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.
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, with weird avant garde/experimental art you have a person making decisions about what they’re making, how they’re doing it, where they’re displaying it, etc. There’s intentionality to it - the artist has to visualize what they’re going to do before they do it, and in that process the differences between one experimental artist who paints their canvasses all a single color and a different person doing something similar become alighted.
With generated images, however, the entire decision-making process has been offloaded to a machine, which by definition does not understand what it’s doing or why, cannot have intentionality, and can only give a weighted average of the decisions that other artists have made in the past. From the “artist”'s point of view, you have an idea of what you want to see and you put in keywords related to it, and then you cycle through generated images until you get to one that’s “close enough”. Your input on the production of the image itself is completely alienated from it - you’re like a producer telling someone what to paint, and then telling them to try again if you don’t like it.
I mean, we have avant garde art where the author only transforms the raw materials very lightly, the most famous and controversial example perhaps being a certain porcelain fountain.
Also for AI specifically, depending on the model the artist has a pretty significant degree of control over various parameters of the generation, e.g. by ‘fine tuning’ and grafting your own data on top of the existing weights. It’s certainly not just typing in different words. In the end I don’t really see how it’s fundamentally different from an artist applying various algorithmic filters and other transforms in Photoshop or whatever.
deleted by creator
How is it different? The artist is presented with a generated image and can choose to keep it and publish or discard it.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
This would be better dunking material if people on hexbear didn’t call you an ableist and classist for not supporting AI companies.
This is sometimes true, but I’ve also seen a lot of arguments in favor of it on this website that are more well thought out that what the OP linked. Still on the “anti” side myself though.
edit: I find it extremely funny that after writing this comment about how I’ve seen a lot of good discussion on this website on the topic of AI, a shit flinging argument immediately broke out. 10/10 never change Hexbear.
That struggle session was about individuals who use AI having a right to copyright what they make. Nobody was supporting AI companies.
You got called names because you were being a liberal of the fifth type. You were making despairing comments without offering actual arguments.
removed by mod
There you go being a #5 liberal again. You should read Combat liberalism… like every day… and not as a “to do” list.
The article that spawned that struggle session was about an AI image being copy writable by the the person feeding it prompts. It had literally nothing to do with any AI companies. “No investigation , no right to speak.”
removed by mod
Nobody is simping for tech companies. Stop throwing out strawman arguments. Stop claiming that I have done no research and then ignoring when I pint out that you are the one who is arguing against a point nobody made. Stop throwing out pathetic insult and engange with my arguments. Stop being a
Am I gonna have to throw the PPB at you?removed by mod
To indulge in personal attacks, pick quarrels, vent personal spite or seek revenge instead of entering into an argument and struggling against incorrect views for the sake of unity or progress or getting the work done properly. This is a fifth type.
You don’t engage with my arguments because you have no materialist arguments only reactionary emotion. You aren’t refusing to engage you are incapable of doing so. You issues with AI are purely reactionary self interest. I’ll apologise for calling you a classist. I was wrong on that front. A classist requires some degree of class consciousness. You are just a socially progressive reactionary. You use leftist language and like leftist ideas in so far as they would improve your life materially but you’d sell the revolution down the river for a quick buck.
Some tumblr tier discourse right there
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.
removed by mod
Honestly the question of the motor disability was way more interesting to me,
Then why didn’t you ask about it? You were the one who was hung up on the athanasia and you are still being ablist about it.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. Conceptually, I think it was the more interesting problem, but I don’t think it would be worth discussing with you because you didn’t want to discuss things from that angle and there’s no sense in pressing the matter.
Insofar as I was hung up on the other aspect, I think it was me be careful about what I knew I could claim because I am not, in fact, ableist.
Conceptually, I think it was the more interesting problem, but I don’t think it would be worth discussing with you because you didn’t want to discuss things from that angle and there’s no sense in pressing the matter.
Gaslight me more crybully. Tell me how my neurodiversity is both
not disabled enough for you
I’m pessimistic about the realistic viability of painting if you’re, like, born blind, but Christ, dude, come on.
but how parts of it might be “conceptualy interesting” but not to actually discuss with someone with lived experience.
Obviously this is one of those “disagreeing with me is gaslightinging” things, but I don’t get where the “crybully” thing came from. I’m not a victim of shit, I think your dismissiveness is unfortunate, but I’m not crying over it.
That said, I should have been more careful in my wording, because I was meaning to contrast “painting while blind” with “bodies having widths while you can’t mentally picture them”. I will repeat that you seem to not understand how NT people draw, which is unfortunate for how it makes the question of how you can succeed in drawing much harder to conceptualize.
Remember that one time I said I liked your post despite not liking you?
This is why I don’t like you.
I will repeat that you seem to not understand how NT people draw, which is unfortunate for how it makes the question of how you can succeed in drawing much harder to conceptualize.
This sort of patronizing tone is gaslighting. You have already made it abundantly clear you care nothing for me as an individual. So why would you say things like “unfortunate” like you pity me? Its blatantly facetious and meant to deceive me into thinking you aren’t being an asshole.
Your original comment was trying to blame a marginalized person for being offended by your ableism that’s being a cry bully.
A Reddit link was detected in your post. Here are links to the same location on Teddit and Libreddit, which are Reddit frontends that protect your privacy.
I fucking hate AI because it has put me on the side of fucking nerds who care about things like IP and plagiarism.
deleted by creator
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
deleted by creator
Depends on where you look, really. Most of the interesting new developments (and the bulk of what’s available only for open source models and not commercial ones because commercial models can’t possibly adapt these things and make them user friendly fast enough) have been a bunch of conditioning models, whose only purpose is adding another layer of human input. And they’re usually extremely useful, because there’s far more that can be expressed spatially that you can’t express with text.
Yeah, the instant art button is what gets the most attention (usually in the form of anime girls with anatomically impossible proportions since straight people are boring), but you can also definitely make things more complicated and gain far more control in the process, and I see plenty of people who came for the instant art ending up doing this down the line. Plenty even going as far as picking up a pen tablet and developing conventional drawing skills to use alongside it. At some point along that process, I think it’s clear that it starts being used as a tool.
deleted by creator
That sounds like a very bad faith reading.
I am sure that there are plenty of people in the movement who are only looking for that, and I support things like the Writers Guild wanting protections in their contracts. That is not the dominant theme in the anti-AI movement. By far the most prominent voices are large corporations and a handful of fairly successful independent artists who are interested in strengthening copyright, which will be of little benefit to anyone who is not already wealthy enough to pursue a copyright infringement case. There’s also plenty of people who do actually want to ban the technology outright or who fantasize about sabotaging it somehow, I don’t know how anyone could follow anti-AI discourse and not see any of that. The likely outcome of strengthening copyright as part of this, though, is that large media companies will then continue to displace workers using AI tools while also making a larger share of money from the development from either selling access to datasets built from their internal libraries or by leveraging their exclusive access to said data, none of which actually benefits artists. IP law is not there to protect small artists, it is only capable of protecting those who can afford to go to court over it, everyone else will get fucked over as usual. But I’m sure that the Copyright Alliance and the handful of independent artists that they want to present as a human face will be pretty happy about it.
The one thing that this could restrict is open-source development of said models, which will make them harder to access for any independent artist who wishes to use them (if we assume that use of AI tools becomes a prevailing standard this will be necessary, if we assume that independent artists will be fine without them then presumably it follows that we don’t need to do anything at all) by making sure that they are reliably behind a paywall and generating profits for either an AI company or a media company. At best, this leaves independent artists slightly worse off when accounting for the effort spent on putting this plan into action, at worst it would make it far more profitable for tech companies and media companies alike.
If a movement is claiming to do something in the name of labor, but material analysis shows that the plan is very obviously DOA and if anything will make the issue worse, I’m going to oppose that, and I am going to have heavy disagreements with the anti-AI movement as long as its dominant messaging is clinging to IP law in the hopes that it will somehow magically transform into something that benefits workers without comparable effort to what it would take to overthrow capitalism outright.
deleted by creator
I think of random furries online who just dislike AI art
A few people I know are actually getting harassment, up to and including death threats from this group. Unfortunately those are also part of that movement and tend to be some of the ones freshest in my mind at any given time.
Isn’t the right wing the ones using AI like crazy? We’ve been laughing at it over here for some time now.
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
deleted by creator
Hot take: ai “art” doesnt actually stop you from making art yourself
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
Ah yes one of the classes Marx wrote about, proletariat, bourgeoisie, artist.
DPRK is a removedd worker’s state - just look at the symbology:
. The ARTISTS (depicted by the brush tool from MS Paint) are above all!Edit: the auto-filter removed a Trotskyist term. That’s a sectarianism!
deleted by creator
Yeah, it’s a calligraphy pen. I’m just doing a stupid bit.
the only stupid thing here is my brain failing to see its a bit
Edit: the auto-filter removed a Trotskyist term. That’s a sectarianism!
Trotsky has sent in a cringe word. We shall neither print it, nor reply.
The artists have been hoarding the products of their labor for far too long, finally we can democratize their work
I wanted to become an artist but the goons of the creative class came to my house and confiscated all my drawing supplies.
Self-employed artisans were petty bourgeois.
deleted by creator
My real point is that if you don’t even know what classes Marx described, you shouldn’t try doing Marxist class analysis until you read some theory. No investigation no right to speak and all that.
deleted by creator
Petty bourgeois extract labor value from others, small-scale artisans are generally not petty bourgeois unless they have assistants or something.
not necessarily, the petite bourgeoisie also include those who own and work their own means of production, which would include self-employed artisans.
Not so, if you own and work your own means of production but don’t profit from others’ labor value, you’re just a yeoman by another name
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
don’t need to be wealthy, it’s about your relationship to the means of production. Petite bourgeoisie just own and work their own means of production. Small business owners can’t afford that lavish shit either
Not the point, please read Marx.
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.
deleted by creator
Man, and I was only joking when I thought that Adobe saw art as a luxury for the rich. Now they’re directly implementing porky-friendly features into their growing enshittified apps.
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.
Best argument I’ve ever fucking heard in this context
deleted by creator
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.
Sure, NOW they see how foolish intellectual property is when it’s done with artists.
