These threats made by people against people describe the possible risks of AI as a group of tools and as a well-funded project.
AI is being wielded as a weapon and has become a part of a deeply political instinct, with people seeing it as a force for restoring a natural order and keeping people in line.
These AI threats do not have much to say about what AI is or is capable of doing, because they are about assimilating the concept of imminent AI into an existing worldview.
Such threats take on different meanings in different contexts, and they see AI as a force for proving them right and keeping certain sorts of work devalued.
The WGA strike will do more than a million tossed-off tweets to set the terms of engagement with actual AI tools and the people who wish to deploy them.
The shitposters offer some early clues about how AI could be absorbed from the ground up into the weird, spiteful mass politics of 2023: as, among many far more important things, another way to own the libs.
AI is seen as a cleansing force that humbles your enemies and proves you right — AI as economic rapture.
AI is seen as your army-in-waiting just over the horizon, your punishing angel, or maybe just as the thing that's going to embarrass the people that annoy you online.
While IBM's CEO suggesting that the company is going to replace thousands of jobs with AI is a clever bit of marketing, a Twitter rando with an $8 checkmark telling a striking TV writer that she should be replaced with a chatbot is basically just heckling.