CONCEPT
The Contemporary Luddites
The artists, writers, actors, and engineers who have raised specific, articulate grievances about AI deployment — and whose dismissal as Luddites performs the same delegitimating function the original label performed two centuries ago.
The artists who protested the use of their work to train image generators were not Luddites, though the label was applied with reflexive contempt. The writers who petitioned against the scraping of their books were not Luddites. The actors who struck over the use of their likenesses were not Luddites. The engineers who raised concerns about AI governance were not Luddites. Each group had a specific, articulate, and entirely rational grievance — and what they shared was not a common technology or industry but a common political condition: exclusion from the governance of decisions that affect their lives. The application of the Luddite label served in each case the same function it served against the framework knitters: the delegitimation of dissent through the imputation of ignorance.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The artists' grievance is a consent grievance. Sarah Andersen's webcomic style was scraped without permission and used to train Stable Diffusion, which could then produce images