For surely that is the whole point: our thoughts on generative AI
May 26, 2025
Did anyone see the article about the Norwegian man who woke up to find a cargo ship parked metres from his front door?
For some reason the sheer absurdity of it has had me laughing all morning.
I found myself thinking “Ha! AI couldn’t bring me this thrill of absurd delight!”. I mean, generative AI could create an image, but the image itself is not what makes me laugh. It is the fact that it actually happened. A man went to sleep and woke up not when a large ship ran aground metres from his front door, but when his neighbour rang the doorbell to alert him… What are the chances!?
I’ve recently seen a real surge of enthusiasm for generative AI. Whether it’s from progressive training organisations offering masterclasses in using it to produce campaign materials and connect with members, women’s media networks boldly proclaiming women just need to get confident to use AI, or Liberal Party Senator Anne Ruston telling Insiders that the party had asked AI for insight into why it had suffered such a defeat.
All this makes my soul want to leave my body.
Watching the progressive movement rush towards AI with open arms worries me beyond belief. As Ketan Joshi writes,
"This is because we are losing something. My primary concern is the spread of falsehoods occurring through over-deployment of text generation.Truth has been at the heart of the climate movement for a long time. It was the scientific method that discovered this problem, and then survived a barrage of well-funded disinformation over many years.
A decade later people in the climate movement are gleefully embracing the single most effective bullshit generation engine ever created by our species. “Loss” feels like one hell of an understatement"
We know from our public good work that people want to be deeply and truly connected to each other. Outsourcing our art making, our critical thinking and our engagement with members does not take us there.
Surely now is the time for us to become more human, not less.
We want to make it very clear that as Australia reMADE we will not be using generative AI.
It could be easy to level the critique that we are anti-tech, or anti-progress, or that our resistance is just a barrier to change. And look, I’m not exactly an early adopter of things like mobile phones. But we think that this is different, or at least the magnitude is different, to what has come before.
Generative AI models are not just unethical because they steal work from artists and creatives, or because they use huge amounts of resources, or because they add to the noise of untrustworthy content, or because they are built on racist, sexist, bigoted data…
These reasons alone are, of course, enough for us to push back against, but we also need to be talking about the extraordinary power and control we are handing over to a very small group of techlords who absolutely do not have our best interests at heart.
Writing about what is happening in the US, Mike Brock says:
“Government functions that once belonged to democratically accountable institutions are already being transferred to proprietary AI systems, optimized not for justice or equality, but for efficiency and control. Already, decisions about financial regulation, law enforcement priorities, and political dissent are being made by algorithms that no citizen can vote against and no court can oversee. Your rights are no longer determined by a legal framework you can appeal—they are dictated by a set of terms of service, changeable at the whim of those who control the network.”
Similarly Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor also see the role that AI is playing in the concentrating of power and the privatising of democracy. They write,
“Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they [the mega rich billionaires] dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.”
Just last week the ABC published an article about young people using AI as therapists. It makes sense of course, what young person can afford a therapist in these times, assuming they manage to get to the top of the waiting list? But just because it makes sense doesn’t make it right. One of the people interviewed explained “I don’t really care if the data gets sold, like I’m not giving it credit card information, I’m not putting my address in”. And yet she goes on to say, “It’s just the inner workings of my mind”. Oh my heart, surely this is the most precious thing of all, the last thing we want to be freely handing over to the techbro oligarchs.
And so we have decided not to participate.
We have decided to resist because we value art and arts, stories and storytellers, the struggle and time it takes to be fully human and to invest in the imperfections of creating and relating.
Eric Reinhart captures this in his recent Guardian article on AI,
"Art is a defining human endeavor, not just for those formally called “artists” but for everyone. It is not merely about arranging colors, forms, sounds or words into pleasing products. The essence of art inheres in its making: the belief that, in the act of creating art, one imbues an object with something ineffable from within one’s own being. This belief, in turn, allows for another person to project their own sense of themselves onto the work and, in doing so, to commune with the artist at a level words cannot access."
Beauty and art has never been optional for us at Australia reMADE. From the moment the 9 pillars of our vision came to life we knew it had to not only read beautifully, but look beautiful too.
Many of you have commented on how much you appreciate the care that so obviously goes into our design. It is more than time to properly introduce you to the artist and the thinker behind this work - Anna Wilson.
Anna is an artist, children’s book illustrator and brilliant critical thinker. She has a PhD in human geography and loves, snow, tea and drawing the world.
Anna recently ran an ultra marathon. Sixty-nine kilometres along the Scottish West Highland Way. Amazing. Strangely, she says she loved every moment of it and ran with a smile on her face the entire way. What I particularly love about her approach is that she decided to run fully analog. She turned off her phone, doesn’t own a watch and just ran for the sheer joy of it.
In her beautifully written and illustrated blog (do yourself a favour and read the whole thing) she explains:
“The increasing penetration of technology into every element of our lives, can really make me forget my body, and distract me from the world that we are actually inseparable from. Embracing the digital realm has been such a huge part of making an income as an artist and illustrator and this has meant regular tuning into a world I can only see through a screen, one owned by a few men (who are proving to be most awful) and governed by algorithms outside of my control. And as I ran through the cold of this last winter, the world of AI heated up, and the connection between tech companies and so many horrors became increasingly clear. The places online that have always felt worthwhile (despite always being problematic) are feeling increasingly unappealing. And as I ran, I felt more and more averse to the world that those who are ushering in AI with such joy (or even a despondent sense of inevitability) seem to want.
I don’t want a world that celebrates efficiency or increased productivity as a goal onto its own. I don’t want to sacrifice a beautiful, flawed, humbling world of toad orgies and migrating geese for one that prioritises robots and screens. I don’t want to ‘overcome’ the ‘flaws’ of being human - they are that which makes life interesting and remarkable. I don’t want an increasingly bland and beige world. I don’t want to do things only because they’re measurable. And I don’t want the crunching of big data to dictate what I do. I don’t want a machine to help me compose my sentences (even if it’s faster). I want the slow struggle. I want it to be hard - the good things in life usually are. We are not machines, at our happiest when most productive. I think humans are happy when we’re allowed to be our wonderfully messy, awkward selves, even if this makes us slow, unproductive and inefficient.”
We’re extremely lucky that Anna is not only brilliant at creating and seeing beauty, she’s also wonderful at sharing that experience through both images and words. Expect to see some emails and content specifically from her soon!
Illustrations Anna made of what it felt like running through the winter on her training runs.
Some people have told me I should use chatgpt as a writing buddy. A conversation starter with myself. But isn't that what Anna is for, what Louise is for, what my friends and intellectual companions are for, what those of you who reply to these emails are for? Knowledge and writing surely isn't something we churn out just to create content but something we co-create with each other in conversation in pursuit of the world we wish to grow into being?
