“AI” needs an acceptance of endless amounts of violence (I will not be able to list all forms of it, this is just a selection).
In order to train “AI” systems you need data. Lots of it. And then some more. That’s really hard to get legally, especially when a large part of the population does not want their creative works or the data about them to be fed into those machines. The first form of violence “AI” depends on is the violence of data acquisition: “AI” depends on scraping and accumulating all you can get – including taking against people’s explicit will and without their consent. I run iocaine on my server and it’s absolutely crazy to see how many AI scrapers do ignore my stated preferences and just try to take all I have ever written to train their systems. And I am not alone of course. “AI” Labs keep downloading unlicensed works like books, keep digitizing anything they can find in order to feed their data hunger. They know it’s illegal and unethical but that’s irrelevant. “AI” systems exist because of the belief that “if you can download it, you can use it”. It’s the belief that might makes right. The second form of violence happens during data labeling and cleaning. Workers mostly in the global south have to spend their days looking at the worst shit you can imagine to try to keep torture content or depictions of sexualized violence against people out of the training data. This is not only economic exploitation (they get paid very little for that mentally and psychologically immensely hard job) but also a violence done to their psyche and mental health. Because we are too lazy to look for stock photos some mother in Kenya can no longer sleep due to nightmares. The third violence we already alluded to: It’s the colonialist, western view to declare whatever the west thought was “worth” digitizing or whatever submits to those logic “all the world’s knowledge”. This is not just lack of representation but a forceful othering of large parts of the population of this planet. If you are not useful to western, capitalist readings of the world then you, your history, your experiences are not part of “all the world’s knowledge”. You are being declared a lesser human being. The fourth violence is the violence done against marginalized groups using “AI” tools that we are just demanded to accept. This starts with the Trump administration creating racist propaganda using “AI” but it doesn’t end there. The amount of abuse and sexual violence that especially women are constantly being exposed to is staggering. “Nudify” apps, “grok, put her into a bikini” are just the most obvious of those tools. It’s not that most “AI” labs explicitly support those kinds of usage but they are also not limiting usage: It’s just “bad guys” or “usage violating our terms of service” but that’s just a legal defense not taking responsibility for enabling that kind of abuse. Using “AI” requires normalizing these forms of violence. You need to accept them in order to be able to live with yourself integrating those tools into your workflows. And this is the connection to fascism. [...] I am a big believer in Stafford Beer’s principle that “the purpose of a system is what it does”, that when evaluating systems one needs to look at the actual effects that system has on the world and not its manual or the sales pitch. From that we can pretty easily determine the short-term purpose of “AI”: The destruction of labor power. Continua su https://tante.cc/2026/04/21/ai-as-a-fascist-artifact/
