A French resistance is regrouping
They know what happens when you invite "them" in
Music is just one industry turning to licensing deals to settle its long, embattled copyright disputes with AI companies. … “Go take your money, girl,” one creator told Semafor. The phenomenon represents a widespread realization that it’s easier, and more lucrative, to join powerful and well-funded AI firms rather than fight the future norm.1
On August 21, 2017 — can it be that long ago already? — I unexpectedly received the following email:
Dear Professor Harris,
With this email, the editors of Inference: International Review of Science, would like to introduce you to a new quarterly online journal, one whose remit is the sciences, from Anthropology to Zoology. To date we have published ten issues, with an eleventh scheduled for publication in October.
http://inference-review.com
The editors came across your publication The Perfectoid Concept: Test Case for an Absent Theory2 and they found it fascinating. With this in mind and having familiarized ourselves with your work, we would like to extend an invitation to you to publish your paper in our journal, modified by yourself if you would like to, and edited by our team. The editors would be willing to pay you up to US$4,000 for a suitable essay. We would be both truly honored and grateful if you were to accept our invitation.
Inference is a fully independent and properly funded journal. We have no ideological, political, or religious agendas. We remunerate our authors appropriately for their contributions.
Thank you in advance for your consideration,
I remain at your disposal for any further information,
Sincerely Yours,
Hortense Marcelin
Managing Editor
Inference: International Review of Science
Paris, France
The $4000 figure looked very tempting, but it was rumored that Inference was being run by evolution denier David Berlinski and, more ominously, was funded by Peter Thiel. In response to a second inquiry, after I had ignored the message for a week, I wrote that “I did receive your invitation, and I am planning to look into the question.”
After the next reminder, I sent a second reply: “It’s on my list of things to do, but this is the beginning of the semester and I need to focus on my work.” It did seem a shame to pass up an easy $4000 on account of a rumor, especially since Inference had published articles by scientists I respected.3 But I had no choice when the rumors were confirmed. I ignored the follow-up, which came more than a year later. Inference sent me another message two years after that, inviting me to send a letter to comment on a piece about Mochizuki and the abc conjecture, promising that
Contributors will be remunerated appropriately for published responses.
Why was publishing in Inference unthinkable for me? If you have seen Ryan Coogler’s Sinners you will know the answer. When you invite them in, you are at serious risk of becoming one of them.
Elon Musk isn’t even trying to hide it.
A few weeks ago I was alarmed to learn that some of my most esteemed colleagues were falling like dominoes to the lure of tech’s Magnificent Seven, including several who have no interest in the technology per se. One even described the industry as “distasteful” and referred to its leaders as “robber barons.” This colleague explained to me, in the tone one uses with a small and innocent child, that money is the secret engine of this sudden appeal of the industry beyond the core of true believers.
That didn’t seem like an adequate reason for anyone to risk ending up looking like the guy in the above picture. Apart from the opportunity to practice for a spot on the Riverdance chorus line,4 immortality is the main incentive the vampires in Sinners offer in exchange for being invited in. So no one should be surprised to read that
Both Thiel and [Oracle CTO Larry] Ellison have each donated millions of their fortunes to immortality research…5
Monsters
Twenty-five years ago I had a dream, a daydream if you will. A dream shared by many of you. I dreamed of a special kind of computer, which had eyes and ears and arms and legs, in addition to its “brain”. I did not dream that this new computer friend would be a means of making money for me or a help for my country—though I loved my country then and still do, and I have no objection to making money. I did not even dream of such a worthy cause as helping the poor and handicapped of the world using this marvelous new machine. No, my dream was filled with the wild excitement of seeing a machine act like a human being, at least in many ways.
That’s Woody Bledsoe, President of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, speaking in 1985.6 Do you think it’s a coincidence that Variety’s predictions for next year’s Oscars include a Frankenstein movie and a vampire movie? Guillermo del Toro made the connection explicit: though his concern in the latest Frankenstein is “natural stupidity” rather than “artificial intelligence,” he explained that
“I did want it to have the arrogance of Victor [Frankenstein] be similar in some ways to the tech bros.”7
If Frankenstein’s monster is the body, the tech bros — or more precisely, their investments — are the vampires, as Franco Moretti already explained more than 40 years ago8:
Dracula…has no body -- or rather, he has no shadow. His body admittedly exists, but it is ‘incorporeal’ -- ‘sensibly supersensible’ -- as Marx wrote of the commodity, …In fact it is impossible ‘physically’, to estrange a man from himself, to de-humanize him. But alienated labour, as a social relation, makes it possible. So too there really exists a social product which has no body, which has exchange-value but no use-value. This product, we know, is money. And when Harker explores the castle, he finds just one thing: ‘a great heap of gold . . . gold of all kinds, Roman, and British, and Austrian, and Hungarian, and Greek and Turkish money, covered with a film of dust, as though it had lain long in the ground.’ The money that had been buried comes back to life, becomes capital and embarks on the conquest of the world: this and none other is the story of Dracula the vampire.
‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ Marx’s analogy unravels the vampire metaphor. As everyone knows, the vampire is dead and yet not dead: he is an Un-Dead, a ‘dead’ person who yet manages to live thanks to the blood he sucks from the living. Their strength becomes his strength. The stronger the vampire becomes, the weaker the living become: ‘the capitalist gets rich, not, like the miser, in proportion to his personal labour and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes out labour-power from others, and compels the worker to renounce all the enjoyments of life.’
The resistance takes shape in France
Industry money may be growing more attractive as a consequence of the sudden drastic reduction in federal research funding. A recent New York Times analysis shows a dramatic decrease in such funding across the board. Math and physics are less severely affected than other sciences but they are still down 17% compared to the average over then 10 previous years. The government’s long-term research priorities are visible in this table, also from the Times:
Responding to analogous pressures, a collective of 300 scientists in Toulouse published a manifesto entitled “Face à l’IA générative, l’objection de conscience.” By signing the manifesto, nearly 1500 students, teachers, researchers, and personnel at all levels of the French educational system, are declaring their conscientious objection to the “deployment of generative AI technology in our institutions.”
We consider that the deployment of generative AI technology in [these] institutions… is incompatible with the values of rationality and humanism that we are supposed to represent and transmit.
The manifesto lists three of the principal considerations behind this position. The French original is on the page of the manifesto. I think this is important enough to publish in rough English translation.
Consideration 1. Generative AI is a such a massive consumer of energy and material resources that no one can claim that it is compatible with major international commitments like the Paris Agreement on climate, or more generally with the protection of living things. To accept the deployment of Generative AI is to amplify the exceeding of planetary limits. In view of the gravity of the situation, this is a resolutely anti-human attitude. The ecocidal character of generative AI already suffices to justify refusing its deployment within our institutions.
Consideration 2. Generative AI is a technological choice that acts as an accelerator of the industrial infrastructure on which the digital sector depends: mines, data centers, power plants, electronic equipment factories, etc. Thus, in addition to the massive problems of pollution already mentioned, the enormous social damage resulting from this system will be reinforced: proletarianized labor in manufacturing plants and ultraproletarianized in “click work,” non-respect of human rights, conflicts over use of resources (water, metals, energy), extractivist and neocolonial relations between the countries of the global North and global South, geopolitical destabilization of mining regions, etc. In all these domains, the unlimited competition among the major players in generative AI will lead to the most brutal and predatory practices. For us it is unacceptable to contribute to such a dynamic by our pedagogical and scientific practices.
Consideration 3. Development of generative AI as a mass consumer product favors those uses that open the way to a dystopian future — that in part has already arrived: proliferation of deep fake videos, large scale disinformation by troll farms, emotional dependence on virtual companions, intensification of e-marketing and scams, etc. More generally, it allows the acquisition of a demiurgic power bycorporate giants, whose leaders have not concealed their megalo megalomaniacal and eugenicist projects and their hatred of democracy. Our institutions cannot support such techno-oligarchies, even indirectly.
Rachyl Jones, “Major music studios strike licensing deals with AI firms,” Semafor, 11/21/2025.
[Note from MH: The article had just been published in this book, co-edited by Nathalie Sinclair — all of whose work is worth reading, by the way. The draft on my home page is more or less the final version.
[Added after publication] One of these scientists just wrote to tell me that my regrets are misplaced: he was never paid for his article!
Is this a spoiler?
From a 2023 article by Brigid Kennedy at theweek.com, under this headline:
Woody Bledsoe, “I Had A Dream: AAAI Presidential Address. 19 August 1985” in AI Magazine Vol. 7, No. 1 (1986): 57 – 61. Quoted in Stephanie Dick’s long-awaited manuscript Making Up Minds.
On NPR’s “Fresh Air,” October 23, 2025.
Franco Moretti, “The Dialectic of Fear,” New Left Review, 136 (Nov.-Dec. 1982), 67-85. Frankenstein and Dracula represent the twin poles of the dialectic of labor and capital, for Moretti:
Frankenstein and Dracula lead parallel lives. They are indivisible, because complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes: the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor. The worker and capital: ‘the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.’
See also Hanna Flint’s interview Ryan Coogler talks Sinners, vampires, and capitalism, around 6:04.
Darkly hilarious and informative, as usual. For those who want to practice their french (nothing beats feeling like a resistant to brighten your day), I recommend also https://420ppm.substack.com/p/jusqua-la-derniere-goutte-lia-prolongera