Did the Luddites have a point?

Who gets to decide what the future of our societies will look like? This isn’t a rhetorical question. Who’s in charge? There are politicians but they’re often focused on the short term. We may not always like what they do but, ultimately, they were chosen by our peers. They are calling the shots because we asked them to do so. If we no longer agree with what they are doing, we can vote them out. That part is straightforward.

How about the tech giants, though? They have been shaping our lives for the past few decades, from the shadows and in plain sight, and seem unlikely to relinquish their power anytime soon. The way we live is now, more than ever, impacted by the technology in our pockets and in front of us at work, but no-one elected the VPs and CEOs of Silicon Valley. If we don’t like them, there isn’t much we can do.

It is something that worries me, because, in truth, I really do not like most of those VPs and CEOs. Take the most recent controversy around OpenAI. On Monday evening, actress Scarlett Johansson spoke out against the company, revealing in a statement that, nine months ago, they had asked her to voice their new AI companion.

She’d declined, for “personal reasons”, and so was shocked to find out, months later, that the newly launched AI voice “sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference”.

Because tech bros aren’t exactly subtle, her worries were confirmed by the fact that Sam Altmann, who runs OpenAI, tweeted the word “her” on the day of the release. “Her”, of course, was a Spike Jonze movie released in 2013, in which Johansson voiced an AI companion.

Sky, ChatGPT’s voice option, has been taken offline for now, but even the most optimistic among us can surely see that winning this small battle will not hand us the war. It is also worth really taking the time to think about everything this incident has revealed.

OpenAI, one of the companies currently most involved in shaping our future tech, asked a woman for her voice then, when she said no, took it anyway. They heard a woman’s “no” and chose not to respect it, because they assumed they could get away with it. Would they have done the same thing to a man? There is no way of knowing for certain, of course, but we can certainly guess.

Similarly, how are they planning to behave with people, especially women, who do not have Scarlett Johansson’s fame, money and legal team? Building artificial intelligence means drawing from endless resources and, given how they have been behaving so far, it seems that the companies doing the work simply do not want to fairly compensate the people who own those resources.

There is a cockiness to these tech bros which feels harder and harder to ignore. They see things they want and they assume they can take them. If it works, it works; if it doesn’t, they can issue a half-meant apology then go plunder something else instead. Again, I must ask: are those really the people we want in charge of our future?

This question is, sadly, a rhetorical one. I know for a fact that I do not want Sam Altmann and his ilk deciding what the internet will look like in the near future, but I also know that I have no say whatsoever in it. There are no OpenAI elections; the tech bros cannot be voted out.

Still, we are not entirely powerless. What they are building are products and we, as consumers, have a say in whether we use those products or not. It is probably easier said than done but, as things stand, I’m just not sure I would want to use anything created by OpenAI. The future of tech may seem exciting, but it cannot be built by bulldozing over women’s consent. The Luddites were long mocked and misunderstood but, looking at what our overlords currently seem to have in store for us, I’m beginning to wonder if they had a point.