Highly doubt most of the people drawing furry porn for rich guys these days are living a luxury lifestyle of eating caviar and having sex with models in Manhattan or shaking hands with MBS over oil deals
This is a disingenous take because the vast majority of artists in the world are likely proletarian. Consider anime artists, do you really think people who are employed by a specific studio and have to do hours a day of back-breaking labor are really... petite bourgoisie? They do not employ themselves, and do not have access to their own means of production.
Do they not realize that the biggest gatekeepers of creativity is Adobe and any apps like them? Quite literally in their perfect world, only the rich get the luxury of having art as a career, and your boss will overwork you well into the weekend so you will never have the time to do art if the cost doesn't stop you.
We benefit from having actual humans digest the experience of being alive to express it back to us. We benefit from a dialog where artists shape and are shaped by their cultural moment. Human art is group therapy. If we cut that loop and replace it with an algorithm that remixes and regurgitates past art, I think we lose something important, we lose part of the feedback loop of how societies understand themselves and evolve.
Some people can't just have a normal opinion without attaching some guilt factor in case you disagree. That hexbear "discourse" is just a really childish way to say "I want my AI art and the haters make me angry" with added pretension to make it sound like an important social issue. Internet brain poisoning and thinking you need to hold a Platform all the time will do that.
Yeah, it's totally a culturally radlib thing to have it be not just that you like or dislike something, but that liking or disliking it is righteous. AI tools are fun to dick around with, but there was once an asshole here who said that aphantasia and a motor disability that prevented them from learning rote action meant they couldn't, literally couldn't do art. I pointed out that there are lots of artists with aphantasia (and linked some talking about it) and they said "I guess Obama getting elected means racism is over". Don't get me wrong, disabilities suck and I'm pessimistic about the realistic viability of painting if you're, like, born blind, but Christ, dude, come on.
Honestly the question of the motor disability was way more interesting to me, but they were mainly hung up on the idea that it's impossible to ever do anatomy beyond stick figures (they literally said this) with aphantasia. Like, is it able-splaining to say that they seem to seriously misunderstand what people use mental images for in the first place?
You called people ableist classist luddites for not supporting AI companies, no argument must be made against you, you must simply be mocked. You dumbass.
No investigation , no right to speak.
This is what happens when your cultures acts like STEM and the people who study it are the pinnacles of humanity and humanities are for dum-dums who can't science.
If they had their way it would be BEet (Business, Economics, engineering and technology in lower case). We've seen how they treat science, especially when it comes to conclusions that popularly held beliefs about the world are actually wrong.
Maybe I dislike AI art because it invariably ends up in this uncanny valley territory where on first glance it looks like “real” art but the longer you look at it the more you realize something is off about it.
TBF there is a certain half-truth here in that the fundamental underlying problem is the inherent contradictions in capitalism and not AI/machine learning spitting out art or writing based on a database of art/writing. However, we do live under capitalism, and thus appeals to novelty don’t automatically nullify the impact to creative workers.
idk I think oop has a point, lots of people on here seem to have reactionary protestant brained hangups about what is and isn't real art. It goes back to the like, max nordau with his entartete kunst (remember what happened to him). makes me deeply skeptical of anyone criticizing art as being lesser and harmful because of its form or presentation. And I thought 100 years ago we mostly settled this debate on the side of weird avant garde/experimental art.
I mean there's a point to be made here that there's a split here. Sure I care about small artists having their shit stolen at no recuperation, but the IP laws aren't written for those people anways, they're written for Disney, who I could not care less about having their art stolen if only for the damages to IP law they caused.
The argument is of course, very bad. The Luddites were resistent to change and they were not reactonaries, they saw basically the same stuff that happens here: I'll lose my livelihood and my lifes work so some other asshole gets richer, at no pay to me, but that's just the inherent contradiction of technological advance concentrating money in fewer and fewer hands.
The better (materialist) argument for being in support of AI (or at least being against the current anti-AI movement) would be more along the lines that Luddites were wrong because they were fighting the means of production, which is absolutely pointless because that is just fighting the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The only way to solve the issues with AI and its impacts on labor would be to attack the relations of production, which would remove the need to actually do anything about the technology itself (good thing too, because the sheer amount of effort that would be required to remove all generative AI from existence and keep it suppressed indefinitely would make overthrowing an entire social order look easy by comparison).
The linked argument does not cover this, it is instead comparing it to the aesthetics of reaction, which is the least useful thing that could be done unless they're just looking for a talking point.
I agree, I'd just like to hand it to the luddites for figuring out the core issue. I don't think them not getting the solution correct is really making them wrong, sort of just proto-right
Being against the current anti-AI art movement is reactionary because it's mostly just a labor movement looking for regulation. Nobody really wants to destroy the technology or suppress the supposedly inevitable march of technology (though the "inevitability" of that I think is questionable), they just want corporations to vow not to use this shit to replace artists, and want to ensure artists that make plenty of creative decisions are still valued by the general public.
There are genuine arguments to be made for the promulgation of AI, but unless you fundamentally pack those arguments with a need for a more equitable society with large-scale redistribution of wealth, you are arguing for utter chaos and poverty for large swathes of the current population. Digital goods still make no sense in a capitalist context, because scarcity doesn't exist - they are borderline inherently incompatible.
While, from a disabilities perspective and from a general perspective, it could make sense that AI art would be "harmless" in the absence of capitalism, and i get where people are coming from... I don't think that's actually true, really.
Well, it would probably be more precise to say that AI art IS harmless... But that the general attitude and how it is currently being used and could be used, even under a communist system of production, is absolutely terrifying. I'm probably falling into whatever the fuck argument the article is making, but I don't care, because it's meaningless to me. Anyways, AI art does have a fundamental problem, but that's not because generative language models are the issue, but because current language models and any theoretical communist offshoots of it are entirely socially-reproductive; They do not reflect social attitudes through the filter of a human being's actual experiences, all of their suffering and joy and whatever the fuck ooeygooey stuff, but are basically designed to straight up mainline cultural attitudes directly into your skull.
If you type "beautiful woman" into a model like this, I'm willing to bet actual money that it's always going to return a thin woman. "Successful businessman" is probably going to return some random white dude. And this isn't just a case of fixing this by adding exceptions and SJW-ifying the language model, because that is just a never-ending torrent of whack-a-mole that has to be constantly reexamined. You'd be expecting all of the work that artists normally do for EVERY SINGLE PIECE they make to be done just once for EVERY SINGLE ARTIST, and the end result of that would be that all art made with it would have only one perception of reality. Basically the full centralization of art.
The solution to this would be to turn AI art into an actual art tool instead of a gimmick item, giving every user knobs and tools and making it unintuitive in all the ways art creation software are on purpose because they're necessary for being an actual creation tool. Yes, this makes it somewhat less accessible, but (and I know I'm not really able to speak on it) not really in the sense that it fucks over disabled people, just... makes it an actual art tool instead of a cultural regurgitation gimmick. Like visual synths, artistic sampling.
Ultimately the fear within capitalism RIGHT NOW is that capitalism does not have the tools to incentivize something like that. The only kind of AI art tool that has to exist under capitalism is the culturally regurgitative kind, because every aspect of it is easy to sell.
So communism doesn't SAVE us from AI art, but it gives us the ability to have an actual solution for it.
giving every user knobs and tools and making it unintuitive in all the ways art creation software are on purpose because they're necessary for being an actual creation tool.
remove the intent, and you have the current state of open source AI
Indeed, but that isn’t something that someone can just download and use, it is being actively marketed as an instant art button and not the visual sampler it is and all of the support is being given towards the instant art button philosophy
I'm probably not the best person to be arguing about this thing but I think there's broader context that needs to be accounted for here. In an ideal world where AI art doesn't impact peoples' livelihood because their livelihood doesn't depend on selling their art to capitalists my position would likely be pretty neutral. It's another tool in the bag. But we don't live in that society, we live in the society where workers are exploited by capitalists and AI art impacts the livelihood of artists because those artists need to be able to sell their art to capitalists to live. So in my view the OOP is being very idealistic with their argument.
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