maybe the project table was upside-down and things ended in the wrong way
this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Late Stage Capitalism
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The argument of gatekeeping art only works in a society where art is not taught to people. If we were taught how to express ourselves artistically, the need for AI art would not exist outside of mass production and cost cutting. There's much more to art than just labor. A common argument I see artists use is that the process of creating art is in itself fulfilling. GenAI takes that away to spit out a done image that at the present moment is made from the unpaid labor of artists worldwide that never consented to their labor being used that way.
You are right that fighting against mechanisation and automation is reactionary and regressive, and that's why we shouldn't do that, but instead help artists organize to fight for their rights in this hellhole of a system that is throwing them under the bus.
It is art with its relationship to paid labour that is at stake here. People are free to make art irrespective of being paid.
We are in agreement that it is reactionary to hold back automation.
The argument that automation in fields were creativity is involved is acceptable except for artisanship is reactionary and often relies on metaphysical and idealistic concepts of where the artists' creativity comes from. Creativity has a materialist root if one is to do away with unscientific notions.
Paid labour is undone by unemployment due to automation and so that only leaves the defense of proprietorship as a means of income, which again is reactionary and regressive. It is this bourgoisie ideal that is being defended and claimed authentic because it happens at a smaller scale.
If ones wants authorship without payment that again is a problem with capitalism and not the technology. The bourgoisie own the means of production - they claim rights on ownership de facto or de jure. However, that is not what is being argued against here; it is the technology itself.
(As you were hopefully alluding to AI art can save time and thereby increase productive capacity. For example a software engineer who wanted to make a game now has lower barrier to entry for say the production of glyphs, a revolutionary as lower threshold to make agitprop, a civil engineer with interior design etc etc. Furthermore a world where everyone can do art is already a world where there is less paid labour for art. We consider making the abstract concrete to take a more dialectical materialist approach.)
I see what you're saying, but this is not something I have been seeing for a while. Rather, all I have been seeing are artists refusing to use genAI and usually the arguments that pops up are about theft, which I don't think is a good argument to use.
The argument I use however is that artists resisting genAI in its current iteration are not wrong. This automation is taking away their jobs and fighting back against that is rational since they now see their lively-hood threatened. What they usually lack is the notion that fighting against the tech itself is not feasible, we can't turn back the wheel of time and prevent it from being developed. Here in Brasil at least, there is UNIDAD, which is organizing artists and fighting for regulation of AI.
Also, a lot of big brands have already started using AI generated videos for advertising in here that not only most of the time look awful, but that also affect other jobs besides art, I see it all the time on youtube ads.
That would be true right now if genAI was at the level of actually being able to do that decently, which it is not. At the present time you need to have someone editing the spitted image to correct the mistakes the genAI did, otherwise it looks bad, and this can take time. Of course that doesn't mean people will do that, and there's already a ton of AI generated slop on Steam for example.
Also, while I'm only talking about AI art here, there's also issues with AI in general like the enshittification of the web with AI sites, news, etc, that I don't even know how to address. I don't remember the correct video to link here, but the communist Brazilian tech-channel TeClas has talked about some other issues too like how the race for AI has these big tech companies pushing out models in the wild to be the first in a "tech breakthrough" without being ready, properly tested and secure.
That's what the defense of proprietorship means.
This is ludditism. Why are so-called marxists acting like this? Why is the automation of every other industry acceptable but theirs is not? It is such a common phenomenon, as exemplified on this thread, one then needs to consider a deeper class phenomenon. They, like others, fear proletarianization. And the argument in defense against this devolves into essentially into two things: proprietorship and the metaphysical idealism of where creativity comes from.
There needs to be introspection to the inherent nietzschen elitism in all of this if one is doing the above while calling self a marxist. Read up and expand one's horizon and burst the myopic liberal bubble.
The quality of output of AI as a defense against the technology in the first place is a poor defense because all that means if it was to reach the level that is acceptable then that means one would be for the technology? Instead what is inferred by this is that it can never reach an acceptable quality because there is something inherently mystical about human creativity that the machine cannot create.
I have no problem against organising against capital. The solution to the problem of unemployment produced by automation is the equitable redistrubution of resources, the end of the rentier economy, and at the scale of genAI it will end up needing to be a dictatorship against capital. That is the point here.
(Socdem compromises such as regulation is nearly not enough. You need to own the means of production. We are marxists. We should know why reform over revolution does not work)
Paid employment could mean retraining under socialism. Remember communism is moneyless, stateless and classless. The aim of society is the socialisation of all labour to free up time to do more leisure including art. People will still want art from humans without AI but there's a difference between that and the preservation of regression through ludditism to maintain less productive paid labour.
Equating anti-capitalism to anti-corporatism, the appeal to ludditism, the defense of proprietorship, or the appeal to metaphysical creativity is not going to cut it, and that is a low bar to clear for marxists.
I think you're misunderstanding me, I'm not going against you here.
I'm not defending being a Luddite. I have expressed that when I said that fighting against the tech is not feasible. It's like you said, it's reactionary and regressive.
I was describing that it is normal for artists to feel that way because their jobs are being taken away. Fighting against AI generated art doesn't necessarily mean wanting to destroy the tech, like I mentioned, fighting for regulation so that they can secure the bare minimum of rights to not get fucked is one way of doing it. And since by doing that they are also organizing the artists, I see it as the right way to approach this issue. I should also have mentioned that the movement I mentioned earlier, UNIDAD, talked with marxist channels on youtube for example.
I don't believe this is going against anything you talked about.
~~I don't know if you meant this to insult me or not, but I did no such thing to you, so I'll pretend I didn't read it.~~
I was being descriptive. It is a fact that current genAI makes images that have issues that need to be corrected by hand. Again I'm not talking against the tech, I'm simply listing the issues it has.
No, it means that on a technical level it is not on par yet. These models produce hallucinations and wrong outputs. Such things either end up needing to be touched up, which takes work and time to correct, or are used as is, which is currently bad, and as I said, slop.
Yes, and to achieve that you need organization. Workers organizing is a good thing since it shows them that they can fight. It them becomes easier to shows them that the issue is capitalism and that only through organization it can be toppled.
I agree completely.
No, it wasn't directed at you. I reworded it before I saw your reply, if it helps. And I upvoted your reply :)
Thanks for clarifying that, I have edit my comment to risk that line off!