Gen AI and the crisis of/in humanness

In the summer of 2023, members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) – a union for writers in television, film, news, and gaming – waged a strike action that lasted 148 days. A parallel strike by members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) concluded in the early winter, after 118 days. Questions around the adoption of AI loomed large in each. For writers, concerns pertained to the application of Generative  AI (Gen AI) to produce “original” scripts and the imposition of such automated texts on writers to craft in scripts. There was apprehension, too, about exploitation of writers’ creative labour – whether original or editorial – to further train Gen AI programmes that might displace, and eventually replace, writers themselves. With respect to actors, concerns revolved around the use of digital doubles – i.e. a digital likeness that can be replicated and manipulated by Gen AI to use without input or intervention from actors. This issue was of particular import for background actors, whose artistry risked being reduced to source material – their image once captured to automate performances, across place and time, without limit or compensation or consent.

Pushing back against studio proposals on the incorporation of AI, the unions were adamant about what lay at the heart of the dispute: while AI has long been used in news and entertainment, current proposals made significant endeavours to more fully displace human labour. This is underscored by the recent drive by studios to recruit for high profile technology roles. Netflix, for example, reportedly advertised for a product manager for their Machine Learning Platform, for pay of up to nine thousand dollars. Disney, Amazon and Sony advertised similar roles for similarly high pay to support their studio businesses (Weprin, 2023). Unions decried these gestures as negating the value of human labour: actor Bryan Cranston accused studios of “dehumanising the workforce,” with SAG-AFTRA insisting that “Human creators are the foundation of the creative industries and we must ensure that they are respected and paid for their work,” as SAG-AFTRA stated (quoted in Coyle, 2023).

While discourses about displacement and unemployment frame the dispute, I suggest that what lies at its silent heart is an apprehension with how this technology infringes upon and diminishes human intelligence. Intelligence, understood as a trait that facilitates cognition and creativity – i.e., the capacity for learning through experience and abstract reasoning, for developing reasoned understand and judgment, and for adapting to and shaping one’s environment – has long been the hallmark of humanness. Indeed, the notion of intelligence has carved an immutable boundary between the human and its (organic and inorganic) others. Injury to intelligence, then, follows from its displacement as a uniquely human capacity. The induction of intelligence as not only replicable but also perfectible by machines seems to both, confirm and exploit the fallibility of human intelligence.

Yet, despite its reference to “intelligence,” the creative ability of Gen AI is not contingent on cognitive capacities – on reason or understanding – but follows instead from an algorithmically determined refiguration of already existing content. Gen AI is trained to recognise patterns and relationships within input data – i.e., within pre-existing text, images, audio, etc. – and synthesises these, on command, to yield new forms. That is to say, artificial “intelligence” is not agential – it is not based upon autonomous ideas and intention. Rather, Gen AI simulates human ingenuity and skill to produce imitations. But in so doing, Gen AI appears to sever intelligence from humanness and creates the conditions for the alienation and degradation a of human intelligence. To substantiate this argument, I look to the work of Harry Braverman and his description of the degradation of work.

The degradation of work, according to Braverman, follows from the subjective alienation of a worker from their work.  The alienation of the worker at the subjective level proceeds from the reorganisation of the labour process as a series of discrete parts. This reorganisation catalyses a dissolution of the worker’s control over and, therefore, investment in both, the practice and process of work. On the one hand, this circumstance is the manifestation of capital’s drive to seize command and control over the worker’s livingness – to reduce the worker to “a general-purpose machine” (Braverman, 1998: 80). In so doing, the entirety of the labour process is made subject to management control – i.e. to objective (scientific-rational) practice. On the other hand, the subjective alienation of the worker is recursive: “[it] feeds on itself and becomes ever deeper until it emerges as a profound antagonism between those who work and those who manage them” (Braverman, 1998: 180). As such, it confirms the worker as unenlightened and unruly, useful only for their machinic attributes as instruments of labour, authorising them further as objects of control.

This rendering of the worker and the labour process into a rationalisable object represents the degradation of labour – a stripping of labour into its “most elementary form, labor from which all conceptual elements have been removed and along with them most of the skill, knowledge, and understanding of production processes” (Braverman, 1998: 180). The degraded worker is a worker shorn of vitality – of the intellectual, affective and material forces that constitute living. This circumstance, although intensified by developments in technology, is not, as Braverman notes, attributable to them. Rather, it is a consequence of the commandeering of science for capitalist purposes.

Scientific knowledge becomes a “balance-sheet item… its supply is called forth by demand, with the result that the development of materials, power sources, and processes has become less fortuitous and more responsive to the immediate needs of capital” (1998: 75). It is this motivating force of capitalised science that intensifies degradation. Scientific knowledge, alienated from the general collective, is made into the property of a select class of professionals tasked with aiding the valourisation of capital. Yet, rather than augment these holders of property in science, so as to aid scientific advances, the impetus of capital is to consolidate in order to increase accumulation. This is made possible through intensified alienation. It is this capitalistic drive of scientific thought that technological development aides and abets, creating the conditions for, and anxiety around, degradation.

The situation of SAG and WGA workers underscores how alienation and degradation are fundamental to the operation capital. More crucially, it demonstrates how the colonial logic that serves to valorise some forms of activity is simultaneously, and necessarily, the motivator of its devalourisation. In the context of colonial epistemology, creativity is associated with the act of making history. In particular, it is understood to emanate from “the genius of eminent creators who almost singlehandedly revolutionise society and culture” (Glăveanu and Sierra, 2015: 346). As such, creativity is associated with individual minds – a capacity conceived of as the singular  property of an exclusive group. It is the idealised expression of humanness, bestowing upon its bearers symbolic or ethical value. The degradation of associated work, then, represents not only the stripping away of this world-building capacity but, more crucially, of the ethical value attributed to it. In other words, the degradation of creative work portends the degradation of humanness.

The colonial conception of creativity is distinct, however, from understandings that may emerge from non-colonial epistemologies wherein creativity is a fundamental human capacity directed towards producing the conditions for living. In this articulation, creativity unfolds through the merging of the potentialities of mind, body and their given environment. Rather than being an exclusive property, creativity emerges from, and generates, collective livingness (cf. Glăveanu and Sierra, 2015). This distinction in understandings of creativity reveals how colonial logic, wherein creativity is conceived of as property, renders this capacity alienable and subject to the machinations of capitalised science and technology. Or alternately, how the operation of capital is contingent upon the colonial rendering of creativity as property so that it may be alienated and advanced as a source of accumulation.

It is thus evident how, under conditions of coloniality, degradation of intelligence/creativity is entangled with the degradation of humanness. Insofar as intelligence and creativity are idealised expression of humanness, the degradation of associated activity represents not only the stripping away of world-building capacity – i.e., the capacity to have an enduring effect on the unfolding of the world – but, more crucially, of the symbolic or ethical value attributed to such it. Moreover, whereas knowledge and creative activity has generally been imagined as existing autonomously, beyond the circuits of intelligent technology, Gen AI threatens this status, thereby bringing forth a crisis in/of humanness itself.

Reference List

Braverman H (1998) Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Coyle J (2023) In Hollywood writers’ battle against AI, humans win (for now). Available at: https://apnews.com/article/hollywood-ai-strike-wga-artificial-intelligence-39ab72582c3a15f77510c9c30a45ffc8.

Glăveanu VP and Sierra Z (2015) Creativity and Epistemologies of the South. Culture & Psychology 21(3): 340–358.

Weprin A (2023) Studios Quietly Go on Hiring Spree for AI Specialist Jobs Amid Picket Line Anxiety. In: The Hollywood Reporter. Available at: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-jobs-studios-hire-1235545491/.