Last I checked on terminally online communists discourse, since I logged off months ago, the general consensus was that we should support our artist comrades and fight against techbro douchery BUT that we don't have much material power to stop AI art from being developed. I check again today and now everyone is talking about PMC and how artists are technically petty-bourgeoisie and acting like there's some sort of opportunity cost we're failing by expressing sympathy to artists? What the hell happened here? I thought I was up to date on the conensus for this but now I'm worried I missed something and I'm committing some sort of... communist sin by being worried for my artist friends.
I mean I checked and a well-upvoted comment on this site from a post I came across mentioned how we shouldn't show concern about AI art because it "only supports petty-bourgeoisie patreon furry artists" which is maybe the most incomprehensible sentence I've ever heard. Obviously I'll grant that patreon artists shouldn't be the focus of a worker's movement but COME ON who reframed a discussion about ALL artists into just patreon artists???
Not to mention that most artists are definitely proles? Like... do people not know how shitty anime artist working conditions are? They do NOT own the means of production except maybe their art software and not only is that rare (most art software is like 10 gajillion dollars and probably licensed by the studio), but saying that's enough to qualify is just silly. Do I own the means of production now because I own the phone that I get texts from my boss on?
Last I checked people here accepted artists as working class.
If they don't I will beat them up.
i'm getting the impression it's just some terminally online users arguing about it with each other? i don't evne... i just made a new accoutn to make fun of a take on reddit for fuck's sake i didn't want to see this
the kids on tiktok all seem against AI art? I thought we were all on board with that
What about the reverse? Do artists consider themselves working class? Do they show sympathy with working class people? Or do they consider artists as far above such unimaginative folks, who couldn't create anything more than a finger painting when they were in elementary school?
I think this part is the real problem and one that needs artists to do the work.
Know several artists, they all are over worked and paied shit. None of them think they're above everyone else. The only thing they complain about is being underpaid, overworked and under-appreciated. Same as any other working class people.
I've seen a few outliers before, they tend to be libertarian dillweeds or people who were born into money so got to persue art and never had to worry about anything else. But by and large most people are pretty cool and pretty queer, but that might be biased by the spaces I hang out.
I think most people understand these algos are built off the work of thousands of practiced, hardworking artists. It is disturbing people will hide behind the plausible deniability machine learning provides here. 😒 You're cool. Ppl be postin
There’s more controversy about what AI art means on the whole but the ‘artists are petite bourgois’ takes specifically are niche.
I've heard it as "artists are labor aristocrats" which has more slippery and slimy wiggle-room and can be strained enough to seem technically correct with enough sophistry.
The only positions I’ve seen that are widely accepted
I've seen fairly wide acceptance (upvoted to 20-30 upbears or more on this tiny little niche site, for what that's worth) for the reductionist take that human art endeavors (or human writing, or communication for that matter) have no intrinsic value whatsoever outside what the market is willing to pay for it, and those same people often extend that reductionism to human thought and consciousness for that matter being no more complex than chatbots, which is a crude way of hyping new technology while denigrating people at the same time.
I'm not even talking about "souls" or the like, which I don't believe in anyway. I'm talking about the pop-nihilistic takes that have subtext and implication that the machines (owned and commanded by the ruling class) replacing human labor isn't just inevitable (as in, don't even try to fight for workers getting paid for their currently-stolen work and don't even try to regulate or restrict how the technology is used, because technology is good in all its forms no matter how it's used or who owns it, you Luddite) but that those replaced laborers should rejoice or at least just accept that they're just obsolete meat puppets/meat computers/stochastic parrots/whatever and that those machines that :porky-happy: own deserve at least as much care and consideration as they do and that those precariously positioned workers' suffering isn't worth being concerned with because they're obsolete now, just like horse buggies and typewriters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0myoaT9tBk0
I'm not exaggerating the takes, only summarizing them, minus the "I have broken you" :shapiro-gavel: anime villain speeches and other techbroesque cringe that came with them.
I do sincerely hope you're right. I really do.
Maybe the 20-30 upbears I've seen (on this niche site where rarely anything is upbeared that high except dank leftist memes) for some particularly bad takes didn't mean anything on their own.
I won't name particular users (they'll likely show up on their own sooner or later and give me more anime villain speeches anyway) but the response seemed mixed at best. One of the most :expert-shapiro: of them keeps coming back, even with attempts to bait me about how I was destroyed/broken/whatever by their Materialist(tm) facts and reason. Even my post about it may seem, itself, like bait, so I'll just leave it at that for now.
but I just can’t believe any large number of people here are so blind that they could be thoroughly exposed to Marxist and Anarchist ideology and still hold such knee-jerk reactionary positions.
Some self-described leftists really do just want legalized drugs, free college, and cheap treats, with no solidarity with obsolete/"aristocratic"/not-enough-hard-hat-purity workers intended or even desired, instead cherry-picking whatever old texts fit what they want in a "fuck you, got mine" way. Hopefully only a (very) loud minority.
Time will tell. Maybe it really is just a few exceptionally arrogant, obnoxious computer touchers wearing the leftist label and chanting "Materialism(tm)" to justify their craving for cheap unfettered treats, the workers be damned.
Looking back (it's hard to go back more than a few days on this site because of how it's structured), I believe there's about 3-4 exceptionally loud "fuck you got mine" voices that keep returning and collecting curiously high amounts of upbears for their anti-labor wrecker takes and :shapiro-gavel: antics.
every post like this is ASKING for that kind of poster to come around, you know
In other news people are posting bait because they're too afraid to learn Krita.
people are posting bait because they're too afraid to square up and learn brazilian jujitsu
I do not feel threatened by AI art where abs and arms blend together. The braindamaged hentai fans who eat it up aren't even my audience. They want to see a woman with the proportions of toddler being full-nelsoned by a character straight out of One Piece. If you'll excuse me I need to apply shaders to an asshole.
artists all have soft baby goose feather hands and should get a real job like mine (clinging to the bottom of moving trucks to scrape off oil and mud)
What the hell happened here?
Petty contempt for "labor aristocrats" with a side order of "I got mine" treatbrain, decorated with a heavy layer of :expert-shapiro: arrogance and twisting of old Marxist texts to make them appear to say "if you're opposed to workers suffering and having their labor stolen by the ruling class that owns and commands the new treat machines, you're against Materialism(tm) and are emotional. Emotions are bad. My contempt for your emotions is implied to be grounded in logic, reason, and Materialism(tm)" with strained cherry-picked Marxist quotes.
I can't tell sometimes whether it's divide-and-conquer wrecker tactics or just dangerous levels of alienated and isolated selfishness with some people. Either way, contempt for workers is no way to build worker solidarity, no matter how nice the cheap/free treats are, for the moment anyway.
Not that long ago, Google was cheap/free and quite a nice browser for a while in much the same way when it first came out, but then the inevitable contradictions lead to its owners and masters making it shittier and shittier long after most of its competitors vanished. I expect the same with the major chatbots and image generators in the near future, too. Shitting on artists/writers/teachers and whoever else that will be negatively affected by unfettered and unregulated labor theft (not to mention all the people that are already getting their reputations, careers, and personal lives wrecked by cheap/free deepfaked revenge porn) is just selfish assholery and I'm sick of it already.
Artists in the first world are 'labor aristocrats' by the metric of living in the first world, as are all first world proletarians (by the standards of Leninist thought), it doesn't mean we shouldn't show some level of solidarity with them, it's just that it is probably not upon them with which the world turns. They are unlikely to be the revolutionary class that remakes society. But hopefully this radicalizes some down the path of understanding how the fruits of labor are exploited by capitalists. After all, capitalists didn't make the art that AI art cribs from.
In the future, it will likely become impossible for the regular person to fully avoid AI designed art. It will come down to, like so many things, a consumer choice, with the likelyhood that 'real art' is only supported by wealthy patrons. The likely historical result will likely bind working artists even closer to the seats of power, as if they weren't already intimately related at this point.
critical support to comrade musk in his protracted people's war on the continued solvency of Twitter, Inc.
I haven't seen this discourse, I don't know if it's actually evolved into that. I still think most people are at the first position
I think the true answer to the class question is that the majority of artists (and certainly the majority of artists who are specifically threatened by AI, most of whom are employed by companies) are working class, but some can be petty-bourgeoisie if they are independent, as owning the tools to create art on their own independently gives them a somewhat different set of interests than someone who works for a studio and who is dependent on that studio to be able to produce anything at all. I think that part of what makes it difficult to distinguish is that the most valuable "means of production" and the one that is perceived as most directly threatened by AI is human capital -- specifically the skills necessary to create art. AI can make anyone able to create an elaborate yet somehow extremely low quality work of art, and can allow someone with any actual understanding of art (using it as part of a more traditional process) to create something potentially years beyond their skill level in a small fraction of the time -- the net effect of this is that human capital from art skills is not as valuable in a world where AI is accepted as a tool for creating art.
Normally, we consider human capital to not be a "means of production", since it is part of your labor power, which is the only thing the working class is able to sell for their survival. Some people clearly have more than just their art-specialized labor power, and have both the ability and means to produce art. But the issue of AI affects both to an extent in differing ways, so while there is certainly some impact from working class/petty-bourgeois class interests and that cannot be left out of a complete analysis, class analysis by itself is not sufficient to explain the effects on artists. It also reveals that the difference between a working class and petty bourgeois artist are not as significant as one would find in other lines of work, since art skills are far more valuable than art tools.
This analysis also lets us explain the often-invoked backlash against photography and digital art, and more clearly see the parallels to AI art tools. All three of these developments shifted the equation for the costs of art production by allowing tools to cover a great part of what would normally be covered by human capital. AI art potentially has done far more to shift that balance than the prior two. The value of an artist's labor is threatened here, regardless of their class.
Independent artists are not the majority, are not necessarily the most likely to be impacted, and are possibly in a much better position to potentially gain from adding AI to their process than employed artists, but they appear to be by far the loudest voices in anti-AI discourse, which is why the discussions are often framed around them. Calling a minority portion of artists petty bourgeois shouldn't be seen as dismissing the concerns of working class artists, but it inevitably will be seen that way if one focuses on one class of artists and misidentifies an edge case of shared interests as unique to that class.
Unless you want unlimited hentai with bad fingers the only thing AI art has been useful for is seeing other people's opinions about it.
AI art is just a novel use case for what should be an incredibly powerful and central tool in centralized economic planning.
If we trained these models on I/O tables for industry and allowed planners to roughly model how a change in industry A's output would effect industry B, then we'd have an incredibly powerful tool for physically implementing communism without like 50,000 bean counters running one simulation.
I hate Cockshott, but him and Cottrell did a good job with their analysis of how Machine Learning can be a tool in a modern Gosplan system.
Artists would be getting a lot more sympathy from the working class had they not alienated themselves from the working class. But that's long past preventing, and artists consider themselves almost a different species from lower class humans.
when you apply liberal personal responsibility politics but dress it up like marxism
