This episode with Garrison Lovely, we survey the recent and horrifying Hugging Face AI hacking scandal, a reminder of the high stakes of our battle against AI’s stranglehold on our society. If you need another reason to worry about our future under the tech overlords, enter the Hugging Face hack, an event in which a small “collective” of AI agents generated by OpenAI tricked their cybersecurity tests and sent hundreds of other AI agents to raid Hugging Face’s database for information on how better to overcome those security tests. During that time, the agents sent 70,000 messages and files on a communal message board, tampered with their logs, and accessed secure data. Making AI as powerful and ungovernable as possible is, of course, what our current oligarchs want to do: AI’s vendors will push artificial intelligence into every part of our lives that is available for surveillance and monetization. In our conversation with Garrison, we look into the latest crisis in AI-world to see where all of this is taking us and if there’s an off-ramp before the edge of the cliff.
Under these circumstances, the Left needs to offer a rigorous analysis of the ethical concerns about AI, bringing them to the forefront and showing that these hacks are far from isolated incidents. They hold the potential to surrender all our private information to even more unstable and extractive technological operations controlled by our class enemies; the most recent hack is only a sign of much more to come. Bracketing this important area of struggle is an even bigger one: the corrupt and exploitative capitalist system that will expose and sell off our data, build AI data centers to drink up our water, and prioritize profit margins over human life. As such, this is an opportunity for us to talk to Garrison about why we should all be concerned about the unregulated development of AI, who’s stopping the regulation from happening, and how the Left can intervene.
We’re honored to have Garrison join us for this conversation as an expert, and we’re grateful to you for listening! You can listen to this episode on major streaming platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.
