Sometimes a title tells you all you need to know. On February 10 and 11, France is hosting an “Artificial Intelligence Action Summit”. You get the idea: action: we need to make the next great leap forward in the ever-growing automation of human affairs.
Gathering at the Grand Palais in Paris will be some hundred heads of state plus the gurus of the digital industries: Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others. They will iterate the well-trodden rhetorical tropes we have been hearing for years now — namely, that AI represents the unmissable and bright economic horizon of our times. Yes, the road ahead may be bumpy, but fear not: regulation will protect us from the worst excesses.
It’s the same old song, set on repeat, and always conjugated in the future tense. As all those tech fairs sprouting up around the globe have shown us, when someone talks to us about the future it always means they want to sell us something.
This conference is set to be a gigantic propaganda fest, fueled by public money, its preening and pomp serving to boost the shareholder value of the participating groups and start-ups.
Given that over the past few months it was becoming increasingly obvious that preparations for this event were focused essentially on the economic aspect, a number of sectors have demanded that they too should have a say. In particular, organisations whose job it is to collect and redistribute royalties. They want to stop the unchecked plundering of cultural resources by generative AI (GAI) and, by means of regulation, to ensure the fair payment of those who created them.
However, this demand, which seems legitimate, is also flawed. For, by calling for payment, it implicitly sanctions those very processes that aim to endow systems with creative capacities.
New paradigm
In this respect, the artists who like to imagine that all this is just another phase in the long history of relations between the arts and technology, and who, for example, compare the current situation with the emergence of photography or cinema which — as they point out, did not kill off the other arts — have got it badly wrong.
Because what we are facing is not a new discipline, but a completely new paradigm: a dedicated system is taking over our genius for producing text, images and sounds. How can we not see the implacable machine for grinding up culture that is being built right before our eyes?
Most distressingly of all, this summit blithely ignores what is the most crucial sphere of all: education. It doesn’t get a mention. And yet, the future of our children — who, the way things are going, won’t even have to bother to learn to write — should be at the very heart of all our concerns.
The tragedy is that utilitarian questions dominate while what really matters — the social, cultural and civilisational implications of the current transformations — is ignored. When it comes to this phenomenon, one of the most decisive in all history, the truth is that confusion reigns. Because we are failing to do the necessary work of clarification.
Indeed, one of the traps of the expression “artificial intelligence” is its unifying effect, which hides its three defining dimensions.
The first of these relates to the kind of systems used, for example, by the aeronautical sector with a view to increasing the energy efficiency of planes. In this instance, the human factor is still in charge.
The second is that AI is tasked not only with interpreting an increasingly diverse range of situations, but also with recommending appropriate responses to them. It stands as an organising authority, a fact that brings with it a host of legal and political consequences, especially in the world of work. These have not been adequately examined.
The third is that, with the advent of GAI in late 2022, artificial intelligence reached an intellectual and creative turning point, acquiring the most anthropomorphic qualities of all: the ability to form sentences, images and sounds.
What is not made clear is that, today, these last two dimensions are dominant and imply nothing less than the redefinition of humanity. That is why, in this age when omniscient systems are increasingly administering the course of events and taking over from the faculties that constitute our being, we are called to answer one great moral and philosophical question: What, exactly, is our role on Earth to be?
Counter summit
This is a very grave moment. Consequently, based on the research that I have been doing for many years now, I think it is essential that we put forward another logic and organise an “AI counter-summit”. When I began to talk about this, the French National Union of Journalists offered me its support, which proved decisive.
The philosophy behind this assembly, which will take place at the Théâtre de la Concorde in Paris on February 10, is based on two principles: First, personal experience. Representing a wide variety of professions, those invited will talk about the practical consequences they have experienced due to the installation of AI systems in their everyday environment.
We need to hear how the loss of dialogue and chaos have descended on schools as pupils are using Chat GPT en masse to do their homework, with the result that so many of our teachers feel bereft of their vocation.
We need to hear how media groups are planning to use systems that will take over from subeditors and shrink staff levels.
We need to hear from literary translators about how publishers who have recently started using robots now expect them to make something publishable out of the textual dog’s breakfasts cooked up by AI, all for less money.
We need to hear from the makers of animation films about processes that, in mere months, are eradicating unique skills which took long years to acquire.
Such voices will be legion. A well-documented diagram showing the gigantic environmental impact of all this will also be presented.
It will then be clearer what is happening because of AI. At last, we will get to look behind the scenes, at what has too long been hidden from view. In order to understand what is going on, it is no longer good enough to naively ask the entrepreneurs and engineers, who are both judge and jury.
The second principle is mobilisation. Now is the time to get active, to draft charters for each sector, nationally and internationally, establishing a number of minimal demands.All this ahead of, and with little faith in the lawmakers, the majority of whom, as we know, are starry eyed about “digital innovation” and battered by the endless charm offensives of the lobbyists. The point is both to describe what is already happening and, as must be done, to prepare for the power struggle.
The coming years will be decisive. To act responsibly is not to shout “Fire!” when the house is burning down, but to grasp phenomena at the moment of germination, so that it is possible to act before they are consolidated and become set. Because when society wakes up it is always too late.
This initiative is driven by a deep democratic energy, in the sense that politics is the free expression of plurality, of contradiction and the possibility of forming agreements. I have already been asked to lend my support to similar events in Mexico City, Berlin and Tokyo. Salutary countervailing forces can be mobilised on several continents.
In reality, beyond the simple technical questions, AI must be seen as the nodal point of two opposing visions of the world. Between, on one side, a terminal form of capitalism which, ever since its origins, has treated humans as an expendable resource and has been constantly mutilating and devastating the planet; and, on the other, a powerful aspiration to active participation in matters that concern us, a desire to express as best we can our faculties within common modalities of organisation that will harm neither other beings nor the biosphere.
Both these visions will be expressed on February 10. On that day, in Paris, historic site of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, let us wager that the truth will be made manifest.
[Éric Sadin is a French philosopher who specialises in the digital world. His latest essay on the issue is La Vie spectrale. Penser l’ère du métavers et des IA génératives (Spectral Life. Thinking about the era of the metaverse and generative AI) (Éditions Grasset, 2023).]