I have commented elsewhere that one of the hilarious ironies I have witnessed in this particular culture war battleground of AI art is the amount of fanart creators who hate on AI. People who have been guiltlessly ripping off the IP of major studios for decades are now sad that someone invented a DevientArt Machine, and they're mad that people might not buy $35 commissions of their "OC" My Little Pony character from them anymore. I don't actually mind fanart existing, nor do I mind them ripping off IP, but don't pretend that being anti-AI is at all logically consistent with that.
Another irony that gets forgotten is that art emerges through inequality. I read The Dawn of Everything recently and one uncomfortable truth that emerged was that great art traditions, like the Haida from the west coast of North America, can emerge from slave cultures.
Artists need to be freed from life-sustaining labour to be able to develop their skill and produce their works. This necessarily means that labour must be reproduced by others in the culture. All the gilded ages have produced a lot of gild on the backs of working people by the rich who have the surplus to sustain the creative class.
In essence we always have had a parasite class that eats our dreams and shits out beauty.
Full disclosure, I am one of the creative class that is sustained by this process.
Some fear that AI will cut out the creative class, to just smooth out the transaction. I don’t think it will, although it will make it harder for marginal creatives to live and favour the mediocrity of the trust fund kids.
If right-wingers relish at the prospect of telling left-leaning artists to ‘learn to code’, I have some bad news about the capabilities of LLMs. I am negative about AI art, but I agree that technically a lot of arguments being thrown around are terrible. But I can’t really argue myself out of my sense of horror before a possible human obsolescence though (not just for illustration gigs). I am very bothered by the gleeful cruelty of some on the pro AI side. And I think they wouldn’t be as casual about it if they were the ones becoming obsolete.
I have commented elsewhere that one of the hilarious ironies I have witnessed in this particular culture war battleground of AI art is the amount of fanart creators who hate on AI. People who have been guiltlessly ripping off the IP of major studios for decades are now sad that someone invented a DevientArt Machine, and they're mad that people might not buy $35 commissions of their "OC" My Little Pony character from them anymore. I don't actually mind fanart existing, nor do I mind them ripping off IP, but don't pretend that being anti-AI is at all logically consistent with that.
Another irony that gets forgotten is that art emerges through inequality. I read The Dawn of Everything recently and one uncomfortable truth that emerged was that great art traditions, like the Haida from the west coast of North America, can emerge from slave cultures.
Artists need to be freed from life-sustaining labour to be able to develop their skill and produce their works. This necessarily means that labour must be reproduced by others in the culture. All the gilded ages have produced a lot of gild on the backs of working people by the rich who have the surplus to sustain the creative class.
In essence we always have had a parasite class that eats our dreams and shits out beauty.
Full disclosure, I am one of the creative class that is sustained by this process.
Some fear that AI will cut out the creative class, to just smooth out the transaction. I don’t think it will, although it will make it harder for marginal creatives to live and favour the mediocrity of the trust fund kids.
If right-wingers relish at the prospect of telling left-leaning artists to ‘learn to code’, I have some bad news about the capabilities of LLMs. I am negative about AI art, but I agree that technically a lot of arguments being thrown around are terrible. But I can’t really argue myself out of my sense of horror before a possible human obsolescence though (not just for illustration gigs). I am very bothered by the gleeful cruelty of some on the pro AI side. And I think they wouldn’t be as casual about it if they were the ones becoming obsolete.
It uses too much energy and water.
I see the interesting contradiction between leftist ideology and AI art.
But you haven’t even touched on the centuries-long discussions on what Art is and/or has become. That’s a real shame.
It seems to me that you are working with an extremely dry conception of what Art is.
This article is a tragedy.