The Victoria Anarchist Bookfair Collective promotes an anarchist horizon through a culture of our own making. This future should uphold and prioritize human creativity and collaborative social relationships, over the hollow convenience of harmful hypercapitalized tools. We support giving power to the imagination. This is why we do not support the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Large Language Models (LLMs) during the Bookfair. We also do not endorse individuals or organizations who use AI in any aspect of their creative process, and we ask our tablers to not bring any AI-generated content to the Bookfair.
We reject the very premise of generative AI, which reduces creativity to low-quality outputs as quick commodities. AI data centres poison lands, waters, and life. This destruction often targets rural, low-income, and racialized communities – particularly Indigenous communities (and on this continent, entirely Indigenous land). AI’s global apparatus requires exploitable ‘third world’ labour forces. To use AI by choice is to surrender our creativity, free will, and autonomy to corporate greed and imperialism. To promote it is to promote dishonesty and corporate surveillance. Writing, art, and crafts are vital frontiers of struggle in the fight against the existential alienation, social isolation, and hostile individualism imposed on us by capitalism.
We understand AI inundates the digital environment and is sometimes unknowingly used and incorporated into a creative output. Mistakes can happen. We are, in fact, human.
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