Surprise, the most influential people in AI are also the richest

A look at TIME's AI 100 list, checking in on California's disastrous gig work law, and a victory for voice actors fighting AI

Greetings, machine breakers. Hope everyone had a nice short week after the long Labor Day weekend. Lots to get to here, as I’m trying a more multi-pronged approach this week, with multiple stories and commentaries instead of just a lone behemoth essay; let me know if you find this sort of approach useful—I’ve been considering including a roundup of key developments in what I might glibly call something like ‘humans vs the machine’ stories in addition to a weekly piece here. As such, this week, we’ve got:

-TIME’s 100 most influential people in AI, and what it says about the state of the industry
-Uber and the gig app companies systematically screwing workers in California, and likely beyond, with a terrible and precedent-setting law
-Some good news for voice actors in their months-long fight for AI protections

As always, this is free to read, but the work is made possible by those willing to chip in the equivalent of a cheap draft beer a month—your support is greatly appreciated. Proverbial hammers up…

TIME magazine’s AI/100 list, which aims to document the “most influential people in AI,” includes 27 CEOs—over a quarter of the haul—and 25 founders. (Some are both.) Some 14 or 15 more are VPs, CTOs, board members, or employees of AI corporations like Anthropic, Apple and Amazon. Four of the first five faces on the list, under the opening “Leaders” section, are billionaires who run the largest tech companies in the world—Google’s Sundar Pichai, who has overseen what has so far been one of the more disastrous forays into AI with the search giant’s much-denigrated Overview flop, sits atop the feature with a full portrait.

More familiar faces of the megarich, whose fortunes have been bolstered by the AI gold rush, despite there being few signs of any of them having developing a winning AI business model, greet the viewer below. Perhaps anticipating criticism for frontloading so many billionaire men, the editors slotted Sasha Luccioni—who does good work on AI and climate—in between OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is right below; he’s now one of the world’s richest men and perhaps the single biggest beneficiary of the AI boom this side of Altman himself. Each of the men have something in common: They happened to be running a major technology company when the AI boom began, and each are, to varying degrees, proficient at espousing platitudes about how AI is going to change everything.

Now, lists like these are always going to be highly disagreeable. (Elon Musk stans are mad that he was omitted, for one.) And there is a strong case to be made that if you happen to run one of the largest corporations on the planet, and you’re selling AI products, you are now ipso facto one of the most influential people in AI. I’m not even saying TIME’s list is wrong. I’m saying let’s proceed from the assumption that it’s correct. That these are the most influential people giving rise to AI. As such, it’s a highly useful snapshot, in that it paints what should be a viscerally discouraging portrait of how and for whom AI is being developed—that is, by and for a fleet of largely interchangeable and very wealthy executives whose chief interests are relegated to expanding their market share as rapidly as possible.

Screenshot of the TIME AI 100 list.

If the single most influential person in AI is Sundar Pichai, who operates a search engine monopoly, and uses that monopoly to do things like thrust before its billions of users an AI program that says it’s a good idea to add glue to pizza and to eat a small number of rocks and that a dog has played in the NBA, I think that’s clarifying.

It’s also interesting to note how the list has changed since the first edition ran last year. If anything, this list is less intellectually diverse than the last one and marks something of a regression in the inclusion of critical voices around AI. DAIR’s Timnit Gebru, linguistic scholar Emily Bender, MIT’s Joy Buolamwini, SF great Ted Chiang, and Signal’s Meredith Whittaker, who were featured last year, are absent this go round. (The aforementioned CEOs still made both lists.) Now there are some fantastic folks included—Amba Kak, my colleague at AI Now, is a great critical mind on all things AI policy; I was very glad to see members of the Nigerian content moderators union; the FTC’s Lina Khan, Luccioni, Meredith Stiehm, the president of the Writer’s Guild who fought for AI protections for screenwriters, Nightshade inventor Ben Zhao, the guy filing the lawsuit against OpenAI for the New York Times, and a few others. But these voices are outnumbered around 10 to 1.

The thing is so top heavy with CEOs and industry advocates and professional AI boosters, it’s like a chopstick trying to hold up a cinder block. At the risk of overthinking a magazine feature, what it reflects to me is how the conceptual enterprise of AI is already shedding incisive and creative voices, and is ossifying into the oligopoly-dominated automation enterprise it always seemed destined to be. And that those critical voices are in the process of getting crushed.

Consider how it is organized. Who gets top billing in Leaders, one of the four sections the list is organized under? Google’s CEO. Innovators? The CEO of AMD, an American semiconductor company. Thinkers? Longtime Google employee Ray Kurzweil. (fwiw I don’t even know of many AI accelerationists who take Kurzweil all that seriously as a thinker anymore.) And by my count, 21 of the 25 Innovators are CEOs or executives at startups and tech companies; this to me seems to reflect a rather impoverished view of innovation and who is capable of doing it—and yet again, it probably accurately reflects who many Americans would point to as the engines of innovation, and who we are currently ceding control over the development of AI technology to.

If there’s one part I was actually disappointed in, it’s the “thinkers”—there are precious few outspoken critics of AI let onto the list. There are many representatives from the effective altruism and e/acc set, and many concerned with “AI risk” or “safety” or “alignment.” But there’s no longer much room for folks like Chiang, Gebru, Bender, or Whittaker, who have more trenchant critiques, or those who are examining the currently-unfolding harms, or thinking about labor or displacement, or asking if this whole enterprise might be a bad idea.¹

But maybe most importantly, the feature doesn’t reflect the thunderous opposition to AI from so many workers and communities, or the fact that pop culture is saturated with critiques and disparagements of AI, and that AI is, in many corners, considered just kind of lame. To wit: Earlier this week, when the quirky writing project National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, announced this week it would be open to writers using AI, all hell broke loose, such was writers’ widespread revilement of generative AI encroaching onto their practice. Meanwhile, artists and voice actors are marching in the streets to protest AI. It is a catalyst for organizing. All that may be admittedly hard to capture in a list!

I do think it’s an instructive list, and I’m glad I read it—it concisely demonstrates what the generative AI project is really about in its current iteration: Tech giants becoming more gigantic, rich executives becoming richer, and corporate efforts attempting to automate the production of every stripe of creative labor. To those who have an interest in checking this technology, or preventing Silicon Valley from obtaining absolute control of it, or even hoping that AI might be made to serve workers instead of hinder them—give it a scan, and witness the scope of the challenge.

THE WEEK IN HUMANS vs BIG TECH

Prop 22, which replaced employment protections for gig workers, is a disaster, as predicted

Too many non-AI tech and labor stories have flown under the radar as generative AI has sucked all the air out of the room — a problem to which I have contributed, by failing to pull myself away from AI matters enough, perhaps! Going to try to do better here, promise. Starting with Prop 22, which critics—myself included—feared would be a disaster for California gig workers (and by extension, gig workers everywhere).

To refresh the memory, CA lawmakers passed a bill that classified gig workers who met certain requirements as employees—and thus eligible for things like benefits and protections, by law. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and InstaCart were furious, of course, and funded a record-breaking $200 million campaign to overturn the law via a ballot proposal, Prop 22. Their case (which was and remains entirely fatuous) was that drivers liked being “flexible” and ineligible for benefits—and importantly, that the gig work companies would offer a “third way” solution, a raft of benefits that weren’t as good as mandated time off or employer health care, but would seek to fill the void. The companies would do things like have to help pay health care stipends and cover occupational accident insurance, according to *the law they wrote*.

Three guesses as to how the gig companies are doing at providing such things, first two don’t count. “California companies wrote their own gig worker law. Now no one is enforcing it,” goes the headline of CalMatters’ Levi Sumagaysay’s great, in-depth story. You guessed right: Gig app companies are simply not giving workers the benefits they promised, and worse, the state has no idea how to make them follow their law. From the piece:

Workers say in the claims, and in interviews with CalMatters, that companies such as Uber, Lyft and Instacart failed to provide higher wages and health care stipends under the law, and that the companies’ representatives sometimes act confused or take a long time to handle their requests for Prop. 22 benefits.

Read the whole thing, it’s infuriating. And evidence of just how thoroughly the gig app companies won here—they screwed workers, who they are paying less than ever, by the way, out of employment benefits, and have shoved the burden of enforcing their own third-rate law onto the state, which has no idea what to do about it. Now consider that Prop 22 is being used as model legislation in other states—it’s truly a disaster for the working class, and must be stopped. Full-time gig workers deserve the same protections and benefits of any other worker, whether or not their boss is an app.

Good news for video game voice actors on strike for AI protections

Video game voice actors, represented by SAG-AFTRA, have been on strike since late July, calling for protections in their contracts that assert that they cannot be replicated or replaced by AI without full consent and compensation. They appear to have made some encouraging progress this week, with 80+ indie studios agreeing to SAG’s language for an interim agreement.

Here’s IGN:

The video game voice actor strike has made progress as Last Sentinel developer Lightspeed LA has signed the union's agreement promising better rights for actors and protections against artificial intelligence.

The Screen Actors Guild — American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) announced Lightspeed LA's signing of the SAG-AFTRA Interim Interactive Media Agreement, which "gives the company access to SAG-AFTRA members under fair and equitable conditions." Since the initial announcement, 80 games have signed on to SAG-AFTRA's A.I. terms.

The larger battle goes on, as the major studios still appear to be holding out, but this is a sign that there may be cracks in the facade—and that the position that studios should be able to fully automate the role of voice actor may not be a defensible one. I also enjoyed, perhaps for the obvious reasons, this quote from Jennifer Hale, an actor for Mass Effect and Metal Gear Solid games:

"The truth is, AI is just a tool like a hammer," she said. "If I take my hammer, I could build you a house. I can also take that same hammer and I can smash your skin and destroy who you are.”

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That’s a good place to leave it for this week; as I mentioned last time, lots more percolating, and thus, lots more soon — see you all shortly. Keep up the good fight against the machinery hurtful to commonality.

1. I would have liked to see someone like DAIR’s Alex Hanna, or the great Safiya Noble, if the Time editors didn’t want to do repeats. One puzzling omission: Gary Marcus? Agree or disagree with him, it’s hard to argue that he is not one of the most visible and influential critics of AI, and he was not included on either list. What about journalists covering AI? What about the 404 Media team, that has blown more stories open about the misdeeds of AI companies than just about anyone? Or someone like Karla Ortiz, who’s not only laying out critiques of AI but fighting AI companies on behalf of artists against it in the courts? Or even Ed Zitron, whose podcast and newsletter have become very popular due to his viral AI criticism? What about the innovators who are actually trying to make ethical AI products, without relying on the plagiarized work of others, like Ed Newton Rex, or products that address AI issues head on, like Cara app founder Jingna Zhang? I know a number of good journalists and editors worked on this thing, and they likely fought hard to get even the critical voices and underrepresented groups that were included onboard—I have been part of compiling features like this before, where there is a lot of incentive to include well-heeled CEOs instead of people perceived as “activists”, and it’s not easy! And again, it is a list, TIME probably sold a lot of corporate sponsorships and ads against it, and TIME is owned by Salesforce CEO and AI fan Marc Benioff, for further context.