Last week, Pia Curran logged onto what is now the most insightful Zoom call of her university career. In an astute discussion of ideas to be raised in her already sold-out Closing Address for the 2025 Sydney Writers Festival, internationally acclaimed author of Stasiland and Wifedom Anna Funder put long and glitchy Zoom lectures to shame. We talked about the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and systems of political oppression such as patriarchy, the complexities of artistic ownership, and what it means to be human and creative in the 21st century.
Pia: Thank you so much for doing this interview, Anna! I wanted to start by talking about the modern conversation surrounding AI. I think it tends to be very focused on the technological aspect of it. It overlooks the ways that AI exists within human social, historical and political frameworks, and is itself a product of those conditions.
How do your ideas about the ‘tyranny of the patriarchy’ and the rise of a ‘broligarchy’ align with the view that AI is an inherently political creation that reinforces an uneven distribution of power?
Anna: If you’re looking at patriarchy, you’re looking at the basic power imbalance between men and women that exists in every society on the planet. It’s a system of power where men are central and women are peripheral, and where men control most of the money and most of the political power, and accordingly have effective impunity. It’s like men are the main characters in the story, and women are the supporting cast. Trump is a convicted sexual aggressor and a con artist and a failed businessman, and yet there is no punishment for him. And there he is with Musk and the tech bros lined up at his inauguration.
The fundamental impunity of male power, and the irresponsibility of it, is then reflected in the fact that they are all refusing regulation. This includes the regulation of AI, social media algorithms, and content requirements. They see it as a threat to their profit making possibilities. I think that the whole mindset of power without responsibility and impunity for the harm that you do is very patriarchal, in both senses of the word. It’s tyrannical — there’s an unjust use of power, and it’s male.
P: It certainly is. Leading on from that point about the centrality of male power, I wanted to talk a bit about ideas of artistic ownership and the exploitation or ‘stealing’ of human creativity. As your most recent book Wifedom shows, this idea of human intellectual innovation being used as ‘material’ to produce intelligence for other people without due credit is not at all exclusive to our contemporary period.
What do you think are the similarities between modern anxieties regarding technology and artistic ownership, and the long history of male authors claiming and profiting from female work?
A: That history is part of the necessary blindness of patriarchy. In order to think that you’re a ‘good bloke’ or a decent male human being, you have to push out of your consciousness the privilege that you have and the fact that you are relying on the work of others, often women around you, to get down what you’re doing.
AI is the biggest act of copyright theft we’ve ever seen. They have copied all of our books, all of my books, and given them to these machines that are imbued with a lot of anthropomorphic-sounding behaviours — ‘training,’ ‘learning,’ ‘hallucinating’ and so on. That kind of model is fairly similar to other models of obtaining or taking power. Look at empires which conquered, invaded, colonised other countries. They took the land from the people who lived there, often enslaving them. The British did a lot of this, and Orwell was actually in Burma as part of this colonial administration.
That is a model where you are taking stuff that is not yours, you are not paying for it, because you are subjugating the people that you’re taking it from. So it’s as if you are getting it for free. And with women it’s a little bit the same. Women are socialised to owe our time and labour to our male partners, husbands, children and families. That’s not paid, and because we live in a patriarchal culture, it’s not seen as work. It’s part of showing that you are a good woman or a decent daughter or wife. Those definitions of what it is to be you as a female person come with work attached, and because they come with work attached, in a way they don’t. It looks like that labour isn’t happening.
Again, the model with AI is we’re just going to hoover all this stuff — even though it’s actually illegal — and ‘train’ these models. It’s the necessary making invisible of labour and resources, whether that’s sugar or slaves or women or the products of our creativity, in order to make fortunes out of that without paying for where it came from. So we’re watching this extractive, exploitative, illegal mass theft take place of AI with absolute impunity.
P: It’s really scary, especially everything going on with the copyright lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI at the moment. I wanted to talk more about this idea of AI and creativity, and the idea that AI can be ‘trained’ to be creative. As you pointed out, AI tends to be heavily anthropomorphised, and there’s a widespread acceptance of the idea that non-human systems can be analogues for human minds.
In the context of the Sydney Writers Festival as a celebration of human intelligence and human creativity, I was wondering if you think AI will ever be able to produce intelligence and creativity that is the same as its human counterparts?
A: We often refer to these machines as having neural networks, as if they can think, which is another anthropomorphism. Essentially, they can predict — they are very sophisticated calculators and computers who put down the next bit of text that is most likely to follow the preceding bit of text. And that is essentially the opposite of creativity. The one thing that all the writers at the festival have in common is that we do not put down the most likely next word, because that is a way to say nothing, or to lull your reader to sleep, or to use language very ineffectually or in a cliched way.
There’s nothing to say that AI might not develop into something more sophisticated than that. Australian philosopher David Chalmers says that there’s essentially no reason why a silicon-based neural network like AI couldn’t develop consciousness, and he’s been studying consciousness for thirty years. Why should we say that consciousness would only be confined to carbon-based large language models like human ones?
I find that, from a lay perspective, extremely hard to believe. I think if you can unplug it, you can’t really love it. I also think that the purpose of art, and of writing included in that, is to explore what it is to be human. It may or may not be that a machine is useful to us. My computer is very useful to me, Google is useful to me. AI may be useful to me, but if I were to stand up at the Sydney Writers Festival as a silicon-based large language model and deliver my talk, it would be a completely different thing, and not nearly as meaningful as standing up there as a carbon-based large language model as I am, and deliver a talk from one human to another.
The humanities are so named because we are interested in what it is to be human. That’s where I stand on that. I don’t want to read a book that’s written by a computer. It might be useful to me, if it’s about campgrounds in the Northern Territory, or if it’s an information based thing, but if it’s a work of art or literature, it’s just by definition not an act of communication from one human to another.
P: I completely agree. So much of literature — and so much of your own work — is really centred around this idea of being human, of having human relationships, human connections, communication, and how this has persisted in the face of even the most oppressive governments or authorities. I think a lot of people get quite pessimistic and dystopian about AI, but it’s my hope that human selfhood, identity and language is actually a lot more complex than we know, and it will be able to endure or transcend this threat of a technological ‘singularity.’
A: I think it’s very interesting that people are so interested in this idea of robots taking over or becoming more intelligent than us. I clearly haven’t read enough dystopian fiction or sci-fi, but I feel like at base there’s also a male fantasy of cresting life here. When Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein, it was at the beginning of experiments with electricity, and people got very excited about the idea that we might be able to electrocute dead frogs and imbue inanimate objects with life. And then you get her writing this book about piecing together this body and giving it a little shot. I feel like we’re in a bit of this Frankenstein mode with robots today.
I think that the world, if it wasn’t so patriarchal, wouldn’t be so fascinated by this, and it would shift our attention to the wellbeing of real carbon-based life forms — for example, children — which is not happening. This is where the future is. The future is not on Mars. The future is here, and it’s in children and young people.
Anna Funder will deliver her Closing Address ‘Bears Out There: Writing in the age of bots and broligarchs’ at the Sydney Writers Festival on 25th May, 2025.
