The Contemporary Luddites

In the AI Story

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 "in the style of Sarah Andersen" competing with her for commissions her years of work had built. The labor was taken without consent to build a tool that would devalue that labor — the framework knitters' situation exactly.

The writers' grievance extends the property question into language itself. The Books3 dataset contained approximately 196,000 books obtained from shadow libraries without author permission. The Authors Guild letter signed by over ten thousand writers demanded consent, credit, and compensation — the mildest conceivable remedies for a violation that, had it been performed against any other kind of property, would have produced criminal prosecution.

The actors' grievance reaches beyond the economic to the bodily. During the 2023 SAG-AFTRA negotiations, studios proposed contract language permitting them to scan a background performer's likeness in a single session and use the digital replica in any future production, in perpetuity, for a single day's pay. The actors' resistance was not to digital effects but to the proposition that a person's physical appearance could be captured, owned, and deployed without ongoing consent or compensation.

The engineers' grievance is internal to the industry and politically complex. Engineers at major AI companies have raised concerns about pace of deployment, adequacy of safety testing, and governance of systems whose capabilities expand faster than understanding. Several have left positions to raise concerns publicly, at significant personal cost. Their grievance is about governance — the concentration of world-shaping decisions in a small number of executives whose competitive incentives are not aligned with broader public interest.

Origin

The framing emerges from applying Thompson's analytical categories to contemporary AI resistance — in particular, his recovery of the framework knitters' specific grievances from beneath the dismissive label that concealed them.

Key Ideas

Specific grievances, not technophobia. Each group has a specific political grievance about terms of deployment, not a general opposition to the technology.

Common political condition. What they share is exclusion from governance of decisions affecting their lives — the same condition Thompson identified in the original Luddites.

Consent as central issue. For artists, writers, and actors, the core violation is the use of labor or likeness without consent — a consent that could have been obtained but was not.

Governance grievance for engineers. For those inside the industry, the grievance concerns who makes decisions about world-shaping technology and in whose interest.