Flopping & Facing the Mob

The other day I opened my bank account and saw that I had -$700. It turned out that the IRS finally cashed in my tax check and charged my account before I could transfer money into it. But it was my fault for not planning. I take responsibility. For a while my finances have been slowly depleting, but YouTube is a business, in that, you invest some, you take some risk, and you hopefully get some sort of return after. Over the past six months of dedicating everything to the AI project I thought: "theres no way a 3 hour deep dive into astroturfing in the anti-AI movement could perform THAT badly. Even if it's controversial, controversy always gets clicks. Surely I'll have some more funds in a few months."

Part 1 of the AI video was a flop. I'm proud of the video itself, the points, and the attention I brought to some of the astroturfing in the online discourse. As I expected, the response from those who watched it was more negative than normal, but overall not as bad as it could have been. Some people loved it, some people hated it, and a lot of people had mixed feelings. But it's the worst performing video I've created in the past two years, and it's also the one I've invested the most time, effort, and money into.

Like the -$700, it's mostly my fault. Maybe the topic was too big to tackle. Maybe it just didn't resonate at a time when those who control AI are so obviously mostly evil, and so any defense of the technology feels in poor taste (even though I state over and over that part 2 is covering this topic). Maybe my audience just isn't interested in this sort of topic. There are plenty of valid criticisms one could make of this video. But what frustrates me the most are the repeated misrepresentations of my work from people who did not watch the video. I keep hearing over and over "how could you ignore fascism!?? how could you ignore the environmental harms?!? how could you ignore artist's losing their jobs?!?" I didn't! This was all covered in the video extremely thoroughly.

One of the plaintiffs of the lawsuit even responded to my video, spreading misinformation about my position to her 80k+ followers, despite admitting to not having watched the video. My final response to this disagreement is here and clears up some concerns people had about the video, but I don't think it will matter that much. People are going into this topic with understandable frustrations and are resistant to any pushback because it truly is such a high-stakes topic. I understand this! This is why part 1 is 3 hours long! This is why I spent months researching this topic, consulting experts, lawyers, researchers, artists, etc. But now I have people in my mentions on Bluesky and Twitter calling me an NFT Curtis Yarvin-loving Crypto-fascist....?????

This all frustrates the ever-living shit out of me because I do deeply care about this. I have literally nothing to gain from this and am putting my reputation on the line. But there is next to no one who has vocally held the position that I do on this topic , especially with a big following online. The people who are AI-friendly are often techno-fascists and the people who are anti-AI tend to constitute a giant chunk of my audience. It's actually an unwinnable position. But as I said, I care deeply about this topic because it kills me to see that the people who should be working on AI the most are the ones who hold the most anti-AI sentiment. I want to quote a section from the upcoming part 2 of my series:

As I explored in part 1 of this series, there is a necessary coalition currently resisting Silicon Valley, its destructive techno-fascist interests, and the human harms its technology has on the lives of workers, the environment, and the world. But I fear that the strategy of this resistance in lawsuits, legislation and environmental awareness, in its targeting of AI technology, misses the core problem in ways that are exceedingly important. 

Let’s recall the example of the lawsuits and legislation currently targeting AI companies on behalf of artists and creatives. While it is absolutely a real problem that professional artists will lose their jobs in the face of the indiscriminate use of generative AI, the current discourse around AI has led to a legal strategy that threatens to make the problem worse through an expansive vision of copyright law. For example, many of the current lawsuits and coalitions argue that training AI image models with copyrighted work is copyright infringement. I go over the arguments for and against this claim in my other video, but whether or not this is the case, the artist's victory in these lawsuits would not solve the problem of artists losing their jobs to AI. Rather, these lawsuits would result in a world where AI developers would need to attain licenses to train AI models on copyrighted work. In this world, only large tech companies would have the ability to pay the price of licensing copyrighted material from large media corporations. These lawsuits wouldn’t stop generative AI from replacing artists, all it would do is consolidate the power to use generative AI in the hands of large media corporations and large tech companies. Sure, the licensing fee would hurt tech companies in the short term, but Google and OpenAI have enough money to cover these costs. You know who doesn’t? Researchers, small open-source model developers, and other individuals who want to apply generative AI in genuinely helpful ways like medicine, weather prediction, agriculture, administration, or social science. This is why organizations like the Copyright Alliance, whose members include Disney, Adobe and major studios, support these lawsuits. They know that they will profit from the lawsuits on generative AI, and they know that they can leverage anti-AI sentiment to further public support for efforts that ultimately do not protect working artists.

But the efforts to regulate generative AI should not broadly target the technology itself, but instead, the way actors abuse this technology to harm people. A more effective strategy to combat labor displacement lies in collective bargaining and unionization efforts that focus on industry-specific labor relations. Take the Writer’s Guild of America West’s 2023 contract negotiations on the use of AI. They propose specific regulations for how AI can be used in film, tv, and radio: they say that, while AI can be used to assist in research, in no way can AI be used to replace human writers. They propose that work generated with AI cannot be eligible for copyright protection. This forces the studios to make a choice: either pay human writers their worth, or give up the copyright protection on AI generated work. This is a really good proposal because studios never want to give up copyright protection for their work. The WGA’s proposal is a clear example of collective bargaining targeting a specific abuse of technology without proposing blanket bans on that technology. 

As I show in my video anti-AI sentiments are often leveraged by powerful actors to build support for broad sweeping actions on AI that have the potential to exacerbate the harm they’re trying to address. Tons of civil liberties organizations like the ACLU have argued that recent legislative efforts to regulate AI like the NO FAKES act, would inadvertently put free speech at risk. I’ve talked about how the environmental harm caused by AI has been overinflated by bad research, and how oil and energy companies utilize the panicked media coverage on AI’s alleged energy consumption to incentivize environmentally destructive overbuilding of oil and energy infrastructure. Again and again, overly broad anti-AI sentiment, well-intentioned or not, is being leveraged by malicious entities to push for solutions that do more harm than good. But AI technology is not the problem–abuses of the AI technology are the problem. And there are practical ways to target these abuses. Narrow and focused legislation. Collective bargaining. The decentralization of ownership over this technology. 

Not only do broad anti-AI sentiments often harm the very people they claim to protect, but they also foreclose any chance that well-intentioned actors realize the technologies full potential. It’s modern a tragedy that the people who hate AI and technology the most are the people who should be working on it. 

I'm grateful to have any audience at all that listens to what I have to say. But this is also my job. I have lost subscribers and Patrons over this, but I will never betray my principles for popular support. Though this hurts me financially in the short-term, I am confident that the truth always longs to be free and therefore, will be free. I will not stop defending it and continue to give my art everything I have.

There will be a part two to the current video, and it's all ready and filmed. This video covers fascism in Sillicon Valley and it's influence over the White House. It also wraps up my thoughts on AI. I think the topic might resonate more with my audience. We will see how it does.

I don't need to make millions from YouTube. I just want to make a living. You guys help make that possible, in both the bad times and good times. Thank you so much for your support.