What tech bros think of you

There is something singularly dehumanising about how the tech bros behind AI tools view people. It is, for lack of a better word, grotesque.

I have already written at length about how AI promises you can “become a writer” without writing, and “become an artist” without drawing or painting. I think the underlying implication here is that you actually do not have the capacity to be an artist or a writer and that they are making it easy for you.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built his Large Language Model by stealing from millions of human artists and creators on the web, and then accused Chinese AI company Deepseek of stealing from his company when they managed to build a cheaper model than him. We have even seen him say that artists who were employing software solutions to prevent their work from being scraped and used for training AI were abusing his system. Even when people explicitly say they don’t want their content taken, they go ahead and take it anyway.

The message is simple – your stuff belongs to him and there is nothing you can do to stop him from taking it and using it to make money.

He thinks he is more important than you. He doesn’t say it in that many words of course.

He was recently speaking to Chris Anderson of TED Talks and said that he sees AI art-making tools as “democratising access to art”.

I think this has to do with what Altman and tech-bros like him think of human beings. They don’t think you and I are people. They don’t think you and I can write, or draw, or call our parents, or love our work enough to want to do it. And if I am wrong about this and they do think we are people, then I would have to conclude that they don’t know what people are. It seems to me to be an astonishing level of disconnect from reality.

Either that or he is just plain lying about what he thinks.

I am sure if someone broke into Sam Altman’s house, stole all his possessions, and started giving it away for free or selling it all for cheap in a black market, he would hesitate to call it “democratising access” to his stuff.