Resisting disconnection: learnings from being trans in the age of predatory “AI” By Raj
AUTOMATED DISCONNECTION AND DISPOSSESSION
Long before the arrival of AI chatbots, the majority of humans had already been conditioned to believe the lies that our minds are separate from our bodies [1], that our bodies are separate from land, and that we are separate from each other, animals and machines. This colonial, militaristic and eugenic worldview categorizes, collects and counts bodies and territories. “AI” is not a novel or new trajectory for humanity; [2] it's part of centuries-long processes of social conditioning through settler colonial and imperial infrastructures (facilitated by the Epstein class, and its historical equivalents).
It seeks to digitally automate warfare, the governance of borders, recruitment and management of workers, access to government services and benefits, access to housing, policing, purchasing behaviours, political opinion, and much more. In the past few years, AI chatbots have shifted from automation and prediction to generation of images, text, videos and more. This is being applied to knowledge production, the creation of art, and as an alternative to human therapists, friends, lovers and partners (refer to: r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/).
INFRASTRUCTURES OF DISCONNECTION
Queer and trans writers of colour (for example, Tommy Missa’s 2022 play They Took Me to a Queer Bar and Sabrina Imbler’s essay collection How Far the Light Reaches) characterise the feeling of existing in a structurally anti-trans world as feeling like a fish swimming upstream in a river, not knowing when they will reach the sea. A painfully accurate metaphor. It invokes the heavy weight of the infrastructures we are surrounded by pushing against us. Castiest and colonial systems mark out some bodies to swim downstream towards social reproduction and wealth accumulation, whilst others are battered by debility, precarity and exclusion. AI speeds up, scales up and makes these processes more efficient.
The infrastructures that disconnect us are not just digital. They are carved into the Earth and our bodies. And the waters’ current is relentless; coercing us to accept and assimilate to gender roles, social scripts, behaviours that maintain social hierarchies. We begin to forget that we are submerged in social constructs (e.g. the gender and sex binary, the idea that you can own people and property, the institution of marriage, the nuclear family, mononormativity, the normalization of predatory behaviour), political and religious ideologies (e.g. zionism, white nationalism, brahminical heteropatriarchy), and cultural production (e.g. Hollywood, Bollywood, online anti-trans disinformation etc). These become invisibly enfolded into the material worlds we inhabit through policies, institutions, platforms, and infrastructures.
DOMINANT AI INDUSTRY NARRATIVES HIDE A MORE INSIDIOUS TRUTH
The deluge of content about AI is inescapable. You might hear the following on your daily commute: “Did you hear about that cafe in New York where people are taking their AI chatbot partners on real world dates? How about Esther Perel doing couples therapy with people and their AI companions? I saw the most disturbing thing about “deathbots”; did you see that? What do you think about going to chatbot instead of a therapists? Isn’t it wild Anthropic said they were against using Claude for mass surveillance (in the US) and autonomous kills, but meanwhile they partnered with Palantir on Project Maven which uses AI to speed up the “kill chain,” the process of identifying, approving and striking targets?”
It is no accident that AI related content is taking over our lives (whether it is framed optimistically or as a threat). Much of it feels like a (low quality) theatrical production manufactured by the AI industry. You might recall, that open letter from AI CEOs and scientists in 2023 (including Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, and Dario Amodei of Anthropic) about the existential risks AI poses to humanity. It stated, “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority” alongside “pandemics and nuclear war”. At first, I refused to believe that the very people who created this technology were claiming to care about the risks it poses. But then, on closer inspection, I realised their highly strategic (and evil) manoeuvre of monopolising both sides of the debate. Not to mention the sole focus on the risk of extinction, despite the myriad of other more legitimate risks to consider. Arguably, the biggest existential risk to humanity is the settler colonial state of Israel and its accomplice, the United States. As explained by Timnit Gebru and Karen Hao in their recent SXSW talk, we are stuck between techno-utopian and apocalyptic visions of the future, with little space for conversation outside the industry’s dominant frames.
Sci-fi films and books continue to normalise the concept of anthropomorphized sentient AI beings, reinforcing the technology industry’s religious pursuit of an all-knowing system of artificial general intelligence (AGI). By all accounts, we are nowhere near this fantasy becoming a reality. And yet, the barrage of content continues. This is further reinforced by the AI industry consolidating its power over social media and Hollywood (for example, Oracle’s Larry Ellison).
But, the real question is, what is this content distracting us from? What are we missing by engaging in it, day in, day out, uncritically?
Understanding generative AI (or “agents) as part of a larger political project and historical continuum of colonial and imperial governance, social reproduction, eugenics, and disconnection is key. We can see the coercive power of the industry and how it's currently attempting to make us and all the institutions we are connected to (including schools and hospitals) dependent upon its products, services and to buy into its visions of the future. In order to resist and disrupt it, we need to be clear about its predatory nature. This is reinforced by allegations against Sam Altman, the numerous connections of the tech industry to the Epstein files, the recentsocial media harms trial that found that Google and Meta apps were built to be deliberately addictive, as well as a separate landmark trial that found Meta concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms. There are also mounting cases of users harmed by their interactions with chatbots, including those who have died by suicide. In addition to all of this, the exploitation of workers behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots is well documented.
This is not a debate about the utility of Generative AI (of course it can be useful for particular use cases). This is also larger than the debate about whether or not to boycott gen-AI (given many people use it out of necessity). This is about how AI is governing our lives, and how willing we are to collaborate in our own demise.
In addition to litigation and regulatory interventions, this moment requires that we consider creative responses to questions such as: how do we become ungovernable in the face of AI? In the face of disconnection and isolation, how do we grow our ability to take care of one another; and to organise and create our way out of these crises?
LESSONS ON TRANS CONNECTION AND SWIMMING UPSTREAM
We as trans people come to relationships in the midst of a barrage of violence, cruelty, harassment and abuse from the world around us. We are stared at and ridiculed in the street. Sometimes we are attacked for simply existing. Workplaces remain hostile toward us whilst claiming to support trans visibility.
In those times I felt like I had no human soul to turn to, I turned to the non-human world, and the worlds that exist outside screens. Physical books have often been my refuge. I’ve written many notes in the margins of Akwaeki Emezi’s books Dear Senthuran and Freshwater. Their books led me to truly grapple with what it means to embody multiple genders, and started my ponderings about the possibility of top surgery. After reading Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy, I genuinely spent time wondering if I have more in common with the alien species, the Oankali, who invade Earth after a nuclear apocalypse (especially the third genderless ooloi) than humans (as disturbing as much of the Oankali behaviour is!). Beyond the worlds in books, I have been on numerous destinationless long walks near water bodies, surrounded by trees (particularly on Bediagal and Dharug Country), attempting to reconnect with my traumatized body; to seek answers to what queerness and transness is; and to understand my relationship and responsibility to Country as a settler who has been displaced. At the risk of sounding woo-woo, it is in these moments, when life is exceedingly difficult, that ghosts of ancestors and loved ones lost make their presence felt. Telling me, “you are not as alone as you think”. These moments have given me strength and comfort that a deathbot never could.
I never find the reclusive life satisfying enough to remain in it for too long. Eventually, through great effort, I move into phases of more connection. There are times when we need relationships as a matter of survival; to get through the frequent crises that are often a feature of trans life (whether related to housing, health, work or something else), particularly for the racialized and displaced. Only in my late 30s did I finally experience the intimacy of T4T relationships (in romantic partners and platonic friendships). Despite the pain, messiness and inevitable failures associated with pursuing connection, I am extremely grateful I did. I began to understand the depths of intimacy that are possible when someone really sees you. It’s the safety you feel in their arms, the comfort of their presence in the next room, the knowing smiles as you meet each others’ gaze. It’s the new possibilities for gender expression and expansion you wordlessly learn from one another. So much of this intimacy is sensory and somatic. It would be devastating to replace this with a text and image mediated online relationship with a chatbot.
In recent times, I’ve been a part of (and benefited from) many trans-centred mutual aid and organising efforts, meal and care trains, and dating events. I’ve had trans elders facilitate a deeply moving online Tamil trans ‘coming of age’ ceremony to mark a new phase of life post my top surgery. Digital platforms have featured heavily, including encrypted messaging platforms, Feeld, Mealtrain.com etc. But time and time again, it’s clear to me that the most sophisticated technologies for enabling connection (particularly for those of us who rarely experience spaces that can hold us) are not digital. They are relational technologies; deep listening, facilitation, embodiment, intuition, cultural and ancestral knowledge, navigating conflict, challenging hierarchy, subverting dominant structures, and much more.
When we accept dominant framings of AI (both within the AI industry, and parts of the digital rights sector) interventions and responses that don’t centre or begin with the digital are often lost from view. As discussed in the final section of my last article, there are many powerful and creative ways to resist AI. In addition to this, what about we consider the starting point as growing our connection to our multiple selves, our bodies, our lineages and ancestors, the Country we exist upon, the non-human, and others? What about starting to deprogram ourselves from the paradigms, ideologies, patterns we inherit and normalise from our families, caste groups, societies, and from our ancestors? What if we imagine and create alternative platforms, infrastructures, and technologies around this? That would make us ungovernable and a real threat to hegemonic AI-driven global empires.
In the harrowing journey upstream in the river, I find respite in swimming alongside those I love; in the intimacy we offer one another, and in the ways we teach one another to travel across time and space, beyond even the sea.
Sources
[1] Consider that the concept of Large Language Models (LLMs), an imitation of the brain (as separate from the body) is underpinned by the notion of Cartesian dualism (an idea defended by René Descartes that claims the mind and body are distinct and separate).
[2] This is in air quotes because it is an ill-defined term. Previously AI has functioned more as a marketing term from the tech industry. It is less useful as a descriptive term due to the vast range of technologies that it includes; chatbots, recommendation algorithms, content moderation algorithms on social media, facial recognition and other forms of predictive policing, and even text prediction and autocorrection. Since the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) that uses models to generate text, images, videos etc, the term AI has taken off. This term is not only difficult to define, but also makes us more susceptible to the anthropomorphization of technology and feeds the narrative that we need to develop systems that outperform human intelligence.