The anti-AI revolt is here, writes @phil_tinline If the AI roll-out amounts to a social and economic revolution, then we must prepare for the political reaction bound to follow, but which few in the political world understand. The “techlash” has already begun, and it may yet prove as transformative for world politics as the technology itself claims to be. Put your ear to the ground and under all the noisy enthusiasm a shift is already audible. In March last year, the Ada Lovelace Institute – which is dedicated to ensuring that AI works for those of us who don’t run tech companies – found that concern around how AI would be used had increased “significantly” since its first study in 2022-23, when ChatGPT was launched. In a further study last December, the same institute found that 84 per cent of the public believed the government put the interests of Big Tech ahead of their own. And that was before January’s torrent of sexualised deepfakes, generated from images of real people with the help of Elon Musk’s AI service Grok, and the growing controversy around Palantir, the data analysis firm that works with Ice in the US, the Israeli defence ministry and the NHS. According to one parliamentary aide, public disquiet about both companies’ behaviour has been landing in MPs’ in-trays. The public’s objections to the AI revolution are widespread and growing, from the copyright violations involved in training AI models – in which giant tech firms trawl through books, music, newspaper articles and so on to feed content into their large language models – to the environmental impact of data centres, and the semi-autonomous weapons systems being used on the front lines in Ukraine and in Gaza. AI slop pervades social media and, increasingly, every other form of media, from film to music, journalism and even books. There is also mounting concern about the racial bias in AI facial recognition technology, the dangers of driverless vehicles and the potential destruction of vast swathes of productive work. Beyond all that lurks the most frightening spectre of all: the prospect of handing extortionists, terrorists and dictators the means to hack into our critical infrastructure; to control military hardware and create bioweapons; even to launch wars. Oh, and of course, the threat of turning humanity into one great Dr Frankenstein, as we lose control of our superintelligent creation altogether. newstatesman.com/politics/so…