Brian Merchant: “My general sense here is that ‘let’s use AI for stuff!’ is something bosses love saying but then the rank and file workers can’t actually figure out good uses for,” one journalist who works for an Axel Springer outlet told me at the time of the Business Insider layoffs. “Which I suspect is happening in lots of industries. Bosses panicking that if they don’t lean into AI they’ll be left behind, but AI not actually being particular useful for workers.”

As I laid out in some detail in my first episode of Vibe Coded, the rollout of #generativeAI platforms across enterprises is not following the typical pattern where individual users first adopt some new innovative tech and then it eventually makes its way to the top and (reluctantly) becomes company policy. This is the opposite of that. Bosses across the board seem to love all the AI hype and want to go full steam ahead, while the workers in many cases are resisting and attempting to make clear the grave danger of doing so.

This is leading us increasingly to a world where AI is ground zero for class warfare. If you promote genAI, you are siding with the bourgeoisie, and if you resist genAI you are a member of the proletariat.

It could have been otherwise, but this is the state of society we now find ourselves in. LLMs are now a culture war. And I know which side I’m on.

Do you?