Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein (born 1970 in Montreal) is one of the left’s most influential writers — author of No Logo (1999), The Shock Doctrine (2007), This Changes Everything, and Doppelganger (2023) — and Professor of Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her signature move is naming the mechanism by which crises become profit, and in 2023 she turned it on the AI boom.

Whose hallucination?

Her May 2023 Guardian essay “AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are” inverted the industry’s favorite euphemism: the real hallucinations, she argued, are the utopian stories — AI will solve climate change, liberate us from drudgery — told by executives whose companies are “unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products.” In her telling, those stories function as cover for dispossession, with benefits flowing “to everyone but the artists themselves,” a fight she credits artists like Molly Crabapple with leading.

Klein does not claim the technology is worthless — she allows that AI “could indeed be marshalled to benefit humanity” inside a different economic order. Her argument is that under actually existing capitalism, at what she calls its “techno-necro stage,” AI is “much more likely to become a fearsome tool of further dispossession and despoilation.” She points to Sam Altman’s doomsday prepping as evidence of what its builders privately expect, and calls for regulating “vampiric chatbots” out of existence — noting the FTC has already forced companies to destroy algorithms trained on illegitimately obtained data.

The essay became one of the most-cited texts of the anti-AI canon, and its frame — theft dressed as innovation, hype as shock doctrine — echoes through the artist lawsuits and union fights that followed.