Published a mere six months before ChatGPT rocketed onto the world stage and into popular consciousness, Dan McQuillan’s book Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence has captured the attention of a diverse and unconventional audience.
“The book has positioned me to be able to talk about generative AI,” says Dan. “It has given me forms of articulation to help move the discussion from the hype-cycle single-layer question around whether Large Language Models (LLMs) are good or bad, to the more radical and worrying aspects of the technology as it is being implemented.”
“Much of the mainstream conversation has focused on the existential threat posed by AI. This is a bullshit concern and one that distracts from the real issues at stake. Specifically, left running on its current trajectory, generative AI will reinforce the disparities within society with disastrous implications for those already marginalised groups and people.”
Through his appearances on podcasts, Dan’s work is reaching a different audience – and at scale. That his episode of This Machine Kills received 12,000 plays and his episode of TrashFuture has had 37,000 downloads is evidence of this. The proliferation of interest from these and other tech critique podcasts, such as The Anti-Dystopians and Tech Won’t Save Us, demonstrates a quiet but growing dis-ease with the standardised ‘technology-as-saviour’ discourse.
“The narrative around these spaces has massively widened out since ChatGPT,” he says. “When I started working on this, the idea of writing a book about making AI fairer was fine but the idea of writing a book against the technology just wasn’t being done – that’s part of the reason I wrote it.”
“Now, however, the ideas of resistance, refusal, abolition and Luddism are circulating like debris in a hurricane. This is a complete transition from when I published the book last year.”
It’s not just tech critics who are keen to speak with Dan. His appearance – viewed by over 12,000 people – on the pro-machine learning video podcast Machine Learning Street Talk is remarkable for Dan being one of the only guests offering a dissenting voice on the subject. “I was chuffed to be inserted into this narrative that is mostly dominated by the Yann LeCuns of this world,” he says.
Resisting AI has also found a more mainstream audience – not least through the interview for LBC radio. This offered another important opportunity for Dan to debunk the popular and unfounded concern about the existential risk posed by AI.
The book has been featured twice in Computer Weekly, something that Dan describes as being ‘a bit surreal’ given it is essentially a trade magazine. The initial article about AI included quotes from Dan that compelled the journalist to ask him for an additional full interview on the subject.
“This piece ended up being almost the most radical thing I’ve ever published,” says Dan, who is wary of obvious political positioning when writing for a mainstream audience in case that distracts from the message. In reality the piece received positive feedback and engagement.
“Part of the reason for writing Resisting AI was a conviction I have that some people, and not a trivial number, already have a more radical critique of things in general than the hegemonic narrative lets on,” says Dan. “Whether it’s climate change or AI or anything else, a lot of people have already gone quite a long way in figuring out this kind of thing is a bit of scam.”
The impact and reach the book has had is international, extensive and personal, as Dan continues to receive regular feedback from individuals around the world. The owner of Iffy Books, an activist bookstore in Philadelphia, USA, contacted Dan to congratulate him on his work, saying they had sold out of the book and just ordered more in. Another person in Philadelphia messaged to say he had set up a reading group around the book; a worker from a digital agency in Malmö, Sweden wanted to let Dan know he used arguments from the book in a presentation to SMEs and entrepreneurs. French film director and sociologist Isabelle Sylvestre contacted Dan to say she was using his book with her journalism students and the I4C Center for Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights in South Asia told Dan Resisting AI had greatly influenced its set up.
The book has captured the attention of artists, philosophers and alternative thinkers. From being referenced by German filmmaker and moving image artist Hito Steyerl in a talk given in Berlin last autumn, to parts of the book being translated by French activist group Tous Dehors on its website, to being recommended by Sheffield-based post-rock band 65 Days of Static, it is clear that his messages are resonating with the cultural underground.
“The dispersion of the book is gratifying,” says Dan. “It is getting a response from different kinds of areas, from those who are tech-savvy, young, hipster activists.”
A Slovenian artist, Sanela Jahić, asked Dan to write and read a transcript based on the book as part of her exhibition, ‘Under the Calculative Gaze’, which was displayed in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He explains: “Sanela Jahić and her partner came to film the piece on their iPhone so they could do photogrammetry. It’s funny for me to watch as my 3D head is blown away bit by bit into cyberspace in their final version of the piece.”
Dan has also taken part in Antiuniversity events, including giving readings from Resisting AI at a nightclub in London. Dan explains: “The point is not be anti-university per se, it’s just to take the critical thinking that is often walled up inside universities and get it out to people. What was great about the event was that many of the questions from the audience were from people who would start off by saying ‘well, I’m a data scientist and…’ which I didn’t expect. I expected people who were already hostile to AI but there were quite a few industry people there, not hardcore machine learning engineers but people who work in data science, engineers etc.
Dan McQuillan speaking at an Anti-University Now event at The Jago in London.
“The outreach I’m doing at the moment is increasingly in the direction of people who are already marginalised,” says Dan. “I gave a talk recently for people out of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. They are bridging the divide, working on the ground with people who are affected by forms of oppression, including algorithmic oppression.”
The breadth of interest in Resisting AI is testament to the growing concern around the impact of AI, including the less seen but already felt experience of technologising bureaucracy; how that serves to penalise the most vulnerable in society and replicate models of marginalisation.
Dan is more confident than ever that opposition will happen. While Resisting AI isn’t a programme or a manifesto, he believes it has a role in giving people a language, as well as substance to their convictions. The book provides grounding and confidence for groups and individuals who are questioning whether the current approach is the only way forward technologically.
“I had an email from someone recently saying, ‘I was feeling alone in my misgivings until I read your book…thanks for saying it’.”
Dan McQuillan is Lecturer in Creative and Social Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Rebecca Megson-Smith is a writer and writing coach, founder of Ridley Writes.
Resisting AI by Dan McQuillan is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £19.99.
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