Why We're Banning AI

Why We’re Banning AI We urgently need to protect human thought and creativity. Our magazine is committing itself to remaining handmade. Ensure every publication you support does the same. Iam proud to say that as part of our new union contract, Current Affairs recently adopted one of the strictest anti-AI policies in the publishing industry. No text that is AI-generated may be published in our magazine. No AI-generated art may be used as a Current Affairs illustration. When you read Current Affairs, you are going to be reading the thoughts of a human, and seeing the results of human artistry. We’re adopting this policy because we want to directly challenge the slopification of media. Newsrooms across the country are rushing to embrace AI and replace actual writers, public opinion be damned. The CEO of Business Insider, for instance, has said his publication is “all in on AI” (which is becoming an annoyingly common slogan) and shamelessly publishes AI-written content. At least they’re honest about it. Some publications have deliberately tricked people; Sports Illustrated was caught publishing AI-written pieces by nonexistent journalists. Guest op-eds in all of the major newspapers have been found to be either partly or wholly written by AI. Sometimes publishing this work can happen inadvertently; here at Current Affairs, we have had plenty of freelance submissions that use suspicious numbers of em-dashes and “this is not an X, it’s a Y” sentences. (We can’t promise that nothing will ever slip through the cracks, but we’re vigilant!) Astonishingly, though, some editors have actually defended publishing the pieces even when writers have been caught. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed from a hedge fund billionaire, Stan Druckenmiller, that turned out to have been AI-generated (probably because billionaires are inarticulate due to a lifetime of never having to craft arguments to persuade the yes-men around them), but the paper defended publishing the piece, since it reflected the billionaire’s genuine opinion. The trends are dire. But it’s obvious why these publications are rushing to replace writers. They are for-profit corporations, whose ultimate loyalty is to shareholders, not workers. AI is great for them, because it can produce “content” at a fraction of the expense that a writer costs. In fact, on the Milton Friedman theory that the only responsibility a business has is to increase its profits, CEOs are obligated to replace writers with AI if doing so is better for the bottom line. It’s a simple calculation: if producing 100 posts with AI costs almost nothing and takes four minutes, but paying a writer to produce 20 posts costs $5,000, well, why would you pay the writer? The calculation might hold even if the quality drops substantially, errors are introduced, and audience loyalty plummets. Even if you lost 60 percent of your readership, you might still make a lot more per story, because you can pump them out in seconds. Futurism reports that despite the common narrative that AI has not led to major job loss, creative industries are being “eviscerated” by AI, which is fueling “one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern US history,” with more than 200,000 jobs in creative industries being lost in four years. The situation is horrible for artists. Game studios are now designing their worlds and levels using “art assets generated with full AI workflows.” As Brian Merchant reported earlier this year: Opportunities and pay rates declining as clients and employers embrace generative AI. Artists getting more touch-up jobs and fewer well-paying, sustainable gigs. Pessimism, anger, and even despair, growing common, if not universal, in the field. This is especially galling given that all of the AI models that are being used to replace artists were trained through the mass theft of those very same artists’ work! Now here at Current Affairs, we’ve decided to say: fuck that! Over 62 beautiful print issues, we have commissioned hundreds of original, handmade artworks from brilliant artists around the world. We’ve published meticulously researched and edited articles, which often take weeks or months to go from the draft stage to publication. We spend ages working on our page layouts, poring over photographs for the magazine, tweaking sketches, moving sentences around in articles. The labor that goes into this magazine has been extensive from the start, and most of it is hidden from view. We do it because we care about quality. If you pick up a copy of our magazine, you’ll see the result. I think it’s clear when you read it that we actually care about what we’re putting out. It’s not just Content designed to farm clicks. Current Affairs has always been a bit of an anachronism. We started a print magazine in 2016. Nobody thought this was a good idea. (The editor in chief of Vanity Fair told me to my face that this was a wholly misguided project and certain to fail. I remain grateful to him for giving me the resolve to prove the prediction wrong.) Everyone else was pivoting to video. We pivoted to ink and paper, sent via the U.S. Postal Service. Ten years later, we are still here, while a lot of other places that began with a lot more money have folded (see, e.g., the Messenger, which burned through $50 million in a year and then died). The reason we’ve survived is that there are still many people who don’t like that all media is now just transient images on a social media feed. They experience a thrill when they get a cool thing in the mail that they can unwrap and hold. They know that seeing a beautiful illustration on the printed page is different, and better, from seeing it as a JPEG on your phone. So we don’t really give a damn what the trends in the industry are. We located ourselves in New Orleans when everyone else is in New York. We defiantly publish on obscure topics that aren’t anywhere in the news cycle. (Have you read Alice Millar-Thompson’s article on eel smuggling?) And we’re going to keep paying human artists to create elaborate, gorgeous works of handmade art that take ages to make. So our rule is simple: No AI generated articles or illustrations in the magazine! We are not going to feed you slop. And we think you should not give money to any publication that does feed you slop, because they’re both treating their audience with contempt, and avoiding paying workers so that their owners can get richer. This doesn’t mean nobody doing work here can ever use any of the softwares that are broadly lumped together as AI. Much as we respect the Luddites around here, we’re not against technological innovation. Nothing in our rules prohibits writers from using a new tool to help them research something, or prevents an artist from using a tool to, say, add a texture or change a color, or make some kind of small element. But we need, first, to ensure that technologies are a tool used by workers to help them, rather than a tool used to replace workers. And, second, we need to make sure that readers aren’t being fed things that look like people’s genuine thoughts and creative expression but are in fact the product of disembodied mathematical formulas. I’ll admit, I used to be excited by generative AI. I made goofy little images in DALL-E. I liked the dumb novelty songs. I thought it could be a cool tool for creative professionals to play around with. I forgot for a moment that we live under capitalism, where every new technology will be used by the ruling class to fuck over workers. As Garrison Lovely writes in his new book Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us—and How to Stop It, the developers of AI don’t see it as an asset for workers, but as a way to replace them. They’re trying to build a device whose success is literally measured by whether it successfully replaces people. It is not being designed to help the average person’s capacity to achieve their goals, but to help automate us all into obsolescence. That’s why it has to be fought aggressively. We at Current Affairs are not capitalists. There are no profits to be made here. We’re a unionized 501c3 organization, which means that we have no incentive to try to replace our workers with machines. So we’re going to demonstrate that you don’t have to do this, that there’s another way, and that it results in better media that is more pleasurable to read and more informative. It’s not going to be easy, because competitor publications are going to be able to produce immense quantities of writing in the time we are painstakingly correcting and adjusting a single article. But like John Henry, before we let that steam drill beat us, we will die with our hammer in our hand. We need your help to keep putting out this handmade magazine. Subscribe or donate today. Your money pays real writers and real artists to make the world’s most beautiful printed publication. If you value authentic human thought and culture, get Current Affairs today.