July 30, 2026
(Listen to That Handsome Devil - Charlie's Inferno while reading this for the best experience!)
So, do you remember my post about mainstream AI "criticism"? In it I focus on a lot about how TESCREALism is pushed into the mainstream while Critical AI is forced into obscurity, although we should get this important set of knowledge and beliefs be known in the public, and we shouldn't spend a lot of energy on gatekeeping and worrying about the community becoming toxic upon becoming popular because it can lead to self-sabotage and the playing field being left to whoever/whatever billionaires want it to be left to. I also emphasized that community standards and codes of conduct are so that communities stay healthy while growing, and while doing your part in the community, you have to watch out for those who join, more accurately, infiltrate for ulterior motives not very positive. Olivia Guest's new blog post/essay, titled "Entryism," is pretty much about that last part!
According to Guest, the time when we start looking out for rogue members in the anti-AI community has arrived, before "AI singularity" (even according to Sam Altman, apparently), and even more importantly, before GTA VI. She calls this act "entryism" (the namesake of her essay), rightfully so: Entryism (at least before this) has been used for when people supporting a certain ideology joins a political party supporting a different (often a bit similar) ideology to spread their own and maybe eventually take over the party. Sometimes this literally leads to coup d'état attempts in countries (I am NOT kidding; the Gülenists (I guess you could call them political Islamists but it looks more obvious that the CIA funds them and shit, and they have ties with US Evangelicals) had this strategy called "renklendirme" in which they infiltrated NGOs and political parties in Turkey (Yes, entryism in a different name). One of the political parties they infiltrated was AKP, the party in power in Turkey since 2002, and a party that supported a different flavor of political Islamism. Eventually, a power struggle began between the Gülenists and Erdoğanists, and that lead to the July 15, 2016 coup d'état attempt). Entryism truly has serious stakes and consequences involved.
"But like, FETÖ and AKP are ideologically quite similar, so it's not very relevant to pro-AI people infiltrating anti-AI spaces. Can people of a certain ideology/viewpoint even infiltrate institutions associated with opposing ideologies/viewpoints?" Oh boy. Yes. Yes they can. Guest herself presents the case of Graham Platner as a general example of this: Basically, that fucker tried to do entryism on the Democratic Party of the United States, a neoliberal political party, as someone with a literal Nazi tattoo, and many allegations of rape and sexual assault. Truly a horrible man he is. I can't believe there still are leftists defending him.
Olivia Guest writes that in the anti-AI movement, entryism takes the shape of pro-AI entities planting spies into anti-AI organizations and universities (AFAIK according to Guest, academia in its core is an anti-AI institution, so specifying universities separately is perhaps redundant), recruiting members of those institutions, or "spreading rhetoric or cultish language" ("cultish language" refers to Section 2 of the article "Against the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia, in which Guest et al. talk about how terminology in the field of AI has been deliberately designed to cause confusion, and is an ode to Amanda Montell, who did work on language and jargon in cultish environments). A very important part of it is "do[ing] all this by looking like one is not against the organisation's goal (i.e. knowledge production and education) or even more insidiously by looking like one is staunchly anti AI explicitly."
Using what Guest wrote, I guess entryism in anti-AI looks like...