The New Practice space at TU Berlin runs a series of talks called LOOPS. Together with my friend Malte I was invited to talk a bit about “Fascist AI”. How capitalism, fascism and AI narratives are very closely aligned and (re)produce one another.

I enjoyed giving the talk (I rarely do those together with others) and the Q&A and conversations afterwards immensely. You can check out a recording of the event here:

You can get Malte’s slides from his website and mine from my cloud.

I had a conversation with a friend who described sitting in a workshop where clients and the people they hired were working on problems. As you do. Happens in every consultingy kind of job.

But what has totally become normalized is for the people hired, the “experts” to use ChatGPT and similar services to come up with solutions. Think that the conversation leads to a problem and the people hired to solve problems now openly turn to OpenAIs incompetence machine to have solutions generated.

I was a bit shocked TBH. Not for ethical reasons or other reasons that make me not use those services in my work. But because I do not understand the strategy.

If you work as consultant or in a consulting/expert capacity your client’s trust is everything. You get hired and get your (sometimes quite significant) rates paid because you have specific skills, specific expertise that makes you that expensive, that legitimizes what you are paying. This reputation is massively important because that is what might get you a contract even if you are not the cheapest offer.

So what are you saying when pulling out your phone in front of a client “prompting” ChatGPT? That you are super on top of the technical State of the Art? Or are you saying that you are worth 23 bucks a month (the cost of a ChatGPT subscription in EUR at the point of writing)?

I get people wanting to cut corners. That is consistent. But openly showing that not even you think your work is worth anything is just … confusing. What’s the endgame here?

An internal Microsoft memo has leaked. It was written by Julia Liuson, president of the Developer Division at Microsoft and GitHub. The memo tells managers to evaluate employees based on how much they use internal AI tools like the various Copilots: [Business Insider]

AI is now a fundamental part of how we work. Just like collaboration, data-driven thinking, and effective communication, using AI is no longer optional — it’s core to every role and every level.

Liuson told managers that AI “should be part of your holistic reflections on an individual’s performance and impact.”

Let’s be clear: this is a confession of abject failure.

Microsoft’s AI tools don’t work. Microsoft AI doesn’t make you more effective. Microsoft AI won’t do the job better.

If it did, Microsoft staff would be using it already. The competition inside Microsoft is vicious. If AI would get them ahead of the other guy, they’d use it.

We already know that when AI saves someone time at work, it’s because they can fob work off onto someone else. Total work doesn’t go down, and total productivity doesn’t go up.

But Microsoft is desperate to sell AI to anyone it can, because the CEO, Satya Nadella, has a bee in his bonnet. Nadella has decreed: everyone will use AI.

Even though it doesn’t work.

We should expect some enterprising Microsoft coder to come up with an automated AI agent system that racks up chatbot metrics for them — while they get on with their actual job.

• Video version

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Still better than the deontology watch, which stops you from lying, even to tell a murderer not to look in your basement.

I've been getting mad a lot about hollow-eyed, artless money ghouls telling me what's inevitable and then I had an idea I had to draw about it.

T-shirt!

Previously, previously, previously.