Against the Factory Farming of Creativity

Why you should join the digital organic movement

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Paying subscribers can listen to me reading this essay here

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AI is a machine, and it’s trained on millennia of human creativity.

I know that our datasets don’t go back millennia, but nobody grows up in a vacuum, and every creative soul develops their craft in the context of previous creative souls, and this chain stretches back to the beginning of humanity. So, embedded in every work – whether it be a text, song, artwork, invention or idea – are traces of all its predecessors.

Take, for example, language itself. We use this substrate of meaning to creatively express things, but every word was developed and shaped by countless generations of people we’ll never meet. While it’s true that I just created this paragraph, the various inflections and turns of phrase within it (such as, ‘for example’ and ‘turns of phrase’) were developed by others.

The word choices in my articles come from me developing my craft for over fifteen years, and doing so in the context of millennia of human word choices. I spend days editing my pieces, which is why I got so angry when someone recently suggested that my article Surveillance Capitalism 2024, Wrapped had been edited using AI. According to them, my word choices and turns of phrase revealed the presence of an automated editor.

The idea that I edited an article about surveillance capitalism with generative AI - a machine developed through surveillance capitalism - was outrageous to me, especially because I’m a proud Neo-Luddite. Much like callisthenics athletes work out naturally using only their own bodyweight, while avoiding steroids and gym machines, so Neo-Luddites like me believe that arduously editing your own work, or crafting something slowly, creates stuff that’s not only higher quality, but is also good for the soul of the creator.

Neo-Luddites do not reject the use of technology. We reject the cult of technology. Remember folks, tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster and more crammed with stuff that we previously didn’t experience as a need, and this is driven by systemic factors beyond anyone’s individual control. ‘Choosing’ to use a smartphone, for example, is much like choosing to continue running on an accelerating treadmill that you’re required to run on to survive. If you fail to make that choice you’ll be dumped off the edge of society into the economic periphery, which for most people isn’t an option, which means there isn’t really a choice. There’s a reason why it’s called the ‘rat race’ - you gotta keep running or you’re screwed.

So, I understand that I’m supposed to ‘keep up’ with tech (aka. run on the treadmill), but I do refuse to indulge the Silicon Valley stories about tech liberation, and I do my utmost to resist the latest waves of acceleration.

This is why there was something so jarring about realising there are people out there who can’t accurately detect the absence of AI in my articles. That’s why I created an AI-free sticker to put up on ASOMOCO: the content on this website is not factory-farmed.

I’ve been sensing we need a movement to promote an ‘AI-Free’ label, much like the movements that promoted the Fair Trade label on bananas. After all, many of us are now struggling to detect AI, which means we’re also struggling to detect its absence. I’ve always known that adverts are trying to manipulate me, but now I find myself looking at them even more suspiciously: is that woman in the toothpaste ad a machine output? Is that dancer in the car commercial real? Those are now valid suspicions, but they’re going to be hurtful if there is an actual dancer. How dare you say my moves are AI-generated!

One sad victim of this is DeviantArt. Ten years ago I loved browsing this website, where graphic artists could post their surrealistic works. I’d use it to find potential illustrators for my articles. Now, though, audiences will assume that any image with a fantasy edge could be AI-generated, even when it’s not, so do I really want to commission an illustrator with that style?

This points to an emergent injustice. Generative AI is trained on the work of generations of artists and designers (which I’m sure includes the 20 years of AI-free material on DeviantArt), but then goes on to not only create career insecurity for those artists, but also to erode the sense of authenticity that previously surrounded their real work. Imagine being a graphic novel illustrator working for two years on a project, and then overhearing a reader say ‘oh these images are clearly AI-generated’. The tech is taking credit for work it hasn’t even done.

Automated aura has no aura at all

I noted earlier that all creative works contain traces of everything that came before – the graphic novelist is drawing on traditions of storytelling and visual layout that extend back thousands of years, and the feeling of authenticity comes from them adding something of themselves to that chain of creativity.

This applies in all fields: Jackson Pollock paintings aren’t merely spatters of paint. They’re evidence of a feeling person who engaged with a canvas, reacting to previous generations of canvases. It’s entirely possible to replicate the surface appearance of that - for example, with a machine designed in a corporate lab that randomly spits out paint - but that will never feel the same.

This is picked up by Walter Benjamin in his 1935 classic The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. A McDonald’s restaurant feels less ‘authentic’ than an old family-run BBQ house, because the latter only exists in one place in one time with one eccentric cook and one backstory, and if you try to replicate this in a cookie-cutter fashion you destroy the ‘aura’ that surrounds the unique thing. Similarly, creating the surface appearance of a Pollock artwork without the backstory feels empty.

Technology doesn’t always destroy aura, but it often displaces it. For example, electronic music DJs use shit-tonnes of automation tech, and we’re not going to sense a particular ‘aura’ about the individual drum loops they use. Nevertheless, people can get very passionate about DJs because we can see the craft and intention they pour into the curation of sounds, and the manipulation of the equipment (against the backdrop of previous generations of music). In fact, genres like techno use technology to capture the grind of life in industrial society, and to turn it towards creating emotional release on the weekend.

EGØ DEÅTH, London

In a typical aura-displacement sequence, though, the old aura remains intact in its original context. For example, house music DJs might use vocal samples from sixties soul singers, but nobody feels like those old time crooners are being degraded in the process. Generative AI, by contrast, opens up new realms of creativity only by impersonating entire generations of previous creativity. It doesn’t try to remix something. It tries to copy something, attacking that thing’s aura in its own context - in other words, you’re listening to the house music DJ and you suddenly think, wait a moment, are those sixties vocal samples actually real?

We will of course see people who, like a DJ, try to generate new forms of aura through the creative manipulation of AI, but as the power of the automation tech increases, the ability to do this gets more tenuous. The techno producer can still spend months fine-tuning tracks, and that’s different to pushing a button to generate a hybrid sixties-meets-house-music album in 30 milliseconds.

You might say well, what’s wrong with expanding our canvas of possibilities? Surely, it’s always good to have a new tool? Surely, it’s good if a person can splice together a ten-hour meta-album using 100 auto-generated sub-albums as raw material?

Well, there’s diminishing returns to automation like this, partly because there’s limits to how much people can actually absorb, but the reason that generative AI gets funded isn’t to allow one cutting-edge AI artist to build a ten-hour album. Rather, it’s to allow for a tenth of a person to build a one-hour album, so that a corporate hotel chain can pay less for their elevator music. Let’s explore this.

The Masterless Piece

Clicking a button that says create instantaneous renaissance masterpiece will not create a masterpiece. This is because the term masterpiece comes from the age of guilds, where you had to show mastery of your craft to enter the guild. No artists will get into any artist guild by using generative AI, but the engineers that built the machine can certainly impress the proverbial Guild of Toolbuilders to say ‘look at my masterpiece of invention. It’s a machine that can replicate the surface appearance of any point in the millennia of human creativity’.

Who might fund such a machine though? As I discussed in The Emptiness Machine, the people who fund the commercial application of generative AI are – primarily – capitalists. Why do they fund it? Well, the evolutionary logic of a capitalist system tilts towards a narrow range of creative endeavours like make something faster, make something bigger, and make something sell more, so entrepreneurs will generally only be funded by venture-capitalists if they lean in that direction too (aka. if your creative impulse is to slow something down, make it smaller, more unique, and less addictive, you probably won’t be funded, and your creativity won’t turn up in the mainstream market).

Historically, firms would hire different creative classes - like artists, copywriters and photographers - and would channel those people’s broad creativity into the narrow pursuit of profit-optimization: for example, they might create adverts. The creative class firms love most, though, are those tool-builders, the engineers. In the case of generative AI, engineers were commissioned by capitalists - either directly or indirectly (via university funding etc) - to take those thousands of years of human invention, and turn it towards building a machine that could generate the surface appearance of a renaissance artwork. Why? Well, venture capitalists know every corporate boss will reach for this new tool in place of hiring the photographers and artists they used to rely on. Generate me an advert for razor blades in the style of Da Vinci sketches.

This is why we now have this system of automated faux-creativity, which is causing people to doubt the veracity of actual creative output, but this phenomenon in which automation increases societal doubt in creativity and diminishes ‘aura’, isn’t new.

For example, most people know that Ikea furniture is pumped out by computer-guided lathes, rather than artisan carpenters. It’s pretty low-aura furniture, but it’s still possible to feel some warmth towards it, especially in situations where it carries class aspirations. In fact, class politics and industrial processes lie at the ambiguous heart of mass consumer culture.

Historically, mass-manufacture facilities – factories – were used by economic elites to get rich while claiming they were liberating everyone. Henry Ford used automation alongside production lines to increase scale and drive down unit costs, which meant the workers of his factories could afford the cars they were building.

But who were those workers? They were people with lower levels of power who sold their labour to Ford, who owned a concentration of productive assets. At an individual firm level, it looks like a capitalist is paying workers to operate assets – Ford is offering employment – but when you zoom out to a systemic level the picture changes: when you look at workers-in-general as a collective class, you’ll see they all turn up in the morning to thousands of different factories, where they will operate the assets owned by bosses-in-general. They then leave work, and enter the market as consumers to buy those things using the wages they were paid to build them. On net, what’s happening is that the ownership class as a whole is renting out the assets to the working class as a whole, taking a big cut in the middle while saying ‘we took risk’, or ‘we gave you jobs’, or ‘we directed you’ (psst, wanna know the other little systemic secret? Previous generations of workers built the assets that are now being rented out to the current generation).

Regardless of whether you believe this arrangement is fair or not, one thing is certain: the rentier classes make nothing unless the workers turn up, just like beekeepers make no honey without bees.

This, though, leads to class gradations in consumer behaviour. The elites take that rent (the difference between what they pay their workers, and what workers will pay back to them to buy goods), and use it to buy more expensive stuff that working class people won’t have access to. Think, for example, of those ‘brick’ mobile phones used by yuppie professionals in the 1980s.

What’s happening here is that dual, out-of-sync, layers are forming within a single economic system. The mismatch in the layers, however, creates an opportunity for a new class of capitalists to turn luxury goods into mass consumer goods. They’ll say stuff like ‘we want to democratise the mobile phone market’, but to drive down the costs of producing phones, they’ll buy machines (from other groups of capitalists), and insert those machines into the production process in place of the workers who were previously there. This lowers the labour required to create a phone, boosting productivity on the production side of the circuit, which means the product appears on the consumption side in a cheaper form.

‘Democratisation’ of goods in this context happened by paying one class of people – capitalists who hire machine-builders – for tech to replace another class of people: artisan workers. Those latter people are told to find a new job, and accept the consolation prize, which is that society now has cheaper mobile phones (which they need, because they’re now making less money in wages).

The net result is that phones are ‘democratised’. Theoretically, this would be good if we were able to turn this higher standard of living into more leisure time and relaxation, but that won’t happen. In reality, what happens now is that the economic system will reset to a state of higher acceleration in which the new technology – which used to be ‘luxury’ – now becomes the mandatory baseline required for survival.

Against the new baseline, new management teams will continue the circuit. They’ll extract rent for the elite strata, who will again buy stuff that isn’t available to the lower strata. Perhaps this now includes organic wine, or meat from a farmer’s market. Those goods never used to be ‘luxury’ - in the 17th century they were a normal baseline for the average person – but in the context of mass automation they’re relatively more expensive in labour terms, so it becomes a mark of status to buy them. This is why fancy supermarkets like Waitrose in the UK are frequented by managerial elites, while working classes go to Aldi (Aldi executives, however, will shop at Waitrose).

These out-of-sync layers will have the technological salvation narrative embedded in them: old farm workers who previously tended chickens by hand might now be pushing the buttons on machines that automatically harvest eggs, but while the executives of these factory farms will buy organic in Waitrose, they’ll defend industrial farming as a salvation for the poor: like Henry Ford’s workers, their workers can buy cheap eggs, which they need, because… well… we live in an unequal society where some people get a much higher cut of the societal product by relying on others getting a much lower cut.

Those rich people will also use their profits to patronise ‘uneconomic’ things like fine art, which gains its luxury status partly because of it’s disdain for mass industrial economic efficiency, and lack of immediate utility. Predictably, though, this opens an opportunity for a new wave of ‘democratisation’. The world’s most powerful venture capitalists come in and say, ‘we’re removing fine art from the hands of the elites!’ and voila, there’s Generative AI. Of course, in the background their actual customers are going to be those firms who want to fire their designers and copywriters, or the corporate hotel chains that previously bought elevator music from actual musicians.

The degenerating tape

This process of being terrorised as an employee while being patronised as a consumer has no end. It’s like a ceaseless game of cat and mouse – cat takes your job, but run like mice to the next station to get another job, catch your breath and buy the cheaper stuff, until you have to run again. As you flip burgers in McDonalds, waiting for Andreesen Horowitz and the other VC companies to fund the tool-builders to build a burger-flipping robot, you’re told that a product utopia awaits you at the end of this all, a mystical land of rest where you have abundant goods and no precarity.

But, that’s a mirage. There is no true rest point in this system. All we do is endlessly adapt to its endless change. A new generation of kids will try to use generative AI to make films or music, but there’s no ‘pause’ button we can push to say ‘ok, we have enough productive power now, so let’s just chill and focus on how to use and distribute it properly’. No. Generative AI will just becomes the new baseline from which the various warring sectors of elites will try to push the next frontier of systemic acceleration and expansion.

There was a time in human history when technology had an aura. But, if technology is an art-form, it’s creation is now on auto-pilot, reproduced through the mechanical logic of profit-maximization. This is why an existential emptiness starts to surround it. It’s one thing to dazzle 19th century rural folk with new industrial gadgets, but a modern person might be bored to hell with virtual reality in about 20 minutes. That’s because we’re almost entirely saturated by automation technology, like being surrounded by 40,000 photographs of the Mona Lisa.

So, even if it was true that somehow this tech made our lives easier rather than faster, we experience a growing distance between ourselves and the raw creative material of the world. In techno-utopian circles they spin this into a story of transcendence – they imagine a ‘transhuman’ ‘singularity’ where we detach from our environment like gods, so numbed and bored of the earth that we can only gain excitement by looking to space.

But, this is just a weird religious spin on the actual thing that awaits us at the end of capitalism, which is the fact that… well.. there is no end. It’s like a tape that loops while being constantly overdubbed until it eventually degenerates into noise, and you’re left standing there on a planet that’s been turned into a giant mall surrounded by a giant waste-heap, and you’re thinking ‘now what?’

Now what?

We do not factory farm to help the working class. We factory farm because we are stuck in a systemic loop that always defaults towards scale and speed regardless of whether it actually helps people. It’s not like there’s actually a real utopia waiting at the end of this, so why don’t we just cut the farce? Why don’t we just call out this version of ‘progress’ for what it is. A tape stuck on loop. A treadmill.

I know that I can’t push pause on the grinding cogs of capitalism by myself, but I can cultivate a callisthenic way of being and to ask you to do so too. Fuck the treadmill. Fuck the factory-farmed creativity. Don’t get me wrong. I know we’re all stuck in this, so I don’t judge anyone who finds themselves pushed to use AI – if that’s what you’ve got to do to economically survive, then do what you have to do – but I’m pledging that ASOMOCO is 100% AI-free in all aspects, and always will be.

And yes, I know that this is forming the seeds for a new dual layer in the economy, and I know, like the organic farmers before me, that a bunch of elites will use their automation profits to patronise AI-free long-form writing like a ‘luxury’. And yes, I know that Andreesen Horowitz will also be trying a fund a robot to automate long-form writing that critiques automation. But screw it. Let’s embrace our roles in the grand farce, and build the digital organic movement anyway. Let’s give it some aura.