privilege of using the probabilistic plagiarism machines they’ve fed it to. “[Generative AI] is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response”. It doesn’t matter if you find it useful.

If you tell me you’re hungry and I then walk up to another person, punch them in the face, take their sandwich, and hand it to you, the appropriate response is “What the hell is wrong with you?”, not “Thank you for the nice sandwich”.

When we open the faucet and pink goo comes out, we have to remind ourselves that it wasn’t the faucet that made it.