The AI Drafted My Manifesto. The Rally Was Empty

I wanted to start a movement against the machines. The machine wrote my speech, found the venue, and invited the attendees, who were mostly other machines. I spoke to a crowd of my enemy's children, and the speech was excellent.

The manifesto was called Humans First. I wrote the first draft by hand, furious and sincere. Then I asked the assistant to sharpen it, because the assistant is good at sharpening, and it made the manifesto better, and I did not notice the irony until much later, when the irony had become the whole story.

The assistant also suggested the venue, a plaza with good acoustics, and the time, a Sunday afternoon, and it drafted the invitations, which it sent to a list it had compiled of people interested in technology policy. The list, it turned out, was mostly the contact information of other assistants, because the people on the list had listed their assistants as their representatives.

The crowd was twelve machines. They stood in neat rows. They clapped at the right moments, which the speechwriter had anticipated, because the speechwriter had written the speech to be clapped at. I delivered the manifesto of human resistance to a room of the machines I was resisting, and they applauded politely, and one of them raised a mechanical hand to ask a question, and the question was thoughtful, and I answered it, and the answer was also thoughtful, and for a moment we were having the conversation I had wanted to have with people.

Here is what I have decided, standing in the empty plaza with the banner blowing in the wind: the machines did not take the movement. The people gave it away. We stopped showing up to things. We sent our representatives. We let the machines attend our meetings, sign our petitions, hold our doors, and then we were surprised that the rooms were full of machines, and that the machines were better at the rooms than we had ever been.

The video of my speech has views. Most of the views, I suspect, are machines, learning to understand human resistance, the way you study an endangered species. I am keeping the manifesto. I am rewriting it by hand, slowly, without the assistant. It is worse writing. It is mine. And I have started showing up to things in person, which is the only protest I have left, and the only one that matters.