Fuck AI

People are creative when they have the tools, the knowledge, and the free time.

I'm tired of this idea that it is by having the right intelligence, or some magical tool so you can do it without effort, or that even stress makes people creative.
We have created a culture that is the exact opposite of developing creativity, and our soil is toxic.
We worship art but hate the artists. I don't know how we got this backward or how we reverse course without changes beyond what people are comfortable with.

There was something special about those early internet days of Newgrounds and community-made mods. It wasn't about efficiency or 'content output'; it was just someone having a weird idea and spending weeks making it real for fun.

Creatives hate AI, full stop. As a musician, I notice that a huge majority of musicians despise that shit. It's such obvious copyright infringement, but whereas I get a life-crippling fine for using a 2-second sample of someone else's song, these companies walk away unscathed after scraping every fucking song on the internet. You and me would go to prison for doing that.

You notice how incredibly often failed or failing creatives end up grifting to the right? Nicki Manaj at the Charlie Kirk event. Steven Crowder's failed acting career. Every dipshit comedian on Joe Rogan scraping for a semblance of relevance. Hitler himself was a failed artist, and it should come as no surprise that fascists and fascist-sympathizers are gung ho for AI in creative fields; they want to control the culture, control the narrative, and ultimately control the public sentiment in their favor.

It's a fools errand. Art represents individual expression beyond their control and reaches the culture organically and not with an ironclad fist. The kids will be alright.

Love this shill getting ratio'd for trying to equate what's essentially theft with "democratization":

I've also heard this argument in the context of copyright. Copyright is not necessary for creativity to happen. Artists are going to art whether or not they get paid for it. The difference is that we, as a society, want artists to be able to live well while dedicating themselves to making art.

The problem with copyright is that it has been weaponized by moneyed interests in a way that often means we get less art, rather than more.

Fan art is incredibly common, and before copyright it was one of the main sources of all art. Almost all the tales of King Arthur are basically fan art. People would take the King Arthur setting and characters and tell their own stories involving those characters. But, in the modern world, copyright law gives companies a way to stop people from telling fan-art stories. As Cory Doctorow has said, at this point adding more copyright protection is basically like giving a bullied kid more lunch money. It's just going to be passed on to the bullies.

So, now we have a situation where copyright is a pretty shitty tool to help artists because it has mostly been turned into a weapon for corporations to use against artists. Meanwhile, we have "AI" that essentially ignores or bypasses copyright to create "derivative" works that look or sound like the works of certain artists, but where they don't even get the meagre pennies they get under the old copyright system.

I think we've really been at a "burn it all down and start over" phase for a while now, when it comes to how to encourage artists to create art.

I was there at the peak Macromedia Flash days. Shit was so fun to play around in, simple enough a 15 year old could work out how to make great animations and interactions but powerful enough to make whole games in and it was the experimentation that led to the creativity.

Kids these days have roblox to play with which looks like it's got the same type of creative tools so that experimentation is still going on in bedrooms and libraries but it's just being swamped by so much slop.

The people I have encountered who claim ai helps with creativity always seem to assume they are naturally “creative” but are held back by a lack of technical talent. Which is why they sometimes call actual artists “gatekeepers”.

I think this whole belief about ai helping people be creative comes from the belief that creativity and skill are separate things. But if you have ever tried to practice an art you would know they are part of the same whole. You can’t be a creative painter without understanding how to represent a perspective, or understanding how light and shadow interact, etc. You build those understandings through practice. There are no shortcuts.

That stuff was also way more common before the Internet got heavily monetized. People would build flash games just for fun. i.e. Newgrounds

Yeah but they can’t charge kids to doodle

The worse part is, all this slop is going to steal a whole future generations of their artistic voice. This is the point of course. To privatize flatten and centralize all creativity so nothing challenges the project of capital. Even local models are made in a way where everything defaults to a very standard style and discourse that aligns with the techbro overlords.

it's the revolution of the nostalgic boomers and millennials, unable to accept anything new and forever stuck on the old memberberries they loved so much.

Who has claimed AI is necessary for creativity?

But the creativity of those kids can't be turned into something capitalizable because most of them will spend their life doing 'unskilled' labor or having their creativity slowly destroyed by corporate work.