HKFP Yum Cha returns for a special episode with award-winning journalist Karen Hao. Author of bestseller Empire of AI and founder of the AI Resist List , Karen discusses with HKFP how grassroots movements around the world are taking on the tech elites. Is the recent backlash against the AI roll-out sustainable? Will the next generation care if content is real or AI-generated? Is the “China threat” a real concern or a marketing ploy by AI firms? And does Hao actually use AI tools herself?
We also discuss what may be motivating AI tech leaders, the protests against “dirty data centres,” and why generative AI art feels empty. Full transcript Welcome to a special episode of HKFP Yum Cha with the Karen Hao, a multi-award winning journalist working on AI, author of the best-selling Empire of AI now out in paperback and co-host of the BBC’s The Interface podcast. Karen studied mechanical engineering at MIT and was previously with the Wall Street Journal here in Hong Kong. This year she launched the AI Resist List to document examples of resistance to the AI revolution/apocalypse around the world.
And she herself remains a rather lonely but bleeding critical voice on the bleeding edge of the Zeitgeist all at a time when we’re a wash with AI evangelists espousing the merits of a technology that’s disrupting business, politics, and the environment. Karen, thank you for coming in to our humble headquarters in this new trillionare era and for braving the rain. If you hear thunder, it’s because you’ve angered the AI gods, okay? Exactly.
Um, I’ll let you just talk about the colonialism metaphor you rely on in the book. Yeah. Um, well, first of all, thank you for having me. I love being in a news office again. Um, I so the the reason why my book is called Empire of AIs because I called the companies like Open AI, Empires of AI.
And Empire is the only metaphor that I’ve really ever found to encompass every facet of how these companies operate and how we should ultimately think about their role in society. So, first and foremost, they as an extraordinary amount of economic and political power and you could argue that they’ve become the preeminent or dominant power in today’s world, but they do that through the dispossession of the majority.
And in my book, I talk about four specific parallels, but there’s honestly many more. The first is that they like claim to resources that are not their own, the data of individuals, the intellectual property of artists, journalists, writers. The second feature is that they exploit amount of labor.
So, the workers that they use to produce their technologies that see very little value in return and also the workers they displace through the deployment of this technology and ultimately they then accrue the value of the salary that would have gone to that worker because the company is instead buying their product or service.
The third parallel is that empires always control the flow of information in society and the empires of AI do that both by censoring and controlling what kind of research is produced on AI.
So the public is in the dark about the true limitations and capabilities of these technologies, but also these companies are ultimately producing an information technology that they want to be the portal through which everyone around the world uses as as um to understand the rest of the world. And the final one is that they wrap this all up in a civilizing mission saying that they’re doing this for the progress of all of humanity. Right.
Sam Altman in the early days in particular said it’s going to solve cancer, the housing crisis, the climate crisis, democracy, poverty, mental health, inequality, but they’ve also warned of deadly bioweapons, cyber security chaos, massive job losses, misinformation, literal existential risk. Sometimes they’ll will have a model and they’ll warn, “Oh no, I’ve accidentally on purpose first created something really dangerous. Again, somebody stop me.
Um why is it important tech chiefs seem to have to play to both hopes and fears? Yeah, so this goes back to the fourth parallel of why I I call these companies empires is religion is a really powerful feature of empire building.
There is the civilizing mission and that promises to bring humanity to a heaven-like state, but complementary to that And what goes hand-in-hand with that is the threat of instead descending into a hellish state. These are like the oldest stories that we’ve told ourselves throughout human history is the idea of utopia, dystopia, heaven and hell.
And so by conveying that there are such extraordinary stakes, what these tech chiefs do is create this narrative of or justification for why they must retain total control over this technology’s development because if it falls into the wrong hands, then we’re doomed, but we could in fact access that utopia.
So, it doesn’t really work unless there is this kind of evil empire competing against what they are ultimately trying to achieve. Do you feel they’re giving up more on the hopeful stuff lately? And I think, you know, as the money seems to be coming more of a thing, they’re leaning on more than Well, it’ll reduce your head count and cut costs. I don’t think they’re leaning on it more than than usual. I think it’s just there are a couple dynamics happening.
One is that within the AI world, different executives will lean on different dimensions of this narrative. Sam Altman is more traditionally leaning on the side of utopia and using the carrot to try and get people to go in this particular direction and allow his company to do whatever they want.
Whereas Dario Amadeo of Anthropic typically leans more on the doomer narrative and what’s happened in the recent months is Anthropic has become much more of a dominant force and is beginning to out compete opening eye both in terms of commercial value and also in narrative swaying power.
So, we’re hearing more of the Doom narrative because that’s what Anthropic foregrounds in his it’s it’s uh storytelling, but this has been uh you know both both crutches or both both legs of the stool have always been there from the very beginning of this industry. Talking to Doom, this is maybe your first interview since the world burst its first trillionaire last week.
If we have this underclass created through massive unemployment, innovation being stifled by IP theft, and if the environment is ruined, what market is the left to sell to? What even is the end game? You went to school with some of these tech bros. What at this stage is their motive? What’s the point in a million in a trillion hair? Um, I couldn’t tell you. If it’s not Maybe money in the early days, is it now power?
I mean, it’s I think it’s always been like Money is a is is a lever of power. You know, the the there’s no point in accruing money if we didn’t live in a capitalistic system where money brings you a significant amount of power.
So, it’s always been about power and we have reached a stage of capitalism where the system has allowed for the creation of these individuals with extraordinary extraordinary degrees of power as as manifested in many ways, not just monetary, right? Elon Musk before he was a trillion already had an an exorbitant amount of political power and other forms of power in addition to financial.
So, I Yeah, I I I think that um this is the perfect example of runaway capitalism and and and also imperialism in that part of why I think these companies and individuals at at their heads are so fixated on this idea of wanting ever more is because of this drive to capture everything under the sun the way that an empire used to.
I mean even though um Musk is you know the first trillionaire you see this ideology parodied and um manifesting among all of the the heads of these companies. You know Sam Altman before he became the CEO of OpenAI, he was the president of Y Combinator uh startup accelerator in the valley and he said back then I want to invest in 10x more companies year after year until I’m investing in every single company in the world.
It’s like there’s this drive to want to lay claim to everything and until that happens, it’s not enough. To run with the metaphor of empire, we saw this decolonization process after World War II, right, where the colonial powers were overstretched, the money was running running out, there were indigenous resistance movements coming up. And there was this new new end framework for states to you know sign up to defining like self-determination.
With AI now, we’re seeing localized like uprisings. The AI firms are looking overstretched in recent months. Last week, HKFP, we signed up to join the Spur coalition, which is a journalistic effort to have some framework for AI firms to sign up to, which can monetize sort of the AI telemetry and try and correct some of the issues with copyright. Are the parallels lessons when it comes to how to take down empire.
I absolutely think there’s there’s parallels. I mean, one of the things we should take as a lesson from history is that empires are not inevitable, even though they feel that way, every single empire has fallen in history. And part of it has been because there is a broad coalition of resistance movements that build up and then topple the empire.
And I think the analogy holds in that what we are seeing now is in in the global conversation around AI, there’s been a significant change in sentiment. I I mean, when I was working on the book just two years ago, the hype was out of control and everyone everyone was parroting the industry’s narratives that this is going to be the best thing since sliced bread.
And now what we’re seeing is many more people aware of the environmental harms, the labor exploitation, the public health harms, and questioning whether or not this is really the way that we should be approaching AI development, being deeply concerned about the impact on their kids and their critical thinking and their future economic opportunities and so on and so forth.
And so in the US, what we’re seeing is 80% of Americans are now concerned about AI and it’s becoming a top issue in the midterm elections. And through this broad base of dissatisfaction, we are then seeing all these different resistance movements popping up. And in in uncoordinated ways, you know, like in independently kind of beginning to push back and actually hold the industry accountable.
And it is having an effect on the ways that these companies are actually able to operate. So I think what we saw with how empires of old ended up meeting their end is beginning to play out with the empires of AI. Is Is it mostly even environmental stuff that’s driving the push back?
No, it’s actually, you know, every single harm that is coming out of these companies, I think, are all intersecting motivations for push back. I mean, environmental is is one of them, but labor is a huge one.
I mean, When you have an industry saying we’re coming after all of your jobs, I mean that really is a huge mobilizing um it it’s a it’s a rallying call for a lot of people to think wait a minute then why are we building a technology to do that. Um psychological harm towards kids is a really big one.
Of course that was a really big one for holding social media accountable as well is why are we okay with platforms eroding the mental health of our teens and as as people have realized that AI chatbots can engage in a similar kind of psychological impact, that is yet another thing that is galvanizing parents to be really critical of these companies.
And so there’s the the the reason why there’s such a broad coalition of resistance happening is because there are so many different reasons why people are resisting and it is essentially touching every single asset every single community in society now in these negative ways.
Yeah, you said when you finished the book, it was all rather depressing, but this has totally changed over the last year or two. And now you’ve put together this AI resist list that I was looking through of different examples from around the world, one in China even. But looking at the US, you you now have like push back against the push back. State-level national agencies starting to monitor and conflate these movements with terrorism. Trump has sort of banned states from regulating IO together.
Is that going to make resistance rarer and tougher? Is it going to be sustainable? It’s interesting. I I mean certainly it’s going to make resistance tougher, but does that mean that it’s going to make it rarer? I actually think the opposite is going to happen. And you can look at the tech industry itself as a microcosm of the resistance that’s happening around the world. So tech employee organizing used to be a very popular thing.
In the 2016 to 2018 period, there were a lot of employees in these big tech companies that started, you know, engaging in street protests, open letters, even unionizing to hold their leadership accountable, especially during the first era of the Trump administration. That dispersed that energy dispersed because of the pandemic, because of various other challenges that the tech industry was facing.
And now we are seeing a return of this resistance. One of the actually things that we we feature on the air resist list is this open letter from Amazon employees where they talk about the intersecting harm that they see their company engaging in with this accelerated aggressive AI development that is enabling surveillance, for example, and authoritarianism in the US.
And And it’s pretty remarkable that we are seeing this bubble up out of time like now because within the tech industry, executives have become more happy than ever before to surveil their employees, to fire them, to punish and penalize them for this kind of outspoken organizing and yet we are seeing more of it.
And it’s actually in part because of the very reaction of these executives trying to snuff out this resistance. because it sort of has revealed, you know, the mask has come off. I think before employees wouldn’t always protest or participate because they felt like they were actually at benevolent companies and they were working for benevolent people and they were happy to participate in that kind of story.
And now that it’s become increasingly obvious that Silicon Valley has become uh fused with Washington in these deeply troubling ways, even though there is much greater risk to to the employees. They feel that compelled to speak out and to push back. And so, I think that’s going to be the same story for resistance everywhere outside of the tech industry as well. Even as there is greater surveillance, greater snuffing out of this kind of protest.
It is going to actually inflame and fuel even further the desire and momentum to resist. One of the examples, data centers, they’re set up, they drain and pollute water sources, gas turbines polluting the air. You’ve talked about this from a more perfect union outside Memphis, a poorer black community.
If Americans resist, and everything goes to plan as you’ve kind of laid out in these grassroots movement. Do you not fear that there’ll be a race to the bottom where this kind of infrastructure is going to be put completely out of sight in mind, perhaps in the less developed world, maybe where there’s less regulation or even in places like Hong Kong, which let’s say is a low resistance, low regulation haven.
There’s definitely been attempts by the tech industry to put these infrastructure in places where they believe believe there will be less resistance, and it has repeatedly failed. I mean, I talk in my book about how Google attempted to do this in Latin America. They tried to put a data center in a very poor working-class community outside of Santiago, Chile, and they received the biggest uprising that they had really ever faced before as a company.
They were shocked that this community, which, you know, by all accounts has the least amount of power in the face of a multinational rich corporation like Google. Um the Google actually was unable to build their data center for years and years because of the degree of pushback. So then they were like, “Well, fine.
If we can’t build it in this community, we’re going to move to Uruguay.” And so then they tried and it turned out that there were community leaders in Uruguay who had read about the resistance in Chile and they then engage in the same protest and the same resistance and so Google was unable to build their data center in Uruguay either. So yeah, you you like these companies absolutely try to play different countries against each other, different communities against each other.
They try to pit people in these ways, but it hasn’t actually been a successful strategy. And I would I would love to recommend um uh a book called The Wall Dancers by Elling Liu, which talks about China and the history of resistance and protest in China in relation to censorship of the government as well.
And it’s a very very beautiful deeply reported story that looks at how there’s actually a significant amount of agency and expression and resistance that happens underground even in places like China.
And that’s why with the AI resist list we had an example from China, we had an example from Hong Kong to show that this narrative that these places don’t have any agency and individuals can, you know don’t have any say in these kinds of issues is not actually a correct narrative.
And um when I’ve done book events in um I’ve done a lot of book events in Hong Kong, um people are just as concerned about AI development and are thinking critically about how they want this technology to shape the future and are thinking about whether or not they want to allow these companies to engage in certain kinds of reckless behavior.
We We We We report reported last week, Hong Kong has the third dirtiest data centers in the world after, I think, Indonesia and India. Can you tell us about the example from China with ByteDance on the resist list? Oh, yeah. You know what? We actually have two examples from China.
Yeah, so the ByteDance example, there was this really interesting moment in which ByteDance tried to release a feature with their video generation model where it would allow users to upload a single photo and then generate a fake take video of that person in their likeness. And there was such a huge backlash on social media that by then actually had to suspend the feature.
And this is, you know, like there are a number of examples that we have on our our resist list where there was very um clear actual like reaction from the company. The company had to actually pull back what they were trying to do, but they they’re rare. You know, a lot of the examples that we have are more focused on accountability that is that is building, you know, kind of in progress.
Like the company hasn’t yet responded yet. It’s just a building or accumulation of pressure. But actually a lot of the examples that we found in China, there was actual real account like the accountability had already happened. The The second example is of a voice actress in China who sued, I forget which company, for taking her voice data without consent to then create an AI voice.
And the Chinese courts actually um uh you know she won the case in the Chinese courts and both the company the AI company as well as the company that sold her voice data to the AI company were fined and held legally liable. I feel there’s a much broader collective like grown when it comes to AI just in recent kind of year or two.
Um aside from the companies that are backtracking and rehiring humans or running out of money for their tokens or whatever. Pretty much everyone I notice online if some company puts out uh we now have AI XYZ or whatever. There’s just abuse in the comments or Coca-Cola trying to do an AI generated ad etc. And and even myself I am getting caught out now with some of the generative AI stuff.
I was kind of blubbing quite late at night listening to this beautiful 1960s Italian song on YouTube, and then I realized it was bloody AI, and I can tell. And I mean, even as journalists, we’ve also been caught out occasionally. And I guess there’s just that what is that icky weird feeling you get of feeling ripped off that only existed after you learnt what was going on. Why do people feel ripped off by that kind of content?
And if it becomes totally indistinguishable from the real thing, are people really going to continue to care in years to come? So, I think often times we get a little bit caught up in this idea that um if something is if AI generated content is indistinguishable from human generated content, then that means they’re interchangeable.
But that’s kind kind of just a super like they’re they’re the same at a superficial level in their presentation, but they’re not actually the same in terms of what they represent Human generated art is a representation of a person’s lived experience and the reason why we like looking at human generated art listening to human generated music and we feel that icky ness with AI generated stuff is because we are in that moment of engaging in a in a piece of art like entangling our life with another person’s life and it feels really meaningful because we know that at the other end of that entanglement was a person you know like a real person who had emotions and thoughts and experiences that were similar to ours.
So like even though AI generated art might at some point be uh in indistinguishable in certain respects at a at a presentation level, it doesn’t actually represent the same thing. And so will there be moments where people might consume AI generated art and still have like an experience that is meaningful to them personally? Yes, you know, I’ve talked with people who feel that they’ve already had that experience.
But does that actually mean it is it is it the same like thing as interacting with human generated art and actually engaging with another real person’s thoughts and feelings and emotions, not at all? Yeah, I was quite surprised actually the some of the students we spoke to at universities for a future last week were pretty cynical about using AI.
This is when the journalism school is converted their entire school to be like AI-based. I also spoke to a teacher who would sometimes show a picture of like a beautiful lake in Switzerland or something to the kids and they’d be like, “Ew, AI.” I mean it was a real lake actually, but these kids I guess are used to quite ramshackle Hong Kong beaches.
But I wonder if that next generation, the very youngest, generation Alpha or whatever, if if generation Z were born into the internet era, there’s going to be kids coming up, who would they be just utterly accepting of AI whilst the rest of us are Abe Simpson shaking our fists at the sky. We You talked about the differentiation that may be important to us who can whether we can tell the difference or not, but will the next generation, the youngest really care?
I think that it’s exactly the opposite way around. I think the younger generation care the most and this was with social media as well. I was the social media our generation, I’m a millennial and it was millennials that started first asking the questions about, did we actually enjoy, you know, growing up in the social media era? Should we be in doing digital detoxes?
Like all of that that cultural push back against social media and now many people starting to buy dumb phones happened with millennials and there was a article from the Financial Times uh column by um uh John is it Murdoch Burns or Burns Murdoch? Murdoch Burns I think. John Murdoch Burns where he looks at the data for social media adoption currently, and it’s already peaked.
It’s just It’s in decline now, and the generation that has been the fastest in getting rid of social media is the youngest generation. And so we’re seeing the same thing with AI. It like Gen Alpha and Gen Z, they’re saying things to each other in school now saying that’s AI, meaning that’s fake news. Where, you know, it was like one of my my colleagues was explaining to me how how like a conversation would go.
It’s like a guy, you know, a guy says to his friends, “Oh yeah, I have a girlfriend in another school.” And they’re like, “That’s AI.” Haters will say it’s AI. Yeah, exactly. And so there’s there’s, you know, it’s literally the AI is being coded in in a in a negative way in the younger generation. And it’s actually, you know, the people that speak the most excitedly about AI are the boomers. Like the ones that I’ve already They’ve already had a long and successful career. They’ve already bought their home.
They’ve already like They’re They’re business owners, capital owners, and they’re the ones that can benefit a lot from this technology. So, they’re super excited about it. Yeah, I feel similar in that. I’ve just made it into the millennial cohort, and I’m trying not to behave same concern. I’ve printed off our five-page guide for staff because we seek to be GenAI-free. No one sentence on our website should be generated by AI.
But we’re also don’t want to be Luddites and we want to make sure that when it comes to processing data or transcription and things like this and experimenting that we’re we’re not completely head in sand. You’ve said that you’re not allergic, you use AI, but I’m super curious to know exactly what tools you use, how you might be using it? Is it mostly for research, for what you do, or you’re getting use out of it? How exactly are you interacting?
In fact, it’s because of you, me and my partner don’t use it for frivolous things, because we have the environmental thing at the back of our mind. So, no cat pictures and things like that. So, I don’t use GenAI. I don’t use Yeah, like I don’t use ChatGPT, GenAI any of the tools other than to if a new feature comes out, I’ll occasionally test it to understand it better for my reporting purposes. But I I’ve never used the tool for research purposes. I don’t recommend people use it for research purposes.
The number of times that, you know, with with now like Google Search has everything is AI search, but I think every one and every 10 searches I get a a really egregious factual error in the AI um search. And and it often surfaces stats that are actually aren’t even in the sources that they link to, which is like very very confusing. But um yeah, so I I don’t use those types of tools because of three reasons.
One is the ethical stance that I take because I’ve been investigating these companies. The second one is a privacy stance because I investigate these companies and I think that these are the greatest surveillance tools that have ever been built. And so every time you use it, you’re giving an extraordinary amount of data to these companies. And for me, I’m particularly sensitive about that. And the third thing is that I don’t think that any of my work actually benefits from Gen AI specifically.
And so I can take the ethical stands without having like a particular cost to me. But I do use other types of AI tools. So, um to to your point of how, you know, there’s gen AI and then there’s other types of like transcription services. I use AI transcription all the time. Um, but I specifically look for transcription companies where first of all, they have a very high data privacy standard.
So, I um for my book, I use a transcription service that only did transcription on my local drive. It was not cloud-based. Um and um I I ensure that it’s like not actually using Gen AI because some some transcription tools have actually switched to Gen AI in the back end. And I just think that’s like using a rocket when you could be using a bicycle.
Um the other type of tools that I I use, so in my book I had this particular detail that I wanted to add in it where I was trying to explain to readers how open I had received a really dramatic upgrade in its office after it went from a non-profit to a Microsoft back to venture and I had noticed that their chairs had gotten significantly fancier.
And so I took screenshots of both the chairs from their old office and their new office and ran them through Google Reverse Image Search, which is a predictive AI tool. So it’s a specialized AI tool. It doesn’t use Gen AI as far as I know. Um and it it gave me, you know, a a map much on the types of the type of prices that these chairs typically go for online. And the first office had chairs that were around $2,000 each.
The second one was around $10,000 each. So I added that as a as like a a um you know a detail a color detail into the book to try and evoke the sense of wealth that we’re actually dealing with in these echelons. We’ve we’ve definitely noticed this year number of mistakes AI seems to make and those AI overviews, it’s one of the reasons we shun it basically.
I feel particularly with Hong Kong, all this bias one has whereby if you’re kind of an expert on an issue, you will notice it more. when it regurgitates these things. But I like particularly with the AI overviews, I feel it’s getting more deeply embedded in our tools, in our phones, in our software. Sometimes quite irrelevant software, which really doesn’t need it.
So I wonder if you’re quite careful and sensitive chunning of certain types of AI is sustainable in that we’re going to be buying phones where it’s just baked in or it’s happening behind the scenes with that you’re using. I also fear they may not declare these kinds of generative algorithms are going to be a play because it’s becoming such a toxic thing.
Yeah, I absolutely think that these companies are trying to bake AI into everything because they’ve realized that just relying on consumer demand is not actually helping them turn a profit. So now you have this thing where I pay for Google Workspace and I have to I you know about a six months ago my monthly subscription jacked up its price not because of anything that any feature that I’m using but because Google has has decided now that they can charge more simply because Gen AI is and everything now.
And I’ve disabled Gen AI but I still have to pay that premium. And that’s how they’re trying to get their money back on the extraordinary investments that they’re making in data centers. I think there are a couple things that need to happen. This this goes back again to the idea of resistance as a an important mechanism of accountability because without the pressure external pressure, companies will continue to go down this path.
And so Like data center protest, for example, is a really critical mechanism of accountability that has started making it much harder for companies to develop and deploy their technologies. In 2025, over $150 billion of data center projects were stalled. I think in the just the US alone, this is according to Data Center Watch.
And um what, you know, many many of these facilities uh were open AI facilities as an example. And OpenAI recently had to shut down its video generation tool Sora. And I think there’s a direct line that you can draw from the data center protests and that shutdown of an entire product line. Because when you look at the reasons for why OpenAI shut down Sora, all of them were shaped by this grassroots movement.
One was they simply were constrained by their computing resources. Okay, so that’s like a very very clear direct line. A second one is that they are about to IPO, and they are facing much more financial pressure and uncertainty from Wall Street because Wall Street has been observing all of this resistance and protest and is becoming increasingly worried that the AI industry can’t actually meet its promises.
This is like and they’re writing about it in their in their memos, in their documents about these companies and they’re pricing it into their valuation. So opening eye feels a lot of pressure to shore up and make less risky bets which means shutting down an entire product line that they’re not really sure how to monetize. The third one was flat landing customer demands. They just were not seeing people actually using these tools.
And so the all three the constellation of these three all shaped by collective action was what met uh made made sure I mean its demise. And so is there going to be a a huge push from the industry to keep going in this direction?
Yes, but that’s why we as individuals and communities and and organizations need to be thinking about how we actively use these kinds of push back mechanisms to shape the trajectory of AI development.
And I And the last thing that I’ll add on this is um when it comes to Like, I think a lot of people think of themselves primarily as like a consumer um when in relation to these companies, it’s like you either use or you don’t use these tools and and that’s sort of like the only option that you have. Again, like I don’t I can actually think that’s the case. Like you can also be a resident within a community pushing back. You can be a voter. You can be um you can be a business leader that actually doesn’t replace your workers and so on and so forth.
But consumer is of course a very important hat that we wear and it is in fact one of the most tangible ways that we as individuals on a day-to-day level can help shape and vote with our feet on what we want these companies to do.
And one of the challenges that we have right now with the AI industry is that the burden on the consumer is extremely high in terms of actually understanding what these companies are doing, where they’re putting their AI models, what kind of supply chains they engage in. But we’ve seen this problem before.
The fashion industry had this problem, the coffee industry had this problem, and all of these supply chains of it as they mature, they’re end up being like consumer advocacy groups that actually audit the supply chains of these different brands, and they tell consumers These are the values that this company is actually enacting versus that company and that gives the consumer more ability to actually move from one product to the other.
That also has to be in with you know with the fashion industry. There was consumer advocacy, there was labor organizing, there was government regulation, international norm setting and all of this in conjunction with one another that then created new markets for sustainable and ethical fashion brands that then created more visibility for the consumer and so on and so forth.
So we have to go on the same journey with the AI industry and that is yet another thing that we can as individuals do right now to demand that we get there eventually. As the AI models would say, you’re absolutely right. But I mean, I grew up amid the backlash against Nike 80s, 90s. I remember that, but then China came along with Shein.
And I wanted to talk a little bit more about China because a lot of the justification for all of the ferocity of AI development is because China. If we don’t do it, they will. They already are doing it. They have massive government subsidies. Don’t regulate us. is this actually justified? Is this like the space race with the US paranoid about Beijing gaining a military edge? I first want to go back to your Shane comment because I think this is a really really really critical point.
So I right after I finished writing my book, I read Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, which is a very short but beautiful meditation on the history of grassroots movements around the world and what like how to think about the role of the grassroots movement in pushing forward social and moral progress in society.
And one of the things that she says in the book is people believe that um that that like there is sort of an like to win in grassroots movements means that you’ve reached a destination and then there’s never any backsliding ever again. Like you’ve just arrived there and that’s like your job is done. And if you arrive there and then there is backsliding, somehow that means that everything that you did beforehand doesn’t even matter anymore.
And she, you know, I I I have a lot of friends who who are activists as well and participate in grassroots movements and they say this is one of the struggles of younger generation activists is this mentality of well, if I fought really hard for this thing and then you know like Trump is elected and everything reverses back, does that mean it’s all pointless?
And it’s like no, that’s like what Rebecca Solnit says in her book is the point of grassroots movements is that you’re always just being the vector that pushes in the direction of the correct moral force. And there will always be other forces that are trying to push back. So yes, you should absolutely expect back sliding. But the back sliding doesn’t mean that everything that you did before is pointless.
It means that you have successfully got to a particular place with that action. There’s going to be back sliding and then your job tomorrow and the day after and the day after is to continue pushing in the other way. So, the fact that she and has reverted back to certain types of unethical practices in the fashion industry is not in any way discounting all the incredible work that was done to shore up the fashion supply chain beforehand.
And there will be continued work by those same people to continue pushing and making sure that we can we continue like advancing the fashion supply chain. Do you not feel there is something in the whole China threat narrative? I don’t think it’s a real narrative or I mean it it is a narrative for sure, um but I don’t think that it’s based in reality.
Uh if you look at the track record that this narrative has actually had over the because this is not the first time that Silicon Valley has deployed this narrative. They deployed it through the social media era. And over the last 10 years, what’s happened? Silicon Valley said, “We’re going to dominate social media and we’re going to have a liberalizing effect on the world.” And the exact opposite happened. Now the the most dominant social media companies bite dance. And Silicon Valley has had an illiberalizing effect on the world.
With AI, it’s the same thing. They said, “We’re going to dominate the AI space and going to leave China in the dust.” And instead, now China has figured out how to create these open source much more efficient models like Deep Seek that US companies and US academics often prefer to use now because it’s free. And why would they pay for the same service significantly more money for the same service instead of just downloading it um from online.
And so this narrative which Silicon Valley has just continued to use to accrue more power to itself has actually backfired in in many different ways. And one of the things that I I find a particular pet peeve of mine is that I think people have a tendency of thinking that anything that comes out of the US is somehow American and represents American democratic values and anything that comes out of China represents uh the Chinese government and authoritarian values.
And at the end of the day, nothing, you know, I do not think any of the companies in Silicon Valley are American in any sense of the word. They do not represent the American American people. They’re not acting in the interest of the American people. They’re in fact undermining the American people and in many ways undermining the American Republic. And the ultimate thing that they are trying to do is just accrue more power to themselves.
And with these Chinese AI models, the open-source ones that are now coming out, you can’t say that they are authoritarian because they are actually democratizing the technology in the way that Silicon Valley often says that they are doing, but are in fact not because you can download these tools, you can modify them however you want. They’re free. Um, you know, people are using them in various different ways that are completely outside of the control of the Chinese government or the Chinese companies.
And they Anytime you use them, you’re not sending data back to the company itself because it’s open source. So, um, so yeah, so I I I think that the the narrative that the AI industry in the US is deploying is one that just doesn’t doesn’t hold up against reality. One more, the AI bubble, we’ve been told for over a year now, we’re in a financial bubble looking to the dotcom boom.
How much worse may the effects be if and when it bursts? Is it going to take our pensions down? We’ve been hearing this for a while, is it a conspiracy? Mark Cuban said last week that it might burst gently and AI firms might fall into categories in which they specialize. This one is doing a bit of healthcare, that one does a bit of coding and maybe it’ll not be so bad.
Um, what do you reckon uh as we we sign off is is coming next with this obscene amount of money that’s being thrown around? I don’t engage in predictions really um because I I think that predictions ultimately make things feel inevitable and the entire core of my work is this idea that nothing is inevitable and everything that we do today is what shapes tomorrow.
We should just make sure what we do today doesn’t it leads to a future where we don’t have you know catastrophic bubble burst. Karen, thank you so much for joining us. You’re going to be giving the keynote at the SOPOR Awards this week. Empire of AI is out in paper back now. Thanks again for coming in. Thank you so much for having me. [Machine generated by Google Pinpoint.] Download the podcast from your favourite platform. HKFP Yum Cha is free of charge, and free of ads, thanks to HKFP members. Join today – support press freedom and unlock 8 benefits . https://anchor.fm/s/ee94cfac/podcast/rss Apple | Spotify | Overcast | Amazon Music | Pandora | YouTube | RSS