Huh? "AI entryism"?
Now that being against AI in an informed way is becoming mainstream, we need to be aware of entryism: the long-term strategy deployed by pro AI people or entities, like companies, to subvert such movements. In the general case it involves essentially enemy actors infiltrating groups in order to influence their ability to act in accordance with their values. Most examples you will probably find online involve political parties, but it happens across the board in any type of organisation or movement.
In the context of the push back against AI, entryism takes on the form of actively sending infiltrators to join universities or related organisations (in the strongest case), or recruiting members of those institutions, or spreading rhetoric or cultish language (in the weakest, and likely easiest, case) in order to undermine push back against AI. The important part is to do all this by looking like one is not against the organisation's goal (i.e. knowledge production and education) or even more insidiously by looking like one is staunchly anti AI explicitly. For the weaker case of rhetoric: success is measured by the organisation adopting harmful concepts through terminologically vacuous or damaging language (see me explaining this over video here).
As we say in this Project Syndicate piece:
"Many scholars, including us, have highlighted the threat posed by techno-solutionism in education: Rather than expanding our intellectual horizons, these technologies undermine the very conditions that allow us to think for ourselves."
So what's extra scary in the AI context is the goal of the technology itself is to harm our ability to detect entryism — it harms our ability to think for ourselves. Much like fascism generally, if left unchecked and unaddressed: AI is a totalising force that destroys people and planet from the inside out. AI entryists want to join committees as if they are anti AI and then instead make pro AI organisational rules, for example.
A recent high-profile example of general entryism is Graham Platner's failed attempt to infiltrate, ironically enough, an already pretty right wing party: the USA's Democrats. Rebecca explains that
"his opposition revealed that he had an actual Nazi tattoo on his chest, which he got 19 years ago to celebrate fighting in Falujah. [However, i]nstead of apologizing for that one, Platner made up the completely ridiculous story that he had no idea the tattoo was a famous Nazi symbol."
This method of mixing half-truths with apologies (his original tactic), and then shifting to completely lying is very valuable to notice as a pattern, as is that certain groups like people of colour, and especially women of colour, clocked him instantly. Entryism is not hard to detect for everybody. It's not at all hard for those with expertise and who know what it is that is being attempted, why it is being attempted, and that — in his case — Nazi tattoos and especially those done in a country that was under Nazi rule are impossible to get done accidentally, amongst many other obvious indicators.
Other examples of entryism are cases where Microsoft has convinced our employers, university executive boards, to spend tax money to force us to all use their ghastly products. This can be counted as a soft AI entryist manoeuver. The call is coming from inside the house. This is why many countries, who recognise this is a genuine risk to their sovereignty, have been moving out of the Microsoft ecosystem.
What can we do?
I have a core take away I must repeat: just because somebody claims to be anti AI does not mean they are not doing entryism. Sadly, that is (in isolation) entirely consistent with entryism. Yes, these people lie about their beliefs.
I repeat this quote from Marx that I put right at the top of our work critiquing this correlationist logic from 2023:
"[A]ll science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided. (Marx, 1894, p. 592)"
This is the logic of AI, of fascism, of sexism, of racism. That is, because things look a certain way, that therefore they are a certain way. Internal properties are wrongly derived from their superficial appearance. "I see that somebody has long hair, therefore I can conclude they are a woman." Or worse still: "I see the external features consistent with (what I think is) woman, and I conclude she must be stupid" — a fractal wrongness that starts with assuming that what you (naively, unquestioningly, think you) see is what you get when it comes to complex organisms. Further down in the same paper, we warn:
"Just because a model correlates with neural and behavioral data, it is not sufficient for us to infer that the model is performing cognition: correlation does not imply cognition."
Again, the core logics of AI are the same as racism and sexism, which is why these issues pop up again and again in these systems: it involves taking the simple shallow features of things we see, like skin colour, or hair length, or whatever other superficial property, and moving to very flawed conclusions. There is something addictive to this form of sheer intellectual laziness — as well as structurally beneficial to those select few within capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy — to this simplistic logic. It's easy to just point at people and call them names, I guess.
Non-human animals can escape from this correlationist logic. Think of the animals who figure out that scarecrows, or other such fake predators, are not alive. So even though first they may fear them similarly to their real counterparts, animals realise that superficial resemblance is not identity: "the outward appearance and the essence of things [have not] directly coincided" — a fake owl is not an owl. Correlationism is false.
I want to underline, people can make mistakes. Not everybody is knowingly using cultish language from industry, some still think these terms refer. But notice who plows on regardless, who does not listen to feedback, who materially and not just ideologically aligns with the AI companies. And like with the case above from big P politics, once you see it, nothing the person can do or say means they can return back to the table, nor that they can deserve an audience, nor even that we owe them charitable readings of their work. This is not about everybody who slips up being irredeemable. These mistakes are normal. I am talking about those with immense power, and who consistently facilitate AI entryism, being held to account. Nobody in the abstract is owed an audience nor do they deserve the extremely privileged job of being an academic.
Marx's warning about Science being superfluous however, is extra timely and even accidentally funny. An attempt at pretty blatant AI entryism was uncovered just the other day: the Editor in Chief of Science (the journal) wrote an article titled AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive. You might think: that's great? But Martin Clavey noticed and others brought it to my attention that many links in the references bear the hallmark of having used ChatGPT. This is pure entryism. He wrote a piece seemingly critical of AI, got caught and then admitted to ChatGPT use, and also claims it's a search engine and it's useful for checking links. A whirlwind of strange claims, many of which are not true on their face: it's certainly not a search engine. How can one claim AI is "slower, worse, and more expensive" with a straight face here? And how can one excuse this behaviour when such a powerful figure does it? Some with medium power may now be less likely to be anti AI if they wish to be published in Science. A bad way of thinking for these scientists, yes, but many junior people are under such senior people's thumbs. Entryism radiates outwards.
My final plea
We can't be anti AI if we don't make an effort to see these attempts at subversion. Entryism from industry is an extremely useful tactic, which still affects and harms science in general, as well as Science specifically as we see above. Regardless of how many times we try to root out the conflicts of interest caused by AI they keep popping up like satanic mushrooms, e.g. "Maples et al. find themselves part of a grotesque, predatory spectacle, laundering it with institutional credibility." And we live with the consequences of how industry forces have successfully done this to harm climate science, to protect the tobacco industry and keep inserting it into the scientific literature, and more.
If we are not careful with our reasoning about these events and learning from the past, the same forces will act on us with respect to AI. Are petroleum companies good now because they also invest in renewables? Or do they still owe the whole planet reparations?
We must stop thinking that just because somebody agrees with us on some superficial anti AI point, that they are in fact in some deeper agreement on principles and values. Poor argumentation, like argument from ignorance or confusing correlation with causation, is our downfall. The case of Science above clearly shows that somebody can be Editor in Chief of a very powerful journal, one that makes or breaks careers, and can write a piece called AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive, and then use ChatGPT without disclosing it until confronted.
AI entryism requires us to fight the thoughtless process of assuming that things are the way they look. As we say in Guest and Martin (2023), a clockwork timepiece is not composed of digital components even if the outwards appearance is seemingly identical. And a person, astronomically more complex and interesting than a clock, claiming fealty to our cause when the stakes are high, can be performing entryism if we do not know the signs. Actions matter more than words.