If you don’t already know about the zombie ant fungus, let me enlighten you. The iNaturalistpagefor this species of insect-pathogenic fungus explains that it worms its way into the brain of a specific type of ant and alters its behaviour. The ants then leave their nest, seek out a warm, humid place suitable for fungal growth, and “they then use their mandibles to attach themselves to a major vein on the underside of a leaf, where the host remains after its eventual death”.I reckon it’s a suitably compelling analogy for how generative machine learning software is propagating itself by hijacking the minds of otherwise rational individuals, sacrificing them so it can spread itself into the next host.Educators, academic institutions, media outlets, governments and government workers, lawyers, studio executives — it’s not hard to find examples of each of these volunteering their brains to help the slop machine propagate even further.Related Article Block PlaceholderArticle ID: 1206398My protests against AI make me feel like a total loser, but not in the way you thinkKetan Joshi43As I wrote previouslyhere atCrikey, it is profoundly distressing to see institutions tasked with protecting truth volunteering to embed a program that fundamentally cannot provide evidence-based, truthful or accurate answers consistently, and it is 10 times worse to see some of my friends and colleagues in the climate movement do the same. Helping a climate-wrecking lie machine feels like the precise opposite of everything we’re fighting for.But recently, we saw a different future play out. Last week, the deeply beloved iNaturalist site and app, essentially a collective Wikipedia-style effort to identify different species of living things on Earth,announceda partnership withGoogleto implement a generative language model that will offer “explanations” of why certain species were classified in certain ways, on the app.Theannouncementwas 782 words, followed by a nervous clarification of 731 words — and the page featured 48,320 words of comments in just 24 hours, before comments wereclosedbecause their website genuinely wasn’t designed to handle so many responses and it was causing problems.Compare the incredible intensity of the backlash to iNaturalist’s announcement to another recipient in the same funding round: “Day of AI Australia” and the University of New South Wales, both loudly celebrating grants from Google to “build new GenAI tools for students and teachers”. Google Australia said it is “proud to support their efforts to prepare the next generation to not only understand AI, but to actively leverage it for positive change”.Not only has there been no backlash to this announcement, there has barely been any media coverage at all. Other funding includes a “gen AI-powered tutor” for K-12 students, mental health provider training, training nurses and midwives using a “copilot”, and the provision of chatbot-sourced medical advice in Kenya.There are extremely clearindicationsof serious cognitive impacts of relying on a chatbot to replace critical thinking, investigation and reading skills, in addition to their output simply being unreliable because it’s probabilistic rather than the outcome of careful investigation and reasoning. The deep, uncontrolled spread of generative systems in education, medicine and academia should all be cause for much, much more alarm than auto-generated explanations of beetle classifications.A part of this can be explained by flocking behaviour. A recent IBMsurveyof executives found that “64% of CEOs surveyed acknowledge that the risk of falling behind drives investment in some technologies before they have a clear understanding of the value they bring to the organisation”, despite the same study laying out a high failure rate of generative software adoption.The other part of why this problem is so widespread, yet lacking serious opposition in many of its worst cases, is simply that there is now a lot of money sunk into making this happen, whether it’s needed or not. It is a nightmare of stacked, interlocked sunk-cost fallacies.A global network of fossil gas supply chain players (from supply, to processing, transport and gas turbine manufacturing) is investing in new capacity on the assumption of massively rising electricity demand in the near future. Big tech companies like Google and a collection of data centre operators are sinking billions into constructing new data centres on the assumption of massively rising demand for generative text, image and video generation in the near future. And the purported end-users of generative software — business, institutions and individuals — are flocking towards uncritical adoption of this technology purely out of a FOMO they feel but cannot really explain.Related Article Block PlaceholderArticle ID: 1210804Inside the fight to get Monash University to divorce fossil fuels for goodRoyce Kurmelovs21It is tough as hell to dislodge the toxic impacts of an industry that decides to induce demand for itself in society. Single-use food and drink packaging was thebrainchildof the plastics industry. Oversized four-wheel drives haveboostedglobal oil demand to seriously high levels. And you can’t turn off the generative “AI” chatbot in your messaging app, which you keep accidentally activating.I stand by my crestfallendismissalof personal-level responsibility or resistance when it comes to fighting back against these trends. This is all far too structural, and so much of it is driven by predatory feasting on pre-existing societal problems (like catastrophic under-funding in education and healthcare, or the long-running erosion of information spaces). Try to do your weekly shop without buying unrecyclable, thin-film throwaway plastic: it’s close to impossible.But the iNaturalist saga lays out something important: intense group backlash does have some impact when used in the right context. It makes sense that we’re seeing resistance emerge in the communities most reliant on open collective action and rigorous, science-aligned fact-checking. Wikipedia’s editors recentlyrose up and loudly objectedto a plan to include machine-generated summaries of articles, for instance.Heck, even the designated host for the zombie ant fungus seems to have evolved “adaptive behaviours able to limit the contact rate between uninfected susceptible hosts and infected hosts, thereby reducing the risk of transmission”.There is so much zombie-like acquiescence to the cruel and toxic pacts offered by big tech. But if we’re looking to grow resistance to corrosive technology, let’s look to the communities already doing it amazingly well (just don’t break theCrikeywebsite with your comments).Has generative AI unnecessarily weasled its way into your industry?We want to hear from you. Write to us atletters@crikey.com.auto be published inCrikey.Please include your full name. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.