As Victor Hugo said, Aimer, c’est agir. To love is to act.
Okay writers, I need your voice here :)
Y’all, sometimes my head is so full of thoughts I barely know where to start. All I know is these twenty things, they matter. Will you come on a little journey with me?
. . .
On a freezing day in February, 1829, Victor Hugo watched a man in rags being dragged away for stealing a loaf of bread. He wasn’t watching the man, except peripherally. He was watching the woman and child hiding in the shadows. He knew what was going to happen to them. It wasn’t going to be pretty.
People say writing is seeing and for Hugo, it was absolutely true. Every day, he’d go home, write down everything he saw. Choses Views—in English, Things Seen. Everything he saw, every day. Logged in his journals. His soul, on the page.
Hugo’s journals “Choses Views” or “Things Seen” — from Neglected Books Imagine this. Your boss tells you the company plans to fire you because they found someone who’ll do your job for less money and not take any time off but they need you to train your replacement. Because frankly, they don’t know how to train your replacement. Would you do it? Or would you tell them to shove it?
That’s what Luddites were. Weavers, in 1811, who were told to train the people who’d operate machines for substandard pay so they could fire the weavers. Instead of training their replacements, they smashed machines and protested companies putting profit over people. It’s a longer story, of course, but that’s the essence. Not people who didn’t adopt technology as some seem to think. It was people protesting corporations putting profit over people.
Have you heard of tokenmaxxing? God, what a term. Comes from some guy who bashed his face with a hammer and called it looksmaxxing because it gave him a more chiseled jaw. When corporations use AI, usage is measured, just like when the power company reads your meter. AI use is measured in tokens. Okay?
According to a Fortune article, Amazon developers said managers monitor the token use of employees. At Meta, they have a dashboard called “Claudenomics” that measures how much AI employees are using and puts it on a leaderboard. It’s all measured. The ‘best’ staff are the ones using the most AI tokens.
You know what they’re using AI tokens for? Training AI to replace them. Programmers. Using AI tokens to train AI to do their jobs. Then they’ll get fired.
Tech company executives say AI is going to “transform the economy” but what they mean is it will replace employees. Because every penny spent on payroll is money they don’t keep in their own pockets. The Economist says one in five Americans expects to lost their job to AI in the next five years.
Five years is a stretch. In April, Google said 75% of new code was AI generated. Microsoft expects to hit 95% AI by 2030. Zuckerberg says within 12-18 months they expect AI to be creating most of the code that runs Meta. So, five years if you work at Microsoft, lol. They don’t want to pay programmers anymore.
In December, Amazon AWS had a 13-hour service interruption because AI made changes without human intervention. Staff said it’s happened more than once. Amazon doesn’t care. They just want to fire humans to make more profit.
I read a post about people on Substack using AI to “read” articles and post comments. Not bots like on Reddit. Actual writers like you and me who want the benefits of community interaction, but not the work or time, so they outsource it to AI. It was a sobering read and a little depressing but mostly I wanted to ask those people. Who gave you permission to feed other people’s writing into AI? What makes anyone think that’s okay? It’s not okay. How dare you?!
I read another post that said “if you liked a book, does it matter if it was AI?” And I want to say yes. It matters. Because when a writer signs a deal with a publisher, it requires disclosure. According to the copyright office, AI cannot be copyrighted and who in their right mind would expect a publisher to throw money behind a book that can’t be copyrighted? Who expects anyone to throw money at a “writer” who doesn’t start with honesty? (Hello, James Frey?) Truth matters.
Also? If publishers didn’t care about AI, why would they even need writers? Why not just open their own Luddite factory, churn out their own AI books? Why sign writers and pay royalties and deal with all the nonsense of advances and agreements when they could just keep all the profit themselves?
Lack of disclosure erodes trust. People don’t think about that enough. IYKYK
The New York Times wrote about a guy who used AI to build a medi-health company that’s earned 1.8 billion. AI wrote the software, built the website, wrote the copy, generated the product images and the videos for ads. After he built it, he brought his little brother into the company. Two guys. 1.8 billion.
Here’s what gets me. They refuse to hire customer service staff. They use AI for customer service. No payroll. All the money is theirs. If a customer places an order for medication and needs help? Talk to the robot. How do you cheer for that?
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, thinks it’s great!!!! In a podcast he said running a one person business worth a billion would have been “unimaginable” without AI. There’s no need for corporations to pay employees anymore, he said.
In Fayetteville, Georgia, the county told residents not to use water because they were in stage one drought. No watering lawns or gardens. People calling in alarm to report low water pressure when they wash dishes or have a shower. Then they found out a data center used 29 million gallons of water. During a drought. The facility is enormous, over 6 million square feet. When they called in to complain, local officials said the data center will generate tens of millions in property tax.
When Victor Hugo died at 83, despite that he’d asked for a pauper’s burial, two million people showed up for his funeral. Suffragettes stood shoulder to shoulder. Brothels closed so every prostitute in France could honor the man who saw them as people. Factory workers, war veterans, civil servants, artists and writers, the poor, the broken and the homeless arrived en masse to celebrate the life of the man who gave a voice to those who were voiceless.
Three days before Victor Hugo died, he wrote the last entry in his journal.
Aimer, c’est agir. In English, it means — To love is to act.
His whole life, in one sentence.
As always, I would love to know what you think…
It's turtles all the way down, Linda. If you think about how almost all digital platforms make money ... for example "What do coders do?" It's worse than writing ad copy for cash. Everything's changing very fast - and I don't think "Luddites" will be needed. And - I think the massive data center rush is for people who want to make $$ off "selling tokens" (i.e. WHAT FOR?). All the big companies already have their infrastructure; the better ones that actually make and do real things are well-situated. I have yet to see one of the data centers that's being protested be anything but a Private Equity or Hedge Fund project. The machines simply don't work if they are made to cheat and abuse people and I am seeing that with the lower tiers of things like ChatGPT and even Claude right now. Meta has Claude use records? Meta supposedly has its own LLM. Meta's for sure gonna go down unless it evolves.
I wonder how long it will take before AI-run companies find that there will be no consumers able to afford their products because none of them have jobs any longer. This is the irony of the "transformed economy." I hope that even sooner than that, consumers realize the products they can buy from such companies are nothing but crap and start rejecting those purchases. AI customer services are no services at all.