"Many artists who oppose gAI want to maintain an artist/creative class"

Ah yes one of the classes Marx wrote about, proletariat, bourgeoisie, artist.

My brother in christ PICK UP A FUCKING PENCIL

This would be better dunking material if people on hexbear didn't call you an ableist and classist for not supporting AI companies.

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.

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.

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.

Sure, NOW they see how foolish intellectual property is when it's done with artists.

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.

I fucking hate AI because it has put me on the side of fucking nerds who care about things like IP and plagiarism.

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.

Hot take: ai "art" doesnt actually stop you from making art yourself

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.