THIS IS NOT
AI
When we hear talk of artificial intelligence, we hear the story of a modern myth. That of a miraculous AI that must save the world, or of an AI endowed with willpower that would like to destroy it. Yet behind this fantasized “AI” lies a material reality with real consequences. This theme will be central to LQDN’s work in 2025, which is why we’re starting by deconstructing these fantasies: No, it’s not AI, it’s the exploitation of nature, the exploitation of humans, and it’s the ordering of our lives for authoritarian purposes, always targeting the most vulnerable among us.
We need your support to fight against authoritarian, capitalist and ecocidal digital technologies, and to continue our work of positive proposals for a free and emancipating digital world!
It’s not AI, it’s state-of-the-art exploitation/h3>
AI is a direct extension of capitalist logics of exploitation. If this technology has emerged, it’s because of the tech sector’s monopolization of numerous resources: first our personal data, then immense quantities of financial capital, and finally natural resources. Linked to this triple accumulation made possible by extractivist and colonial logics, AI also requires the exploitation of human labor to train and correct its models. Once deployed in the professional world and the public sector, it exacerbates the precariousness and deskilling of people in the name of a frantic race for productivity.
It’s not AI, it’s a huge ecocidal infrastructure
The rise of AI relies on the extraction of rare minerals to manufacture the electronic chips essential to its calculations. It also leads to the proliferation of data centers by tech multinationals, gigantic, energy-intensive warehouses of severs that must be constantly cooled. To that end, all over the planet, human communities are being deprived of their water, while coal-fired power plants are reignited to produce the electricity needed to run them. Behind corporate greenwashing, AI hardware infrastructures are generating a frightening increase in the greenhouse gas emissions of the tech industry.
It’s not AI, it’s the automation of the police state
Whether through predictive policing or algorithmic video-surveillance, AI amplifies police brutality and reinforces structural discrimination. Behind a supposedly scientific veneer, these technologies arm the repression of the working classes and of political activists. They enable systematic surveillance of urban public space, and in so doing, contribute to the advent of a world where the slightest deviation from the norm can be detected and punished by the state.
It’s not AI, it’s a computerized war on the poor
Under the guise of “rationalization”, AI is invading the Welfare State through the development of self-learning algorithms aimed at detecting potential fraudsters. Across the childcare, health, unemployment and pension agencies, many systems are now deployed to determine a “suspicion score” for welfare recipients, deliberately targeting the most precarious among us.
This isn’t AI, it’s the auctioning off of our available brain time
The monopolization of our personal data feeds info ad-profiling AIs, which match ads in real time to our “profiles” sold to the highest bidders. This commodification of our attention is also shaping centralized social media through content recommendation algorithms promoting binary radicalization of political camps. Also, to develop products such as ChatGPT, companies in the sector have to amass huge corpora of text, sound and images, appropriating the Web as a common good in the process.