“The current AI craze is a result of a toxic surveillance business model. It is not the result of novel scientific approaches that, like the printing press, fundamentally shifted a paradigm.”
– Signal Foundation president
Meredith Whittaker, describing AI products as an
intensification of surveillance capitalism. Accepting the
2024 Helmut Schmidt Future Prize in Hamburg, Whittaker warns that generative AI “must be understood, primarily, as a way of marketing the derivatives of mass surveillance.”
