Over the past week, I’ve watched left wing commentators on Bluesky, the niche short form blogging site that serves as an asylum for the millennials driven insane by unfettered internet access, discuss the idea that “the left hates technology.” This conversation has centered around a few high profile news events in the world of AI. A guy who works at an AI startup wrote a blog claiming that AI can already do your job. Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude, has raised $30 billion in funding. Someone claimed an AI agent wrote a mean blog post about them, and then a news website was found to have used AI to write about this incident and included AI-hallucinated quotes. Somewhere in this milieu of AI hype the idea that being for or against “technology” is something that can be determined along political lines, following a blog on Monday that declared that “the left is missing out on AI.”

As a hard leftist and gadget lover, the idea that my political ideology is synonymous with hating technology is confusing. Every leftist I know has a hard-on for high speed rail or mRNA vaccines. But the “left is missing out” blog positions generative AI as the only technology that matters.

I will spare you some misery: you do not have to read this blog. It is fucking stupid as hell, constantly creating ideas to shadowbox with then losing to them. It appears to be an analysis of anti-AI thought primarily from academics and specifically from the professor Emily Bender, who dubbed generative AI “stochastic parrots,” but it is unable to actually refute her argument.

“[Bender’s] view takes next-token prediction, the technical process at the heart of large-language models, and makes it sound like a simple thing — so simple it’s deflating. And taken in isolation, next-token prediction is a relatively simple process: do some math to predict and then output what word is likely to come next, given everything that’s come before it, based on the huge amounts of human writing the system has trained on,” the blog reads. “But when that operation is done millions, and billions, and trillions of times, as it is when these models are trained? Suddenly the simple next token isn’t so simple anymore.”

Yes it is. It is still exactly as simple as it sounds. If I’m doing math billions of times that doesn’t make the base process somehow more substantial. It’s still math, still a machine designed to predict the next token without being able to reason, meaning that yes, they are just fancy pattern-matching machines.

All of this blathering is in service to the idea that conservative sectors are lapping the left on being techno optimists.

The blog continues on like this for so long that by the time I reached the end of the page I was longing for sweet, merciful death. The crux of the author’s argument is that academics have a monopoly on terms like “understanding” and “meaning” and that they’re just too slow in their academic process of publishing and peer review to really understand the potential value of AI.

“Training a system to predict across millions of different cases forces it to build representations of the world that then, even if you want to reserve the word ‘understanding’ for beings that walk around talking out of mouths, produce outputs that look a lot like understanding,” the blog reads, without presenting any evidence of this claim. “Or that reserving words like ‘understanding’ for humans depends on eliding the fact that nobody agrees on what it or ‘intelligence’ or ‘meaning’ actually mean.”

I’ll be generous and say that sure, words like “understanding” and “meaning” have definitions that are generally philosophical, but helpfully, philosophy is an academic discipline that goes all the way back to ancient Greece. There’s actually a few commonly understood theories of existence that are generally accepted even by laypeople, like, “if I ask a sentient being how many Rs there are in the word ‘strawberry’ it should be able to use logic to determine that there are three and not two,” which is a test that generative AI frequently fails.

The essay presents a few other credible reasons to doubt that AI is the future and then doesn’t argue against them. The author points out that the tech sector has a credibility problem and says “it’s hard to argue against that.” Similarly, when this author doubles back to critique Bender they say that she is “entitled to her philosophy.” If that’s the case, why did you make me read all this shit?

All of this blathering is in service to the idea that conservative sectors are lapping the left on being techno optimists, but I don’t think that’s true either. It is true that the forces of capital have generally adopted AI as the future whereas workers have not—but this is not a simple left/right distinction. I’ve lived through an era when Silicon Valley presented itself as the gateway to a utopia where people work less and machines automate most of the manual labor necessary for our collective existence. But when companies from the tech sector monopolize an industry, like rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft, instead of less work and more relaxation, what happens is that people are forced to work more to compete with robots that are specifically coming for their jobs. Regardless of political leanings, people in general don’t like AI, while businesses as entities are increasingly forcing it on their workers and clients.

Instead of creating an environment for “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” an incredibly optimistic idea articulated by British journalist Aaron Bastani in 2019, these technologies are creating Cyberpunk 2077. Hilariously, although the author of this blog references Bastani’s vision of an automated communist future as the position leftists should be taking, Bastani does not appear to be on board with generative AI.

Part of the reason I made a hard leftwing turn was because I was burned by my own techno-optimism.

Friend of Aftermath Brian Merchant points out something important about all this discourse: most of this conversation serves as advertising.

“We’re in the midst of another concerted, industry-led hype cycle, this time driven more visibly by Anthropic, which just landed a $30 billion investment round,” Merchant writes. “This time the hype must transcend multibillion dollar investment deals: It must also raise the stock of AI companies ahead of scheduled IPOs later this year and help lay the groundwork for federal funding and/or bailout backing.”

Part of the reason I made a hard leftwing turn was because I was burned by my own techno-optimism. I am part of a generation that believed it could change the world, and then was taught a harsh lesson about money and power. The first presidential election I voted in featured a platform of “Hope and Change” and then did not deliver hope or change, and that administration embraced Silicon Valley in their ambitions. Techno-cynics are all just wounded techno-optimists.

In fact it is following those two things—money and power—that have made me a critic of AI and the claims of corporations like Anthropic and OpenAI. More than anything, understanding that tech companies will just say things because it may benefit their bottom line has led me to my current political ideology. After President Barack Obama allied with Silicon Valley, these same companies have been happy to suck up to President Trump. Asking the question “who benefits from this?” is what has created my criticism of AI and the companies pushing these models. As far as I can tell the proliferation of the technology mainly benefits the people making money off of it, whereas, say, a robust and fast train network would provide a lot more obvious benefits to working people in the country where I live.

Like Merchant, I do feel more and more like the Luddites were right, a view that is bolstered by leftist theory. But as Merchant has argued, Luddites did not hate technology. They were skilled workers who understood the potential for technology to exploit them. So much of how technology integrates into my life also feels like exploitation—watching Brian Merchant destroy a consumer grade printer with a sledgehammer at a book reading several years ago unlocked this understanding for me. Does that printer actually make printing easier, or is it primarily a device that eats up proprietary ink cartridges and begs me for more? 

The questions leftists ask about AI are: does this improve my life? Does this improve my livelihood? So far, the answer for everyone who doesn’t stand to get rich off AI is no. I’ve been working as a writer for the past decade and watching my industry shrivel up and die as a result, so you’ll excuse me if I, and the rest of the everyday people who stand to get screwed by AI, aren’t particularly excited by what AI can offer society. One thing I do believe in are the words of Karl Marx: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. The creation of a world where that is possible is not dependent on advanced technology but on human solidarity.

Read the full report (PDF)

Read the press release (PDF)

Access the raw data, chart files and other documents

I guarantee you’ve heard the harms of data centre expansion justified on the grounds that “AI” will ‘solve climate change’. These range from sci-fi claims of superintelligence through to detailed reports stacked with hundreds of examples of ‘AI for good’ helping energy, transport and industry cut emissions.

In partnership with the good people at the organisations shown below, I’ve created a new report that, for the first time, interrogates both the logic and the evidence for this claim.

We found that most of the ‘benefit’ tends to relate to older, smaller and leaner forms of machine learning, what has been called ‘traditional AI’, while we also know that most of the new harm is likely stemming from consumer generative AI over-deployment.

This distracts from the decisions made by companies that result in their own fossil fuel use rising at an unprecedented rate.

We also found that the evidence presented for examples of climate benefit, regardless of AI type, tend to be weak whether from companies or organisations like the IEA. The potential benefits are overstated, in surprising and significant ways.

What we see is companies veering wildly away from their climate targets. In most cases, this is true whether you use their ‘adjusted’ metrics that incorporate renewable energy offsets and deals or not.

That is a choice, and this focus on ‘AI for climate’ is a distraction from the decision to worsen the pollution of data centres through an unprecedented explosion of digital bloat.

Video and social

3 minute overview: AI vague-washing (watch on Youtube)

3 minute overview: Weak evidence for benefit, strong evidence of harm (watch on Youtube)

Supported by

Very genuine and warm thanks to the good people at the follow organisations, who supported this work and continue to push for accountability from polluters:

About Beyond Fossil Fuels
Beyond Fossil Fuels is a civil society network committed to ensuring a just and rapid transition to a fossil-free, renewables-based future. Building upon the Europe Beyond Coal campaign, its goal is for Europe to be coal-free by 2030 and phase out fossil gas from the power sector by 2035. A clean and flexible energy system will deliver lasting benefits for people, the climate and the broader economy. Beyond Fossil Fuels is a non-profit organisation with an office in Berlin, with staff spread across Europe.

http://www.beyondfossilfuels.org

About Stand.earth
Stand.earth is a global advocacy organization delivering large-scale change for our planet and its people by interrupting the systems that create environmental and climate crises. Its mission is to challenge corporations and governments to treat people and the environment with respect. Stand’s worldwide community of more than one million members advocates for a climate-safe, equitable future, where environmental and climate justice policies uphold the dignity of people everywhere – at the scale our world requires.
https://stand.earth

About Climate Action Against Disinformation
Climate Action Against Disinformation is a global coalition of over 120 leading climate and anti-disinformation organisations across the globe demanding robust, coordinated and proactive strategies to deal with the scale of the threat of climate misinformation and disinformation.
https://caad.info

About Friends of the Earth U.S.
Friends of the Earth U.S. works to reduce the spread of disinformation that potentially affects all of our campaigns. As technology and media companies consolidate their power, our fundamental ability to campaign on any issue is threatened, as corporate polluters gain more control over the basic communications systems that are needed for social change and democracy itself.
https://foe.org/projects/disinformation/

About Green Screen Coalition
The Green Screen Climate Justice and Digital Rights Coalition is a group of funders and practitioners looking to build bridges across the digital rights and climate justice movements. The aim of the coalition is to be a catalyst in making visible the climate implications of technology by supporting emerging on-the-ground work, building networks, and embedding the issue as an area within philanthropy. https://greenscreen.network

About Green Web Foundation
Green Web Foundation is a non-profit organisation working towards a fossil-free internet by 2030 by reducing absolute emissions and phasing out fossil fuels in data centers – fast, fairly and forever. The foundation maintains the world’s largest open dataset of websites that run on green energy and builds open source tools for measuring and mitigating emissions from digital services.
https://greenweb.org/

On Friday the website Ars Technica published a story about Scott Shambaugh, a coder who made headlines in the tech world last week with his story about AI agents, and in particular one that he claims had written what he called a 'hit piece' on him and published it for the world to see.

Shambaugh’s story is as interesting as it was horrifying. Agents are just the latest front in tech's war on our collective sanity, a type of AI that's essentially a glorified autocorrect that in this case has been given a uniform and sent onto the internet to try to do human things like propose code changes and then, when humans like Shambaugh decline them, writing pissy blogs complaining about it.

Among other sites, Ars Technica covered this last week with a news story that remarkably appeared to have some AI-created filler of its own, citing quotes from Shambaugh that never appeared in the very blog Ars was linking.

Not long after readers--including Ars' own community--began noticing this, the story was pulled (though you can still read the archived original here). It's general journalistic practice that published stories which contain inaccuracies are edited and updated, not deleted entirely.

Ars has since published an editorial statement, bylined by EiC Ken Fisher, addressing the story, its deletion and the outlet's policies on AI:

On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards. Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said.

That this happened at Ars is especially distressing. We have covered the risks of overreliance on AI tools for years, and our written policy reflects those concerns. In this case, fabricated quotations were published in a manner inconsistent with that policy. We have reviewed recent work and have not identified additional issues. At this time, this appears to be an isolated incident.

Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here.

By citing Ars' clear rules, Fisher's statement points the finger for this disaster at the two authors bylined in the piece, with one (Benj Edwards) having since posted a statement of his own, assuming full responsibility for the incident and saying the other (Kyle Orland) had 'no role in this error':

I have been sick with COVID all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this. On Friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh.

Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday.

During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline.

When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why.

I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words.

Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft.

Kyle Orland had no role in this error. He trusted me to provide accurate quotes, and I failed him.

The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that.

I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part.

When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own.

Look, I understand mistakes can happen when you're sick, but Edwards--who it should be noted is Ars' 'Senior AI Reporter'--has used AI not once but twice here, and in doing so has caused a huge amount of reputational damage for himself and his employer in the process. And it's not like he used it to comb through 800 pages of impenetrable legal documents, either; Shambaugh's original blog was only a couple of pages long (he's since written a follow-up), and written in plain English, making the AI's hallucinations (and Edwards' use of it) even more damning.

It's disappointing someone working in this space felt the need to have to use this garbage, particularly when it violates their employer's own policies. As this whole mess has shown, the tech simply cannot do the most basic things the people selling it keep claiming it can. Citing quotes from a blog for your own story is bread-and-butter stuff for a journalist, it's what the job is, and seeing this busted tech worming its way into a profession that should be its sworn enemy– and fucking the whole thing up in the process--is just a huge bummer.

This week’s question comes to us from April Piluso:

My daughter turns 3 this month. I want to help her have fewer troubles than I did by teaching her about boundaries, values, independent thinking etc. I think if more kids learned this stuff, we’d have more good humans and fewer jerks. What do YOU think every kid should grow up knowing?

Every kid should grow up knowing they are loved.

Everything else is pretty close to a rounding error. Ok, maybe not a rounding error. I’m exaggerating to make a point. But honestly, there is nothing a child needs more in life than knowing they are loved. Love can make up for a lack of a lot, but a lack of love is very hard to make up for.

Regular readers of this newsletter will now be familiar that I didn’t grow up in the best household. I grew up in an abusive household. I also grew up poor. And when I look back on my childhood, growing up poor wasn’t really a big deal. It was just a fact of life. And to be clear, poor is very subjective. We always had a roof over our head. We didn’t miss meals. I knew we were poor because every Sunday my parents would pile us in the car and go for a drive around the rich neighborhoods in town, getting progressively more upset about our own circumstances, and blaming each other—and their kids—for not being able to live in one of those fancy houses. Meanwhile, my brothers and I sat in the back seat, being as quiet as possible so as to not draw my father’s growing anger. We didn’t know we were poor until my father started hitting us for being poor.

I’ll tell you a story, but first—some cultural background: in Portugal, where my parents grew up, if you had a house for rent you’d make a paper cutout and tape it to the windows. (This was pre-internet, obviously.) The cutout could be any of a number of things, probably made by whichever kid the landlord deemed to be “the artistic one.” No, I don’t know how this started, and it’s not the point of our story so I’m not looking it up.

One Sunday afternoon, we’re driving around doing our routine wealth tourism on The Mail Line, and my dad stops the car. He pulls over.

“Go see if that house is for rent.”

I turn towards the house he’s pointing at. This thing was an old-school two-story mansion. Very old-Philadelphia money. Whoever built it probably has their name on a hospital now. Anyway, I ask him why he thinks the house (that we obviously cannot afford) is for rent.

“You see the cut-outs on the window?”

“Yeah, it’s Christmas. Those are snowflakes.”

The slap came before I finished the sentence. Followed by the scream to get the fuck out of the car and do what I was told. So off I went, crying. I rang the doorbell. Some unsuspecting stranger opened the door, wondering why some crying kid was standing there and asking if the house was for rent, even though I knew it was not. He seemed understandably confused, but politely told me it was not, then closed the door. Receding, I’m sure, to a nearby curtain that he could peek out of. (Or possibly straight to the phone to call the police about immigrants in the neighborhood.) I walked back to the car, knowing what was coming. And when I told him the house wasn’t for rent, sure enough—it came. Right across the face. We drove home in silence, where he dropped us all off and went off to do something else with people who were not his family, who he hated.

So yeah, when I think back on growing up, it’s not the lack of anything—except the lack of love—that I think about. Love and safety. Made all the more worse because every once in a while I’d get a glimpse of what those things were like. Sometimes he’d come home in a good mood. Sometimes he’d muss my hair on the way in. But those times were rare, but the fact that they existed at all let me know that they were possible, which made it that much crueler.

Fast forward decades to a therapist’s office where my therapist—who I’m sure isn’t reading this—is telling me that my own relationships are falling apart because how am I supposed to love anyone else when I never learned what love was like growing up. (Yes, my therapist is RuPaul.) If you were raised in a similar environment, please believe me when I tell you that it is never too late to learn how to love. You don’t have to carry your parents’ sins into your relationship with your own children.

Every kid should grow up knowing they are loved.

Telling a child you love them is free.

Also, while I by no means an expert in the field, and my opinions should be treated with much salt, I tend to believe that children are born good. They’re born full of love. They’re born full of confidence. (How fucking confident do you have to be to take that first step?!) They’re born curious. They’re born wanting to be part of a community. It’s not so much that we need to teach them these things, as much as we need to encourage them to keep believing these things. And protect them from people who would work to destroy those things.

Yes, this is about AI. The AI industry can only succeed if it separates people from their joy and their confidence. An industry run by people who were not raised with love, attempting to steal it from others.

I’ve written about this before, but every child is born loving to draw. They draw on everything. They demand crayons in restaurants. They draw on your walls. You should let them do so. Fuck your walls. It’s easier to eventually paint over a wall, than to rebuild a child’s confidence.

It’s wild to me that we parent our children to fit into society, then get together with our friends and talk about how broken society is. I’ve seen people rail against our broken educational system, then demand their children get straight As in school. I’ve seen people complain about not having any time to themselves and then schedule every minute of their kid’s life.

There is more we can learn from children than they can learn from us.

Mostly we need to support children and let them know that they are loved. Children are so ready to love you back. For every cruel thing my father did to me, anytime he walked through the door and mussed my hair I was ready to give him another chance. I was so ready to love him.

Congratulations on your daughter turning three. The fact that you’re worried about this stuff is usually a sign that you’re on the right path. The funny thing about parenting is that the people who are most worried about messing it up, are the ones most likely to get it right. I’m old enough that I’ve seen a lot of my friends have kids, and those kids are now adults in their own right. And one of the first things I noticed was that the folks who were the most chaotic, the most fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants, the most worried about fucking things up… they were the ones who ended up incorporating their kids into their messy lives, encouraging them to be themselves, giving them the space to be curious, to climb trees, to draw on the walls, to ask their neighbors for help. And ultimately, hold everything together with love. While the friends who made plans, and spreadsheets, and made lists of goals, and fretted about their kids not being able to tie their shoes yet, or read at a certain level yet—and by the way, I totally understand wanting to do these things, and worrying about these things—they were so concerned with how things were supposed to be going that they totally missed how things were actually going. Which is that this new amazing human was unfolding before your eyes, and while it might not be the human you were expecting… aren’t they amazing?!? And if you don’t understand them, well child what happened to your curiosity?!

Your kid is going to be alright. With enough love, your kid is going to be alright.

Don’t judge your children, love them. Because they will, in turn, love you back. And when they do—holy fucking shit, it’s just amazing.

My daughter’s coming over for dinner tonight. I can’t wait to hug her and tell her I love her.

I love you for asking this question.

🙋 Got a question for me? Ask it!

📕 My new book, How to die (and other stories), is now available for pre-order! It’s stories from this newsletter. It’s very handsome. Yes, you want it!

📆 Related, but secret… if you’re in the Bay Area, please circle May 21 on your calendar. All will be revealed in time.

📣 There’s a couple spots left in next week’s Presenting w/Confidence workshop. Sign up, we’ll have fun hanging out, we’ll make fun of AI slop, then I’ll help you get a job.

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🍉 Please donate to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. The ceasefire is a lie.

🏳️‍⚧️ Please donate to Trans Lifeline, and for fuck sake if there is a trans child in your life PLEASE tell them you love them, they are SO ready to love you back.