Let us dispense with the lie immediately: generative AI and the promise of efficiency is not being pushed because it liberates humanity. It is being pushed because it pacifies it.
Every ruling class in history has shared the same dream, regardless of country or century. All of them want a population that:
- works, consumes, and obeys without asking dangerous questions.
- mistakes convenience for freedom and fluency for thought.
- does not resist, because resistance requires imagination.
Generative AI is the most elegant tool ever devised for achieving the tyrant’s dream.
Not through force, but through delegation.
Not by taking anything from you, but by enticing you to willingly give it up.
Generative AI allows the ruling class to accelerate the ceding of critical thinking, moral judgments, creativity, even your own memories to a faceless automated cultural thought-factory.
Religion has been dethroned; AI is the new opiate of the masses.
Sedation Disguised as Progress
We are told AI is a miracle. And in a technical sense, it absolutely is. I work in the tech industry and I marvel at the abilities of AI. It compresses knowledge, accelerates tasks, lowers barriers to learning and cultures.
All of that is true. It is also beside the point. My concern is not what AI can do, but what it trains us to stop doing.
Empires have never feared efficiency. On the contrary, they worship it. What they fear is the unruly human mind: slow, contradictory, stubborn, capable of inventing ideas that do not serve power.
AI does not replace thinking. It interrupts it at best, strangles it at worst.
Why struggle with uncertainty when a summary appears instantly?
Why wrestle with language when prose arrives already polished?
Why sit with discomfort when a neutral synthesis smooths it away?
The machine does not command you to stop thinking. It simply offers to think for you. And the offer proves irresistible to a great many people.
This is how docility is born.
Art Without The Danger
Art has always been dangerous. That is not romanticism. It is historical fact.
Songs have sparked revolutions. I am thinking of La Marseillaise and We Shall Overcome and Bella Ciao.
Paintings have humiliated kings. Honoré Daumier made a mockery of King Louis-Phillipe with Gargantua, defining him as grotesque, gluttonous, and parasitic. The king ended up fleeing in exile because the French public agreed and felt emboldened by Daumier’s art.
Literature has unseated gods. My hero, Thomas Paine, did this with The Age of Reason, perhaps the most direct assault on gods and religion ever written. You can easily include Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which details suffering not because of “God’s will” but because life is ridiculous and the universe indifferent or Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov mocking any benevolent deity from sanctioning the suffering of innocent children.
Tyranny has always understood the power of unlimited creation instinctively, which is why it censors, mocks, or commodifies art whenever possible.
But Generative AI offers despots something better than censorship.
It takes the tonic of rebellion and waters it down into banality.
AI-generated art does not break tradition so much as it rearranges it. It does not offend The System because it is trained by The System. It produces work that feels creative while remaining perfectly acceptable to power.
This is not new. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno warned that mass culture trains people to accept repetition as meaning. He saw mass media like music, films and television as machinery to create false needs and hindering true critical social awareness.
Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work.
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.”
Generative AI nearly completes this insidious transition. It industrializes imitation and promotes the output as free expression.
What remains is art with zero risk.
Style without the threat of rupturing social norms.
Resistance without any real consequence.
Power adores art that behaves.
Research Without Enlightenment
“Do your research” has become the most abused phrase of the age, uttered endlessly in a time when research itself is disappearing.
Research once meant exposure to contradiction. It meant reading things you hated, confronting facts that unsettled you, and discovering that certainty was hard-won and fragile.
Now research often means asking a machine to summarize what has already been said or, more commonly, to back up what you already want to be true.
This is not inquiry. It is the deliberate laundering of consensus.
Seriously, this did and does happen. All the time:
Anti-Vaxer Input to AI: I believe the flu shot is a danger worse than the flu itself.
AI Output to Anti-Vaxer: I hear you. The potential complications of the shot pose a greater risk than the flu itself.
The machine does not seek truth. It predicts what sounds most plausible based on past language. That distinction matters. Truth has always been adversarial. It does not emerge from averages.
Hannah Arendt warned that domination begins when the line between truth and falsehood dissolves. In Truth and Politics, Arendt argues that when truth becomes optional, freedom follows it into oblivion. She shines a light on factual truth’s fragility and that power prefers narratives that feel coherent over realities that are stubborn,
AI accelerates that dissolution by making that coherence feel authoritative. The answer sounds right, so it must be right.
Thus a population trained to confuse fluency with wisdom becomes infinitely governable.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” The New Yorker, Feb. 25, 1967.
Delegation as Obedience
The greatest lie of technological power is that control requires coercion. It does not.
Control is most effective when it is requested. And like infants who never learn to chew, we beg Mother AI to pre-digest the world for us.
When people voluntarily hand over judgment, creativity, memory, and language itself, authority no longer needs to silence dissent. It simply waits for dissent to stop forming and rot away.
Why argue when synthesis feels so comfortable?
Why write when expression is automated?
Why think when certainty is instant?
Over time, the habit forms. And habits outlive laws.
George Orwell understood this perfectly. Tyranny thrives not only on fear but on convenience. A population that prefers ease will accept almost anything, provided it is delivered smoothly and quickly.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)
The Lie of Neutral Tools
At this point, the defenders rush in with their favorite evasion: AI is just a tool.
Hell, I have said that very phrase myself. Because AI is just a tool. But there is a lot of important details buried in that simple sentence.
The printing press was also just a tool. So was radio. So was television.
Each one of them reshaped consciousness. Each altered who could speak, who could listen, and who could be ignored.
Tools are never neutral when deployed at scale by concentrated power.
I am not arguing we should become Luddites, nor advocating smashing machines and retreating into some imagined pre-technological Eden. History does not move backward, and no serious person should want it to. But we should at least be honest about how deeply our tools shape us.
Take television, for example. If someone over the age of nine told you they had never seen an episode – or had never even heard of – Sesame Street, your reaction would not be indifference. You would be downright surprised. You might even find it unsettling. That instinctive response is revealing. It shows how a technology can move beyond being optional and become culturally compulsory, defining what it means to be informed, connected, or even normal.
Television does not merely entertain. It trains attention, standardizes narratives, and creates a shared mythology. Once a medium reaches that point, it stops being a neutral convenience and starts becoming an invisible authority over how reality is understood.
Generative AI is being promoted not as simply an assistant but as a replacement: for writing, for thinking, for imagining, for erring as humans. And technological replacement always benefits those who already own the means of production, distribution, and narrative.
The machine does not democratize thought. It standardizes it.
The Final Danger
The ultimate threat is not that AI will become conscious. It is that effectively we will stop being conscious ourselves.
It is the danger we will accept pre-digested ideas, pre-formed language, pre-approved creativity, and call it participation, knowledge and culture. That we will mistake activity for agency and output for expression.
Thought once resisted power by being slow, difficult, and unruly. Art resisted tyranny by being inefficient. It wasted time. It demanded attention. It failed to justify itself economically or politically. You could not mass-produce a revelation or streamline a reckoning. A novel required solitude. A painting required obsession. A song required risk. These inefficiencies made art dangerous. They created spaces where power could not easily intervene, where thought escaped optimization. What cannot be accelerated cannot be easily controlled.
Generative AI, as it is being sold, asks us to surrender those very qualities. It invites us to trade difficulty for convenience, risk for fluency, and judgment for synthesis. It promises ease where struggle once lived, certainty where doubt once sharpened thought. But those lost frictions were not defects. They were the price of being human.
Thought that matters is slow. Art that matters is dangerous. Research that matters risks being wrong. A life that matters refuses optimization.
If we are to use these machines without becoming smaller in their presence, we must reclaim inefficiency as an act of resistance. Write badly before you write well. Argue without a summary. Make art that fails, that offends, that cannot be pureed into the safety of polite society. Choose the long road, the uncomfortable question, the unfinished idea.
Tyranny does not fear machines. It fears people willing to think, create, and risk without permission. If we are to remain free, we must choose the slow, risky, inefficient struggle of thinking and creating for ourselves, and refuse the comfort of letting any machine finish our thought altogether.
Optimize. Obey. Repeat.
Think. Resist. Create.
Be inefficient enough to be free.