Back in D.C., I pitched my editor and later returned to the Denver area to live in the hotel for about five weeks. I got to know the people living there—how they lost their home and what life living in a hotel was like. My article, “The Weeklies,” ran in March 2013. I remain incredibly proud of it, because it highlighted the struggle ordinary Americans were facing as the economy slowly recovered from the housing crash.
So I turned to the chatbots themselves for details. Some would not divulge which works of mine were used in their training, but Gemini cited my work at The American Prospect and TNR:
There have been more than a few times lately when I wanted to throw my laptop across the room, drop everything, and go live in the woods. This was one of them.
I don’t want to throw too much of a pity party, but as someone who went to college thanks to financial aid and then borrowed to go to graduate school because I didn’t know how else to move into my desired career, I never had family money or connections to rely on. During these years, I struggled to keep up with my bills and to stay one step ahead of the layoffs devastating the entire industry. At various times, I put my student loans in forbearance, had a Honda Civic repossessed, and defaulted on credit cards. It took me years to dig out of that financial hole.
AI is not the first technology to upend that promise, but it is the latest—and the one that has touched me most personally. It makes sense that I would be In the Weights. I wrote a lot of words during the early years of internet publishing, creating a body of work that is easy to find and offers free material for the LLMs to suck into their gaping maw. But it is a mistake to think of everything I published under my name as just internet writing. Each word came from years and years of labor.
We definitely need to talk about where we’re headed, but what about where we’ve been? Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is the rare voice on Capitol Hill to acknowledge that AI “is based on the collective knowledge of humanity and the creative work of tens of millions of people.” Last month, he introduced a bill that would levy a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of the largest AI firms to create a $7 trillion sovereign wealth fund, which every year would pay out more than $1,000 to everyone in the U.S. It would also give the federal government voting shares and positions on company boards to allow the public to have a say in its future use.
Of course, this is part of a broader trend in which executives and investors mint millions while workers get an increasingly thin sliver of the pie. If you want one chart to explain why people are mad about the economy right now, look at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s chart showing how labor’s share of gross domestic product has declined since the 1950s.
While anger at Big Tech is growing, I don’t know if people are angry enough, and I wonder if that’s partly because a lot of the work that has fueled social media platforms and now AI is in creative fields like art and writing, which are misunderstood or esoteric to many Americans. The writing that many people do in their own working lives might be annoying paperwork, like a self-evaluation, or a cover letter in a job application—typing, basically. But writing, whether a quick take on the day’s news or months of reporting, is really the product of months or even years of labor. Writing also demands thinking, which is work in itself. Generative AI can write, albeit very poorly, but it can’t really think—not as humans do. The best it can do is scan all of its inputs—the result of human beings’ thoughts—in order to approximate the output a human would provide.
Only politics can address the problems with AI, but for the past 50 years our leaders in Washington have largely abandoned labor in favor of companies’ capital growth. Wages, taxes, and regulations have undervalued the work and safety of real people, driving the K-shaped economic growth we see now. Political and economic systems won’t change course unless we force them to. To use an example from the past, the Luddite rebellion was not a wholesale rejection of modern advances. The Luddites were textile workers angry about how mechanization was being used to exploit working people, and they protested by destroying automated power looms. My desire to smash my laptop comes from an old tradition.
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