• 08 Nov 2025 *

Unless you’re wealthy enough to bribe a small country or have personally received an invitation to Epstein’s island, you have no business advocating for billionaires.

Surely there must be a thrill in an ethics of contrarianism, something to make docile subservience an exciting prospect.

“Ohh look at me, I’m so naughty because I’m not like everyone else”, thinks the contrarian while shooting a sideways glance towards the working class, hoping to one day share a meal with wealthy industrialists, completely oblivious to the fact that among the working class is where he will always be kept.

Did anyone ever find a friend in the kid that played “devil’s advocate” in school?

I want to share with you an unbelievable paragraph I read today. I call it that because it’s hard to believe how good it is at mischaracterizing the artist’s rejection of generative AI.

Imagine an artist in a patriarchal society complaining when women are allowed into the art museum for the first time: “I never gave permission for women to view my art!”

This artist has no legitimate moral complaint, I’d say, because he has no moral right to make his work accessible only to men. Likewise, artists have no moral right to make their work accessible only to humans. They have no legitimate complaint if an AI trains on the work they post online, any more than they can complain about a young human artist “training on” (or learning from) their work.

Take a minute to read that one again.

“Babe, I thought of a great way to advance an instrumentalist view of agency that attributes mental states and intentionality to generative AI systems. First you pretend women and computer software are equivalent and then...”

To philosophers it must be exciting to think of Artificial Intelligence as its own ontological class, a sui generis marvel of modern engineering. The truth is that no such thing exists yet, and marketing in Silicon Valley is powerful.

Women have agency. AI has no agency. That’s why this is a silly comparison and not even at all what the rejection of generative AI is about.

When an artist pushes back against the use of generative AI tools, what they are saying is something like this: I do not approve of technology corporations amassing wealth by exploiting my work as an artist without consent.

There’s no artist saying they don’t want the literal software processing their data because it’s software. It’s about who owns the software and what they do with it.

The rejection of generative AI is not about programming languages, package managers, libraries, large language models and application programming interfaces. It’s about technocrats building programs, using marketing terms like “learning” to make you think they have agency, and then the working class pretending they do because the marketing got so good.

The devil needs no advocate.