Model Collapse

Fuck AI.

I hate the AI overview on Google searches. I read somewhere online that using swear words are a way to remove the automatic AI overview function on the search engine—so far it works. The volume of writing about AI and Large Language Models is now so massive and dystopian, and boring, that it seems impossible for me to relocate where I sourced that information from.

Somehow, there is an idealism that persists about AI. Mike Pepi shared on his substack that anyone repeating the propaganda that AI can be good if it is used for the right things/in the right ways is misinformed. Firstly I agree that it’s not used for the right things. However what is interesting about what Pepi wrote not that they are misinformed, it is that AI was never made for doing the right things, and never will be.

AI is not a tool built for the worker. Its built for the fuckers that you and I hate. But the campaigns of disinformation continue to present LLM’s and AI as these tools to make work easier and our lives better. At the end of 2024, I made a zine responding to this feeling and responding to a Bloomberg article written by Evan Gorelick that my friend Caspian shared with me.

The zine I made engages with the concept of model collapse while also highlighting AI’s extractive and exploitative nature which consumes our data and unfathomable amounts of Earth materials. The zine is an unsuccessful attempt to fuel the process of collapse (but an attempt nevertheless). Using photoshop’s generative AI—a software which requires users to consent to training the company’s AI through its use—to create abstractions of the materials that are needed for the ongoing viability of the tech industry. I generate images of materials such as lithium rocks and continuously take the output and feed this information back to the AI, re-training it.

Naturally, in reflecting about this silly exercise of mis-training as a method to distort the LLM’s perception of reality with abstractions of lithium rocks, one should critique my use of AI in this project. I don’t deny it, in making it I was looking to interpolate Audre Lorde and this quote from a 1979 essay: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Thinking about this in the time since I made the zine it feels a little heavy-handed. But I still think it is worth thinking about why I used the master’s tools for this anti-AI zine? Perhaps it is to follow Lorde’s quote to its logical end and remind us that we are still living in the master’s house.

I will be selling the full zine at the “Other Worlds Zine Fair” at the Marrickville Town Hall on August 2, 2025.