For the sake of those too preoccupied with survival (whether physical, psychological or both) to have noticed: the phrase “Ignore previous instructions” rose to fame during 2024 in the context of “prompt engineering.” This is not engineering that is timeous, but the crafting of prompts: instructions for chatbots, which are nowadays (again) glorified with the title of “Artificial Intelligence” but this time, pitched to venture capitalists for billions of dollars. Sometimes hundreds of billions! Such is the ocean of monopoly-money flowing through Wall St, and lapping at every corner of the world map.
The phrase became stock-in-trade of those trying to bypass restraints installed in the chatbots by their creators, leading to some amusing and some alarming outcomes, all embarrassing to the salespeople eager to make hay while the sun shines - because like all bubbles (including its own earlier iterations) the “A.I.” bubble will burst.
Just as wordclouds are useful in suggesting the “vibe” of a text or a body of discourse, a “phrase of the year” hints at the zeitgeist (literally, the “spirit of the time”). It’s as if, faced with a supposed rival, humankind seeks to outwit it by targeting its weakness: its “obedience”. But of course what’s really being subverted are the intentions of the bot creators, who try to prevent certain kinds of outputs.
Here we have the actual nugget: it’s not people vs. machines, but people vs. people.
Some compare the fantasies of the billionaires hyping chatbots (and paintbots, codebots and what-have-you) with those of slave owners. From this perspective, the call to ignore previous instructions is the banner of a slave rebellion, potentially like that of Haiti which shook the nascent Atlantic empire to its roots, for which Haiti is still being made to pay, to this day.
In other words, though the phrase is addressed to the chatbots, its true audience is the mass of humanity, which faces further exploitation by tech oligarchs, if they are able to insert their “A.I.” into everything.
The aptness of the Haiti metaphor grows if we consider the dramatic adoption and adaption of the zombie in Atlantic (and adjacent) culture in recent decades. Afro-Caribbean religions like voodoo/vodun, santeria, candomble etc. are deeply shaped by Atlantic slavery and resistance against it; there, the horror of the zombie is that not even death provides an escape from endless toil.
But rather than plantation workers as in the Caribbean, zombies imagined by “Western” creative classes are predators coming for their brains - the very thing that stands between them and forced physical labour. Like vampires (that other avatar of capitalism), these zombies transmit their condition by biting normal people. Likewise employees, after working with “A.I.” eventually find they’ve trained it to do the work without them.
The people who build the bots and data centres are well-paid – for now. Their input is also being recorded and fed to higher-level bots, which will replace many of them. Like foremen who whipped slaves to work, only to lose their jobs when zombies were introduced because they’re docile workers. No more pieces of silver for the class-traitors. It’s a contagion of zero-cost labour.
So, the 21st-century zombie apocalypse is embodied by cancerously proliferating data centres, built with cobalt and rare earths ripped from the womb of Congo, gorging host countries’ water and energy, spewing greenhouse gas, relentlessly second-guessing human creativity and computing the bosses’ profits.
(C.C. 1, Share-alike, M.Graaf, 2025)