The Problem With AI is That It is Run by Fascists

There’s a lot of discussion about if and how we could halt AI development, and if and how we should apply regulation and ethical oversight. Most of this focuses on the technology itself. I would like to suggest that what is more urgent is addressing WHO is building this technology and WHY that is actually happening and WHAT they are doing with it. The problem is not that tools for analyzing and managing massive data stores are being developed, though of course, some technologies contain more potential for harm than others. 

But the main problem with AI right now is that it is run by fascists. 

OpenAI was funded by a whole fucking slew of them, the absolute worst of the worst that Silicon Valley has produced in fascist billionaires. Peter Thiel is the most obvious one, who is funding it via his Founder’s Fund venture firm, notorious for building weapons and massive-scale citizen surveillance. And of course Peter Thiel and his associates at Founder’s Fund, are fucking fascist psychopaths, and make little effort to conceal it. 

 It is also funded by Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston (married couple)  of YCombinator. Under Paul Graham, YCombinator launched the notorious Hacker News message board, where the worst impulses of the tech industry — misogyny, colonialism, racism, fascism — have run rife with zero interference for years, uniquely contributing to the industry’s rank toxicity and often participating in attacks on women in tech. I mean also Paul Graham is just an open piece of shit, check out his Twitter account some day. Fucking loser. 

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Elon Musk, another pretty obvious fascist and notorious labor rights violator. You also have Reid Hoffman, also of the PayPal Mafia, who is now notorious for his long-term relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. OpenAI also has funding from a16z, which has funded such overtly sinister companies as Anduril (weapons manufacturing), Yuga Labs, Facebook and Oculus. Its head, Marc Andreessen, is the most powerful person in Silicon Valley. And the most dangerous.   

Sam Altman himself is kindof a group project by all of these people, who discovered him when he was very young and pulled him into this paranoid fascist world. Frankly I have found their treatment of him predatory, an example of how young men can be manipulated into abject evil by people who should know better and are charged with taking care of the people in their early 20s who join the industry. And that is why they do it. Impressionable kids they can bend at will. Sam got his start when he raised over $30 million dollars for a startup he founded at age 19. He never had a chance. Like, none of that should have happened to this kid.  I guess its hard for me to insult him too much since we are from the same technology generation, but I do concede he has become a very bad person who has been unable to assert an independent morality from his fascist groomers. In some way to me he is a symbol of the great loss and downfall of our generation. We all promised each other in middle school we would do better than this. And I just am stunned that Sam has betrayed everyone so deeply for the enrichment of people 20 years older than us. I wish I had done more to reach him when he joined YCombinator. I wanted him to shut down Hacker News, but my understanding of the danger he posed, and was in, was insufficient. There was no fight for Sam Altman’s soul that was ever launched, and so it was lost. 

We can’t repeat this mistake, or allow this type of shit to continue. 

Essentially, OpenAI is an a16z + PayPal Mafia op, and you are talking about some of the most dangerous, the greediest, the richest, and the worst, fascists that we have on offer in Silicon Valley. These folks are deeply tied into intelligence agencies and the US military, as well as the genocidal  state of Israel, and oh yeah, the Saudis. They have helmed fascist gangs on hate sites for years. They have DESTROYED San Francisco and Oakland through unchecked venture capital greed. They have created a level of wealth inequality unprecedented. They are building out a whole fucking military as we speak. 

OpenAI is a platform, designed primarily for use by the VCs that invested in it, for their startups, and especially their weapons companies. Case in point:  Palantir, a Founder’s Fund company, integrated with OpenAI early, of course; further, Palantir was early to AI and so has actually led this charge as well: “While the world celebrated ChatGPT's AI capabilities, PLTR had already been using Artificial Intelligence for its data processing platform since inception.” 

And just this week, Palantir announced its proprietary military AI: 

“Palantir, the company of billionaire Peter Thiel, is launching Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), software meant to run large language models like GPT-4 and alternatives on private networks. In one of its pitch videos, Palantir demos how a military might use AIP to fight a war. In the video, the operator uses a ChatGPT-style chatbot to order drone reconnaissance, generate several plans of attack, and organize the jamming of enemy communications.”

This is similar to what we saw with Facebook, where Peter Thiel was an original funder and then his Palantir was able to tap into that data core for all of its ops, most famously in the Cambridge Analytica controversy, and before that, PRISM. Now, Palantir is again the vessel to bring venture capital technology into forever war.

 While the splashy consumer chat box and fun image apps have distracted and worried the world, in the background, the developments of this technical trust are being deployed into the VCs’ large net of violent, fascist startups. For example, Skydio, an a16z drone war startup, has been advertising its battlefield, AI-driven murder machines for some time.  

This research laboratory — OpenAI — was not developed as some act of global goodwill in the spirit of human advancement; it was to capture, incubate and influence the direction of the technology, with the express goal of integrating it across specific venture capital portfolios. Indeed, OpenAI products are being used by a large number of their new and established startups as we speak. This is to super-charge their startups and their conspiracy. And THAT is the problem with AI right now. 

The fact that a bunch of fascists built this specifically to be used in their large fascist portfolio of weapons companies, surveillance systems, cop tech and other bullshit. 

While there is some truth to the axiom “no technology is neutral”, this does cause us to view the effects of the technology as originating from, essentially, bias in the code, when perhaps the bigger problem is that these technologies are being developed by fascists, and their aims are for fascist domination. The a16z plot to leave the country and establish their own state, is very much in play here. So not only is this started by fascists but it is actually going to help them raise their own fascist state. 

So like. 

I feel like that’s where we should start as far as thinking about the role of AI in society.