ChatGPT inventor Sam Altman stands on the icy forecourt of the Federal Chancellery and speaks into a megaphone: “It doesn’t matter if an accountant loses her job,” he shouts. The boss of OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT language model, praises the advantages of artificial intelligence: “Why are you so crazy about jobs, leisure is great.”
The tech billionaire is not actually standing in front of the Chancellery, but rather an activist wearing a mask with Altman’s face. This is how she speaks “disguised” at the first protest action of the FAIrness Now initiative, whereby the “AI” in Fairness is capitalized and highlighted in color because of the English abbreviation for “Artificial Intelligence”. Around a dozen activists have gathered to present an open letter to Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU).
In it they warn of the dangerous consequences of artificial intelligence (AI): mass unemployment, threats to democracy through deepfakes, and disrupted development of children and young people. AI has penetrated people’s everyday lives within a very short time, says a co-initiator of the campaign, Raphael Thelen. “The new technology has many advantages, but it also poses risks.”
However, these have hardly been regulated so far. The initiative therefore calls for the establishment of a citizens’ council. The selected members of the committee are supposed to advise the federal government on measures that will put the tech companies in their place.
Grassroots against Big Tech
Even if the action on Wednesday morning is not very spectacular, it could be a harbinger of a new wave of protests against the growing influence of large tech companies. At the end of February, the initiative is mobilizing for a larger demonstration and even wants to organize a mini citizens’ assembly there.
In April, an alliance of urban, climate and digital policy groups is calling for a “movement conference against big tech”. Cables of Resistanceas it is called, is intended to be the starting point for a broad anti-tech movement that is significantly more radical than the Fairness Now campaign.
With AI, everything comes together: environmental destruction, excess wealth, threats to democracy
Raphael Thelen
Initiatives such as Turn off Tesla, which is committed to opposing the expansion of the Gigafactory in Grünheide, or Berlin vs. Amazon, which wanted to prevent the so-called Amazon Tower on Warschauer Straße, as well as the Tech Workers Coalition, a self-organization of workers in the tech industry, are involved.
Although all of these initiatives have been active for years and have rarely been able to mobilize broad masses, the social framework has changed dramatically. Tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman are now openly megalomaniacal and right-wing radical. Technologies like AI have a profound impact on people’s everyday lives, but are rarely regulated.
This is also evident in the protest action. After the interview, a Reuters journalist noted that his employer had already saved jobs through AI.
“With AI, everything comes together: environmental destruction, excess wealth, threats to democracy,” says Fairness Now initiator Thelen. The former full-time activist at Last Generation has found a new topic with the resistance against Big Tech. Thelen believes that the anti-tech movement is exactly where the climate movement was in 2018, when mass protests slowly started. “It’s going to be big,” says the activist.