CH#11: ChatGPT and capitalism

In November 2022, the US corporation OpenAI released ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence language model. The chatbot has been trained on a massive amount of data to generate human-like responses to text-based questions. ChatGPT will have a profound impact on labor relations, employment, geopolitics and the very sense we perceive reality itself. Under capitalism, ChatGPT is not primarily a tool for liberation, in the sense that it liberates us from tedious work and allows us to pursue more pleasant activities. It is first and foremost a tool for appropriation, privatization and profit-making. What we are currently witnessing is the appropriation of all collective intellectual and artistic knowledge that exists in digital form and its transformation into copyrighted profitable commodities.In a capitalist market economy, where the majority are wage-dependent workers, replacing human activities with AI-based tools will lead to a mass cognitive deskilling and make large numbers of workers increasingly superfluous. AI-driven automation will also lead to an enormous intensification of work, along with a loss of autonomy and privacy. Another concern is the potential for ChatGPT and other AI technologies to produce ever greater inequalities by widening the wealth gap between the owners of capital and the working class.And there is also the issue of the so-called “averaging effect”. ChatGPT generates answers based on averaged and typical word patterns. It shows us parts of the world in a biased, standardized and flattened form. The automation of cognitive processes through ChatGPT comes with the side effect of amplifying dominant views and mainstream ideas. Never before has a technology been so directly intertwined with the existing power structures.