Baratunde Thurston on agency and leadership in an AI world

Baratunde Thurston: I understand where it comes from. We’re at the tail end of a process of massive disenfranchisement and concentration of wealth – and AI is the last straw for a lot of people.

We’ve been screaming about climate change since the 1950s. Corporations knew, and here we are watching ice shelves melt. We’ve watched the flows of money and decision-making, watched rampant abuse. And now we have “AI” – really generative AI, large language models, built by a handful of companies who didn’t ask anybody what they wanted. They’ve taken on so much financial obligation that they now seem to need to force all of us to use it rather than sell us on it.

Not to mention: the very premise of these models was to leverage – without consent – vast troves of intellectual property and prior art. Let’s call it what it is: stealing. So I understand why creative people might have an itty-bitty issue with AI.

My response, as a creative person myself, is that our issue isn’t with AI itself. The real anger should be directed at the people and companies who made distinct, non-inevitable choices about how to build and promote this. As a creative person, I’ve found real value in various AI tools, and I hold that contradiction and its cost. But I want us to discern between the people behind this and the thing itself. That anger deserves a legitimate hearing – and there are plenty of people with every incentive to make sure that hearing never happens.

A simple rejectionism – based on a strongly held, mostly justifiable, but ultimately impractical moral stance – just allows this technology to be developed without the best minds and the best hearts in the room. We should keep talking about how, if you can just steal your way into a business model, we’re going backwards. That’s the history of colonisation. That’s the history of enslavement – massive takings without compensation, without consent, without credit. It’s a shitty way to build the future. We can do better.

Baratunde Thurston: James Andrews, another guest on my show, talked about taste mattering more than access. If everybody can write, the bar is raised on what “good writing” even is. I worked for The Onion for years, and reporters from the real press would say, “With the internet and social media, everybody’s a satirist now, right?” Sure – and there’s a lot of bad satire, so the bar is higher for what’s good.

Taste is a product of life experience. In an era where anyone can generate a video, we’ll reward people who’ve seen a lot of different types of moving images and made a lot themselves – who’ve been in the game a while, or who just have a weird, hyper-specific point of view that stands apart from the gentrification-leaning general blahness these models drag us toward, because they’re averaging across so much stuff that the result is non-distinctive.

So uniqueness will matter. Duration, seasoning, tenure – fucking age – will matter. Novelty will matter. These one-of-one experiences can’t be generated – you had to be there.

That’s what changes if you’re making ads and creative work: anybody can make a medium rectangle pop-up now, a 30-second spot, a trailer. So you’ve got to zig when everybody’s zagging. Maybe you break out a film camera, hire human actors, lean into distinctiveness. Or you use AI but bring it into the flow so what you produce doesn’t look like everybody else’s AI-generated video.

Baratunde Thurston: There is a real form of agency we should be fighting for, and it’s more meaningful, more dimensional. If capabilities are just one dimension of agency, the critical missing one is power. If you’re not increasing your own power with your use of these tools, but merely your skills, then you’re not increasing your agency. And power is three things: choice, control and community.

If you have no choice about whether to use AI or not, you don’t have more agency. You may gain more skills because your boss made you do this thing, but you have no more power – you’re just doing what you’re told. If you have no choice of which tools to use, then you’re living in a monopoly. That’s literally abusive. So you need choice, and it needs to include the choice to say no.

Secondly, you need to be able to control your own representation in these systems, and not through 30 menus of infuriating opt-outs you need a lawyer to wade through. Defaults matter. You need to be able to control the environment you’re using this stuff in.

And lastly, community, which means you should be using these tools with others. You should be sharing your experiences, your successes, your frustrations, your abject failures – with others. And you should be deciding with others what you want, whether, if and how to use these technologies to achieve it. That’s democracy. That’s self-governance. That’s collective decision-making. And if you’re not doing that, you’re in this individual lane – you can increase your own individual power, your individual skill, your individual agency, and still make a worse society. The lack of choice, control and community leaves people with pent-up, unreleased anger, and the answer is more choice. The answer is more involvement. The answer is more power in decision-making.

If you live with anyone, ask each other how you’re engaging with this stuff, what bothers you about it. Just practise not being alone in it. And don’t be satisfied by broadcasting your position on social media – that’s not collective, that’s just tossing your individuality into the field. It’s not really engaging. Reacting to someone’s video with your opinion isn’t the same as talking to someone in the same space, the same chat, at the same level. So bring it there.

And if you have authority over people, or responsibility for people (which should mean the same thing; if you’re any kind of manager, boss, instructor, media person, like I am, you have responsibility for people), offer them choices. When you feel like, “Oh, we should do some AI thing”, you might be right. Maybe you really should. It might help your business, might help you understand where the market’s moving. But talk to your team about it. Talk to the people you have authority over, not just the people you answer to, and ask them: what part of your job do you actually hate? Throw AI at that first rather than the things people love to do.

You need to create a culture where people will honestly answer that question. Then you want people to experiment, and come back to the group and share what happens – even if they mess up.

And as the manager, the boss type, you have to demonstrate it first, because nobody’s going to believe you otherwise. You have to be the one to say, “Hey, everyone – so, I thought I was smarter than the tools. I had a moment over the weekend where I decided to vibe-code a feature, and it went wrong. The good news is I was able to change them in time, and I’m telling you so you don’t make the same mistake I did.”

Baratunde Thurston: Trust your instincts. Heavily discount conventional wisdom – authority doesn’t mean someone deserves your trust. And most importantly, work as a community. The most devastating trend of our time is individualism taken to the extreme. That’s part of why the ice shelves are collapsing right now: we weren’t thinking collectively, across human societies or the wider web of life.

Create peer groups, group chats, converse with other humans, not just machines. Community can be small: your intramural league, your friend group chat from high school, your roommates, your church. There are a lot of ways to associate with other people.

Raise questions about this AI future with others, and seek connection with someone from a different generation. Some of the wisest information you’ll come across will come from an exchange with someone who’s 70, versus infinite Googling.

Last thing: the odds are very high that you are not crazy, and the odds are very high that the world is crazy. When you feel this disconnect between your own sense of reason and your experience of the world, that anxiety is coming from somewhere. Everything’s on fire. That’s not you. I don’t hear that enough in the advice given to Gen Z, Gen Alpha – it’s all “hustle”, “grind”, “get up at 4 am”, and that’s the same bullshit that’s gotten us where we are today. It’s not going to get us out.