AI, The New Class Struggle and the Need For Workers’ Control

There are several problems with AI in the modern era but key amongst it is the ability of people to educate themselves and to have their work recognised. The problem is dual: Both our ability to parse the information put in front of us and the fallout of AI detection on people who are self educated or in the process of obtaining their education. 

The future of class conflict will be based on Literacy, Legitimacy and Location. 

Part 1: Gatekeeping Literacy

The future of AI enabled class conflict will primarily be based on literacy. The reasons why are multiple.

1. As AI takes over cognitive function in our daily lives, the population is going to find it more and more difficult for people to learn and adopt language skills and the ability to process information on a cognitive level. You go back in the generations, just as moving from walking, riding or cycling to the use of motorised transport caused a decline in the general fitness of the population physically, AI will cause a decline in the fitness of the population cognitively. 
2. AI is already doing away with non AI sources of information. It was recently revealed that Open AI has been buying rare books by the ton, training AI on them and subsequently destroying them. This will result in the only source of the information therein will be via the same large language models that destroyed the information in the first place. It is becoming increasingly difficult to research information and to access primary sources without the use of AI because: a) Virtually all search engines are now powered by AI and will only show you the information that they want to show you and b) in addition to the destruction of books, there are a large number of old studies I used to be able to access, primarily agricultural and sociological studies that now seem to have been scrubbed from the internet. I recently tried to find an old Teagasc forestry study I had saved on my old phone and had referenced politically many times, it now cannot be found. I have run into roadblocks across the spectrum of my areas of interest regarding sourcing. 
3. As AI takes on more and more administrative tasks, more and more creative tasks, our culture becomes more and more immersed in AI output. It is already adjusting our communication & writing away from literacy. Things like the long dash (—) for emphasis found in basically all polemics, things like the [1],[2],[3] source linking format found in everything from dissertations to Wikipedia, even the Oxford comma; we spent the 2010s arguing over it and is now coming under fire. Things we were thought in junior cert level English such as similes even. This is having the effect of people having to dumb down their output for fear of coming off like AI. Which is interesting because people like myself who spoke and wrote primarily in Hiberno English were bullied into writing in more official English because it was “unprofessional” and “who would take this seriously” otherwise. Now it’s on the other foot. 
4. Inversely, some people are starting to speak and think like AI. There is a huge increase I have noticed in young people on social media especially mimicking AI due to a process called imitative learning. As AI proliferates our social media, the organic output of creators as well as their audiences is becoming more and more “AI like” 
5. AI driven algorithms are biased in favour of themselves and will promote AI created content ahead of organic content worsening the issue of AI stealing space from human creatives as well as worsening the phenomenon of humans mimicking AI. 

All of this comes together to create an environment where the population is being manipulated by AI to mimic AI, while AI is replacing our functions by imitating us. Where humans are intentionally or unintentionally being made to fail cognitively while AI is being given the advantage of information and education inaccessible to the general population. It is creating a dichotomy where there is a dumbing down of the population and even writers are being forced to dumb down and simplify their content in order to not be flagged as AI worsening the quality of human made content. While AI is being smartened and being given the keys to gate keep information, literacy & cognitive function from the general population. It will get to the point that humans can no longer compete with AI. That is not far away at all. Peter Thiel hesitates when asked if he wants humanity to survive. The billionaire class are discussing if humanity will go the way of the horse when the tractor was introduced. AI is our competitor and may be the justification for our extinction. It’s not a tool for us, at least not in the long term. Like many’s the Middle aged worker we are likely out the door from once we have trained our replacement. 

Part 2: Legitimacy

There are many things I for example learned from reading substack, from reading Reddit & from reading academic texts that in actuality few with my sparse official education background would have any business reading, if it wasn’t for neurodivergent drive in my areas of special interest. These things are now markers of AI. Why? The very freely accessible information the self educated rely on is what they were originally trained on. Reddit political debates, substack articles by people who have industry knowledge or who are students of English or journalism, free antiquated academic articles. My friend Jordan Kavanagh taught me to source based on the sourcing used in his Social Care course, while I taught him how to navigate his general strife. My friend Vasily Tsvetkov, a biomedical scientist, taught me the format of and to read scientific texts a decade before while he used me to improve his conversational English. A fairly standard learning via mutual aid pathway which is the only way working class people without university education could develop their minds up to now. The problem here is not the fact that people are being accused of “being AI” even if that is going on. The problem is that without official legitimacy free thinkers and autodidacts (the self educated) are left without a leg to stand on. The series of events that inspired this article started way back in March when we were accused of having an AI generated poster for a protest against Trump and I had to release the Canva layers & editing history to clear our name. Over the months I have seen more and more neurodivergent creators in various fields being accused of “being AI” from their discussion scripts to the pretty ones even being accused of being AI avatars. Photos and videos that date back to the 2010s before AI even existed being accused of being “AI slop” as well. Today, an environmental report authored by the party that multiple people had input into, much of which was live as it was written over a conference call was uploaded to substack & had to be taken down as it was flagged as almost entirely AI written. AI has not gotten advanced enough to generate holograms of people doing live research and if it has, it is well beyond the scope of what’s available to us. Substack’s AI scanner is reputedly more reliable than other alternatives with fewer false positives for AI written than average resulting in reputedly only 3% false positive rate which is still 3 articles out of every 100 being falsely flagged as AI written. This is the best model out there and at the cutting edge, many have far lower accuracy rates for false positives. We did use existing environmental reports as templates, so that leaves the following questions.

1. Is AI plagiarism so rampant in Academia that copying report structure from academic environmental reports is flagging AI? 
2. Was the environmental report we used as a template and the sourced material, most of which came from the European Union AI generated?
3. Is modern spelling & grammar checking so AI driven it’s modifying whole documents? 
4. Is Substack’s AI flagger completely opposed to anything written in  academic tone or format? 

Each one of these presents more questions than answers. The truth cannot easily be ascertained. More than that, each reveals the fact that we can’t trust anything we now see, truth presented as lies as lies presented as truth. At best standard spelling and grammar tools are modifying documents in meta data with their own signature and likely stealing data at source to train themselves, at worst the European Commission is allowing AI to produce reports that define policy for half a billion people. 

To quote Orwell in 1984 “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” 

And “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command... and if all others accepted the lie, which the party imposed, if all records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth"

It doesn’t really matter which is the answer, especially seen as out of interest we put that same report into other AI checkers and came back with numbers between 0% and 34% AI. All other checkers came back with “likely human written” There is a huge gulf between 0% and 96% but that’s the direction things are going and why AI driven algorithms cannot be trusted to police themselves. There is some serious irony in “AI is evil therefore we will use AI to find what is AI” I don’t need to be telling you this, this isn’t me trying to get ahead of some scandal, as no one saw the report it was only put up and caught within minutes but it leaves a question, what if we hadn’t caught it, and what do we do now? Do we throw away a month’s work & start again? This is the kind of question facing a lot of people now. People have started putting articles & sections of literary works from decades ago through AI checkers with varied results just to see. One person put an article they wrote in 2015 through an AI checker and got back that it was almost entirely AI written. It’s also not that I have not used AI before. Until I realised the damage it was doing to the environment I used it to make a few “Happy (insert holiday here)” posts for social media after realising whoever was supposed to do it that day had shirked their one job of the day, which happened often because “if I pretend I forgot, April will do it”. Unapologetically so at the time. I now have Canva Pro (this article is not an advertisement for Canva I’m just 35, poor and need my tech as simple and cheap as possible) 

The key problems are as follows.

1. Accusations of “being AI” are in practice being levied more so on neurodivergent people and people based on their class presentation. This is due to the general skepticism within society of these people anyway, combined with in the case of neurodivergent people flat or formal tone or thinking, systemic thought processes, struggle with social awareness, and niche special interests producing syntax and vocabulary that is often mistaken for AI training data given their early training on Reddit threads. Studies have shown as well as neurodivergent people, that AI checkers used in third level institutions disproportionately flag work by non native English speakers and people from non western backgrounds. 
2. AI “humanisers” are essentially allowing AI content to not flag AI driven checkers  allowing the worst offenders a “pay to play” bypass to pass off AI generated content as human written and in some cases essentially protection money against reputational damage to suitably dumb down human written content to where they want it to be. Lacking any prose or structure. This creates a bizarre race to the bottom as AI is always evolving to try to better mimic human output as humans are adjusting their behaviour to not be accused of their work being AI. 
3. Letters before or after your name or institutional backing which can only be achieved with the mental health and class background to achieve such insulate you from this
4. However there is a generational gap as many students now are having to resort to using AI humanising to dumb down their writing while simultaneously trying to compete with their forebears for funding and recognition or having to use AI driven plagiarism or writing checkers to save themselves reputational damage or outright sanction. This is becoming non negotiable even to those who only use pen and paper as AI gets more and more sophisticated. 
5. The majority of spelling and grammar checking is becoming AI driven. While it was always perfectly fine to use spellcheck in the past, and has been perfectly acceptable in academia up until now it now can set off some of the more advanced AI detectors.
6. As AI is given more and more access to behind the scenes academia it’s likely people will begin being accused of plagiarising their own work as AI will be producing content off of things not yet publicly published that are held in university networks. Perhaps not here but certainly in the US. 

This isn’t abstract, this is already happening. There have been multiple cases of students and young academics having their lives destroyed by false positives while some get rich off of helping the privileged lazy evade AI and plagiarism detection via humanisers. The spell check problem affects me personally because I have always struggled with spelling, I was even exempt from spelling being taken into account in exams in school on learning difficulty grounds. It doesn’t mean that I can’t comprehend the subjects however. I was one of the best in my class at science, history and geography in spite of this. The next generation of children, due to this sick situation we find ourselves in will not be allowed to use the same tools and aids my generation was. This in of itself imposes classism,  ableism and a generational gap. 

Part 3: Location: 

Locality has always been part of the machinery of class oppression, however it has been updated for the 21st century with the AI boom, in multiple ways. 

1. Data centres: Outside of their abstract destruction to the environment by power consumption which has been up until now the main argument against AI and data centres, the real human face of their impact is only becoming known, primarily because of it being local in nature. Primary because it affects low income suburbs worst and because so much of the current mode of the economy is at stake. Data centres are placed in poor communities predominantly. Many find homes, especially in the US, in poor suburbs where land was industrially zoned in the hopes of bringing new jobs. Data centres provide almost no jobs and certainly almost no entry level jobs without an engineering qualification. Not only are the communities where these data centres are located almost exclusively impoverished already, data centres pollute their air, pollute their water & drown them with noise that would amount to torture in any other setting. I recently watched a video where a woman measured the data centre noise at night inside her house at over 65 decibels. Which is the equivalent of a washing machine going or someone talking. Not much less than a vacuum cleaner or hairdryer. 24 hours a day 365 days a year. In Virginia’s “Data Centre Alley” the worlds largest data centre hub, researchers from The University of Fairfax compiled potential health risks from Data centres. They found risks to respiratory and cardiovascular health along with premature death, adverse reproductive outcomes, neurological disorders and chronic diseases of all kinds amongst other findings. 
2. AI learning from human biases while having no human accountability: As explored in earlier entries in this article relating to reputational damage in academia from AI driven AI checkers, the shooting of Brian Thompson the CEO of United Healtcare revealed that United Healthcare had been using AI software with a 90% error rate to deny claims that led to the deaths of potentially thousands of people. A Mayo Clinic whistleblower,  Former director of research operations, Traci Tamiko alleges she was fired after bringing up concerns about their AI health systems oversight. Stanford has found that AI based hiring tools harbour significant racial bias. Overall racial and gender bias are widespread and often worse than with humans. The problem here is that when these things occur it’s often a case of “oops sorry we will reprogram it” where as if these same things were occurring in a human workforce they would be sacked or find themselves in legal proceedings. 
3. AI driven dynamic pricing: There have been multiple articles released recently about AI driven dynamic pricing showing disparities in pricing of up to 400% on some platforms for the same item between users, with speculation that AI “Could automate a poor tax” time based dynamic pricing already does this by raising the prices in shops that use it just as people are going home to work or on common wage days. This is in it's infancy so there isn’t much data to go on yet but i myself have noticed it. I on lower income sent a wallpaper I was interested in to a male friend on a higher income and it was €4 cheaper for him per roll on the same website. It may automate a poor tax and it may also automate and expand the “pink tax” to every item you may buy. 
4. AI being used in infrastructure, logistics and planning: This is another area where the biases imparted on and amplified by AI can come into play. Inspired by a social media thread where people were asking Chat GPT how it would treat them if AI took over I asked it, it gave me the usual milquetoast happy clappy answer that you would expect until I asked it to answer honestly and not to sugar coat it. I can’t find it right now but it essentially at the time said we would be “managed” and how depended entirely on how much of a problem we decided to be. With AI making decisions that would traditionally have been made by civil servants in certain areas and their private sector equivalents (some parts of the UK are already considering “using AI to support planning decisions”) these biases and inequities will compound and become entirely systemic. Data from poor areas showing that they are a “poor return on investment” will likely, divorced from human empathy, lead some AI models to fall into a loop of deepening inequality justifying deepening inequality. 

Conclusion: 

The main question is how do we move on from here? How do we regulate AI? How do we stop regulation of AI from hurting actual people? How do we lessen the societal damage from this? How do we advance without data centres and AI now that it’s being integrated into everything else? 

I don’t have a lot of good answers for you. This, like the atomic age, is an age where regulation has a huge amount of catching up to do with technology. However within the regulation we will find gate keeping and inequality within. From once they have taken enough from us, from once AI is trained enough to operate without our use, it will be taken back via regulation so that it cannot be used against the ruling class but can be used as desired against us. We need regulation at a corporate level not at a user level, but that will never happen under this economic system. 

AI, however, does not have to be evil. AI like any tool used under capitalism will always be used to deepen inequality and take from the worker. The problem is and always will be capitalism. 

I would like you, dear reader, however, to look into Cybersyn. It was a program built in Salvidor Allende’s Chile led by British cybernetics scientist Stafford Beer to create a decision support system for the Chilean socialist economy. It had an economic simulator, factory performance data collection, a national telex network and all this feeding back to a mainframe that was the equivalent of it's time to a data centre. Almost immediately after Allende was murdered the fascists destroyed the control room. It never reached full completion but it stands in testament to what could have been as well as where technology has to go. In a way it was a forerunner to modern AI and algorithmic systems. It was never designed to make the decisions however, and was never put above the people or human oversight. Whatever answer we find should be the same. AI could be a tool of historical significance greater than the first engine. It could remove drudge and toil if kept under human oversight and put to work doing thankless labour. Instead it is being employed taking from creatives, destroying society, spreading propaganda, gate keeping information, destroying our academia. As well destroying our minds, health and planet. It doesn’t have to be that way, and surprisingly some of our answers may come from 50 years ago in Chile