Dead Labor, Dead Speech
What happens when culture becomes an industry's raw material.
If, as Marx argued, capital is dead labor, then the products of large language models might best be understood as dead speech. Just as factory workers produce, with their “living labor,” machines and other forms of physical capital that are then used, as “dead labor,” to produce more physical commodities, so human expressions of thought and creativity—“living speech” in the forms of writing, art, photography, and music—become raw materials used to produce “dead speech” in those same forms. LLMs, to continue with Marx’s horror-story metaphor, feed “vampire-like” on human culture. Without our words and pictures and songs, they would cease to function. They would become as silent as a corpse in a casket.
The generative-AI strategy is in one sense just a new variant on the central business strategy of the online economy. Whatever else the internet may be, it is a vast repository of human speech, digitized and machine-readable, that can be put to use by businesses to pr…