Hey there, sometimes I see people say that AI art is stealing real artists’ work, but I also saw someone say that AI doesn’t steal anything, does anyone know for sure? Also here’s a twitter thread by Marxist twitter user ‘Professional hog groomer’ talking about AI art: https://x.com/bidetmarxman/status/1905354832774324356
What people are really upset with is the way this technology is applied under capitalism. I see absolutely no problem with generative AI itself, and I’d argue that it can be a tool that allows more people to express themselves. People who argue against AI art tend to conflate the technical skill and the medium being used with the message being conveyed by the artist. You could apply same argument to somebody using a tool like Krita and claim it’s not real art because the person using it didn’t spend years learning how to paint using oils. It’s a nonsensical argument in my opinion.
Ultimately, the art is in the eye of the beholder. If somebody looks at a particular image and that image conveys something to them or resonates with them in some way, that’s what matters. How the image was generated doesn’t really matter in my opinion. You could make a comparison with photography here as well. A photographer doesn’t create the image that the camera captures, they have an eye for selecting scenes that are visually interesting. You can give a camera to a random person on the street, and they likely won’t produce anything you’d call art. Yet, you give the same camera to a professional and you’re going to get very different results.
Similarly, anybody can type some text into a prompt and produce some generic AI slop, but an artists would be able to produce an interesting image that conveys some message to the viewer. It’s also worth noting that workflows in tools like ComfyUI are getting fairly sophisticated, and go far beyond typing a prompt to get an image.
My personal view is that this tech will allow more people to express themselves, and the slop will look like slop regardless whether it’s made with AI or not. If anything, I’d argue that the barrier to making good looking images being lowered means that people will have to find new ways to make art expressive beyond just technical skill. This is similar to the way graphics in video games stopped being the defining characteristic. Often, it’s indie games with simple graphics that end up being far more interesting.
Comrade, I’ll have to disagree. I enjoy your posting a lot, but I’ll have to agree with comrade USSR Enjoyer.
How? I always see this argument, but I never see an explanation. Just how can it allow more people to express themselves?
Let’s look at the recent Ghibli AI filter debacle. What exactly in that trend is allowing people to better express themselves by using AI art? It is merely just another slop filter made popular. There’s nothing unique about it, it just shows that people like Ghibli, that’s it. It would be infinitely more expressive for people to pick up a pencil and draw it themselves, no matter their skill level, since it would have been made by a real person with their own intentions, vision and unique characteristics, even if it turned out bad.
What can a gen AI do that an artist can’t? In this specific use case you talked about, why would the artist want to do that in the first place? It doesn’t take into account the whole creative process involved in making an art piece, doesn’t take into account the fact that, for artists (from what I read), making it from scratch is in itself satisfying. It isn’t just about the final product, but about the whole artistic process. Of course this can vary from artist to artist, and there will be people that don’t enjoy the process itself, and only the final product of their creative labor, but that’s not the opinion I see from the majority of artists that are being impacted right now by gen AI.
I can totally see artists using very specific AI tools to automate parts of that creative process, but to automate creativity itself like what we are seeing right now? I can’t.
So, what purpose does gen AI serve? If the argument is about how it enables non-creatives to create, or about how it “democratizes” art, like I have seen tossed around by pro-gen AI people, wouldn’t advocating for the proper inclusion of art in schools be the correct approach? Making art is a skill like any other, and if it was properly taught since little, wouldn’t people be creating, drawing and painting all the time, also making gen AI not a necessity?
What we are seeing right now is capitalists fucking over artists, designers, and a bunch of other workers to save money. Coca-cola is already using AI generated videos for advertising here in Brasil (I don’t know about the rest of the world), alongside other big, medium and small brands.
I can see the use in text AI like ChatGPT and Deepseek, but not in gen AI to make art, and I’m yet to see a compelling argument in favor of it that doesn’t just fucks over artists that already were a struggling category of workers.
I suck at using tools with my hands but I’m great at imaging stuff. I can now make art that some peope like where before I was stuck because my nervous system suck…
That’s how.
That’s a good point, I can’t and won’t argue against the use of gen AI by disabled people. But I gotta ask, wouldn’t the development of tools that can help your specific disability mitigate the need for such AI tools?
Here’s a perfect example from this very server. Somebody made this meme using generative AI
They had an idea, and didn’t have the technical skills to draw it themselves. Using a generative model allowed them to make this meme which conveys the message they wanted to convey.
Another example I can give you is creating assets for games as seen with pixellab. For example, I’m decent at coding, but I have pretty very little artistic ability. I have game ideas where I can now easily add assets which was not easily accessible to me before. OmniSVG is a similar tool for creating vector graphics like icons. In my view, these are legitimate real world use cases for this tech.
You’re literally just complaining about the fact that people are having fun. Nobody is claiming that making Ghibli images is meaningful in any way, but if people get a chuckle out of it then there’s nothing wrong with that.
What can Krita do that an artist using oils canvas can’t? It’s the same kind of question. What AI does is make it faster and easier to do the manual labour of creating the image. It’s an automation tool.
Last I checked, different artists enjoy using different mediums. If somebody enjoys a particular part of the process there’s nobody stopping them from doing it. However, other people might be focusing on different things. Here is a write up from an artist on the subject https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/you-dont-hate-ai-you-hate-capitalism-1234717804/
What I see the artists actually becoming upset about is that they’re becoming proletarianized as has happened with pretty much every other industry.
I don’t think anybody is talking about automating creativity itself. It’s certainly not an argument I’ve made here.
Again, as I pointed out in my original comment, I think this line of argument conflates technical skill with vision. This isn’t exclusive to art by the way. For example, when programming languages were first invented, people claimed that it wasn’t real code unless you were writing assembly by hand. They similarly conflated the ardours task of learning assembly programming with it being “real programming”. In my view, the artists today are doing the exact same thing. They spent a lot of time and effort learning specific skills, and now those skills are becoming less relevant due to automation.
I’ll also come back to my example of oil paints. Do you apply the same logic to tools like Kirta, that if somebody uses these tools they’re not making real art, that they need to spend years learning how to do art in a particular medium? And if not, then where do you draw the line, at what point making the process easy all of a sudden stops being real art. This line of argument seems entirely arbitrary to me. If you see a picture and you don’t know how it was produced, but it feels evocative to you then does the medium matter?
That’s been happening long before AI, and nothing is fundamentally changing here. I don’t see what makes artists jobs special compared to all the other jobs where automation has been introduced. This is precisely what is being discussed in this excellent Red Sails article https://redsails.org/artisanal-intelligence/
The way to protect against this is by creating unions and labor power, not complaining about the fact that technology exists.
I don’t actually think there’s that much difference between visual and text AI here. For example, text models are now increasingly used for coding tasks, and there’s a similar kind of discussion happening in the developer community. Models are getting to the point where they can write real code that works, and they can save a lot of time. However, they don’t eliminate the need for a human. Similarly, the need for artists isn’t going to go away, there’s still going to be need for people to work with these models, who have artistic ability and vision. The nature of work will undoubtedly change, but artists aren’t going to go away.
Finally, it’s really important to note that regardless of how we feel about this tech, whether it is used or not will be driven entirely by the logic of capitalism. If companies think they can increase profits by using AI then they will use it. And the worst possible thing that could happen here is if this tech is only developed by corps in closed proprietary fashion. At that point the companies will control what kind of content people can generate with these models, how it’s used, where it can be displayed, and so on. They will fully own the means of production in this domain.
However, if this tech is developed in the open, then at least it’s available to everyone including independent artists. If this tech is going to be developed, and I can’t see what would prevent that, then it’s important to make sure it’s owned publicly.
There are other ways of doing that, like commissioning an artist or doing some basic editing using photos or collages to represent their point. AI is not the only way of doing this, and if that person resorted to the second example I gave, it would also make them learn a new skill that can be useful in a myriad of other situations for them in the future.
Except I’m not complaining about people having fun, I said it shows that people like Ghibli and that’s it. You were arguing that it lets people express themselves and I argued that there are more ways to express themselves better than that. Also, there is a problem if it is coming at the expense of the normalization of willfully giving way your data to these big tech companies to do that while also spitting at the face of artists.
What? Krita and oil canvas are two different mediums of art that do not necessarily compete and/or are in contrast with one another, each one have it’s own quirks and differences and require the person to be able to draw/paint. This is not comparable at all to gen AI.
They already were. The vast majority of artists can barely make a living out of their art. Those that can are a small minority, usually working at big companies, like in literally every other industry. And in some places like Japan, animators are treated like literal garbage, earning pennies for their hard work.
They are completely justified in being upset that they are further being thrown in the gutter by capitalism.
Gen AI as it is right now is fucking over artists hard and needs to be regulated asap.
I can’t argue about the programming part because I don’t have knowledge in that, and I already talked about different mediums. But this is not making the process easy, it is replacing the whole process, the skill is not learned, you cannot do it yourself, it’s a completely different situation.
Also, you completely ignored my question about how properly teaching the skill from childhood would completely change how we interact with art and would change how we view the necessity of gen AI.
I have this article opened in another tab, but I still have to read it, thanks for the link anyway, I appreciate it. I also opened the other one you linked and will read it.
I never argued that artists jobs are special, and I don’t think anyone is arguing that. At least I haven’t seen that. But that doesn’t mean we should simply accept that. We communists are on the side of the workers, and right now artists are the workers getting the short end of the stick, simple as. In our capitalistic world, these workers aren’t granted even the minimal dignity of being moved to another job, they are simply thrown out like garbage, and that is unacceptable.
That is an actual good argument, but I think there is a problem that is not being talked about in this case. There is already issues with developers having to spend time fixing AI spewed code. There are also issues with the alienation of artists having to fix AI spewed images instead of creating it themselves. And of course there is the issue of both of these workers being completely replaced in some cases.
I’m not arguing that this tech should go away, that’s not possible and it would just be Luddite behavior from me. I’m questioning it’s need and how it is intrinsically linked with how our current capitalist world and education works that can’t even teach us how to be creative and express that creativity by ourselves, generating the need for gen AI, which instead of automating the menial work, is automating creativity while we work ourselves to death.
I completely agree, but where in the world is it owned publicly right now? And it being open source is a step in the right direction, but it can still be abused by companies, in fact companies do that all the time. Right now I think the push for heavy regulation is a necessity.
Nobody is going to commission an artist to make a meme, and I really don’t see an issue of using AI in this context given that you’re not using it for profit. However, the fact that AI makes it very easy for anyone to do these things is precisely the point. It’s an automation tool that lowers the barrier for people wanting to express themselves. The fact that there are other ways to do this in no way detracts from the fact that this tech makes it easy for people to take an idea they have in their head and make it real.
I think people should be free to decide how they want to express themselves. Saying that people have to spend a lot of time learning how to draw so they can make a picture and they shouldn’t use a tool that can do the drawing for them is just gatekeeping.
You can run models locally, and you don’t have to give anything to big tech companies. There are plenty of open stable diffusion models available nowadays.
I’m not really following why it’s not comparable to gen AI. You can make oil painting style effects using Krita, and it’s much easier to master that than actual oil painting. AI is just another medium that further automates the effort involved in producing the desired effects in the image.
AI is not going to be regulated because capitalists see it as a source of profit, that’s really the short of it. The only thing that can happen is that artists start unionizing and doing collective bargaining. In my opinion, that’s where the discussion needs to be focused. It’s not about begging the oligarchs to restrain themselves, it’s about workers talking to each other and organizing.
Simply typing a text prompt has incredibly limited utility and gives you pretty much no control over what’s generated. Meanwhile, tools like comfyui are quite sophisticated and there is a learning curve to using them effectively. Using such a tool still requires skill, it’s just a different skill from a traditional tool like Krita.
The reality is that you can only learn so many skills in your lifetime, and different people have aptitudes for different kinds of skills. Some people enjoy drawing, other people enjoy writing, yet others enjoy solving math problems, and so on. If gen AI allows people to produce an image they wanted to create without having aptitude or training, then I don’t see a problem with that. The tech is simply lowering the barrier so that more people are able to take ideas in their heads and share them with others.
As communists we shouldn’t engage in wistful thinking. We have to engage with reality as it is, and create effective strategies for improving our conditions. When new technology, such as gen AI, is developed then we have to be realistic about how it will be applied. The discussion has to focus on what effective strategies workers can use to mitigate negative impacts of this tech.
Two things I can think of are ensuring that this tech is developed in the open and accessible to everyone, and for workers to organize and to do collective bargaining. This has been the case with every technological advancement, and gen AI is not any different in that regard.
I agree, this is a disruptive technology and it is changing the nature of work in many domains. There are always negative aspects associated with any new technology such as this.
I disagree taht AI automates creativity. Generic images people produce with simple text prompts are boring in nature, and the novelty is already wearing off. I’d argue that the fact that it’s very easy to create a generic looking image simply means that people will be finding new ways to express themselves. Incidentally, a lot of very similar debate happened when photography was invented. People made almost identical arguments that art was dead because you could just take a picture with a camera. Yet, today photography has become its own art form, and traditional art is far from dead.
Models that have open source licenses and can be run locally are what I’d consider to be publicly owned. Corporations will use these models as well, but not much can be done about that. This is exactly what’s been happening with open source code for many years now. Corps freeload on it and save billions while contributing practically nothing back. That’s just a general problem of living under capitalism.
Personally, I’m very skeptical that any sort of heavy regulation would happen here. The reality is that the capitalists are the ruling class, and they will have disproportionate influence over what laws and regulations are passed. I think the real push should be for unionization within the art community. These tools will require human workers to operate them, and the one power workers have under capitalism is in collective bargaining.
Yes, because in a heavily individualized society people don’t care about other people’s labor.
Sure, but the current iteration of gen AI is only possible with the stolen labor of thousands of artists that never consented to their work being used by big techs to train these AI models, which not only copies their unique artstyles, but contribute to them being laid off the working force.
I’m not gatekeeping. I’m not saying they should do it one way or the other, I don’t have the power to do that, lol. I can still point out that I believe doing it yourself is much more expressive than using a image generating machine to do it, and I truly believe that.
Keyword CAN. The reality is that the vast majority of people are not computer literate enough and don’t know how/have the time to do that, so they will just use the online tools available, ChatGPT for example, to generate whatever they want, giving way their real information, likeness and whatever else the machine needs, to these big data centers controlled by a bunch of tech capitalist pigs.
A drawing in Krita cannot be sold and/or presented in an oil canvas because it was never made in that, it is a digital artpiece, of course you can print it, but it’s not the same thing. I’m not an artist so I cannot say that doing X or Y is easier than Z, and as far as I know, these oil effects will not behave like real life oil painting, creating different challenges, but traditional art has not been replaced by digital art, they both coexist, and even if it was, the traditional artist could easily transition to digital art and vice-versa since their skill sets transfer from one another, the same cannot be said for a gen AI user that does not know how to draw/paint, unless that person already had that skill set before.
Yes, that’s precisely what I’m advocating for when I say about regulation, I should have been more precise in what I mean. And in fact, here in Brasil that is already happening, like the collective UNIDAD.
I did not know about such tool and will take a look into it to inform myself when I have time.
Even if people have aptitudes for different kinds of skills, drawing is not a 7-headed monster of a skill, nor does it require you to keep practicing to perfection, that is only done by people that want to do that. There is a myriad of skill levels and if taught from little, people would be able to express themselves in yet another way that would change how we see and interact with the world around us. The same goes for the other artistic skills you also mentioned.
I’m not engaging in wishful thinking, I’m stating a simple fact. Right now artists are being heavily fucked over by having their unpaid labor being used to train the same tools that are replacing them and throwing them in the gutter. I already linked to UNIDAD, so I believe the rest of this is already answered.
That being said, I think it’s important to listen to what these workers have to say, their struggles, concerns and what the general public perception of their struggle is, and I believe this post on Instagram by Groselha_Atômica, a Brazilian communist artist is a good place to look at. A lot of comments are either offensive or just shitty towards artists in general, and that matches the public perception I have been seeing on other places too, it’s a big fuck you to artists with no or very little empathy for them, a clear reflection of our capitalistic society.
The moment we stop learning how to do these things and simply start generating it, we are automating creativity. There is already a bunch of AI generated books flooding stores like Amazon, is that not automating creativity? Also, I’m not seeing the novelty wearing off, in fact I see the opposite, AI art is here to stay and is already plaguing the internet. Some time ago people started to notice that some searches would return a wall of generated art in Google that’s good enough to fool most people and whatever it generates that is incorrect won’t be noticed by most people, but will impact others, it is dystopic as fuck. We should be automating work to free the labor force so that we can pursue our own hobbies and interests, instead we are stuck in a capitalistic hellscape that is doing the exact opposite.
I hope that is the case with gen AI, but I don’t see how it is like when photography was invented. I can see the parallel, but not the end result like that. A photo is a moment of reality frozen in time, and while it’s invention heavily diminished the need for photo-realistic drawings/paintings, it didn’t and couldn’t replace art because of it’s myriad of forms and expressions, nor did it make these photo-realistic drawings/paintings less impressive. The same cannot be said about AI art, since it can completely replace the artist, designer, writer, etc.
You realize that you’re arguing for doing labor for the sake of labor here. You’re saying that a task that can be automated should not be automated in order to preserve the need for human labor. This is not a Marxist position.
Yes, models are trained on existing art just the same way human artists train on work of others. However, I don’t see any more problem with this happening in non profit context than somebody making a fanfic or emulating a style of the artist they like. The only issue is in the context of companies using models trained on work of artists to create profit for themselves. That issue is entirely separate from individual people using these models to create things for their enjoyment. And companies will continue do this regardless of whether people use models for non commercial purposes or not.
Sure, that’s your opinion but it’s grounded in your biases that art has to be difficult to produce to be real art.
Seems like that’s an argument to embrace using this tech outside big tech companies, and to make it more accessible. Rejecting use of this tech leads precisely to the problem you’re outlining here.
Same applies to AI generated art. It’s a different and distinct medium.
I entirely disagree. AI does not replace traditional art, and there will always be demand for art created by humans. And artists absolutely can transition their skills to use tools like comfyui if they want to. The skill being that of developing an intuition for visually interesting scenes, lighting, composition, storytelling, and so on. Again, it’s exactly the same set of skills that photographers use.
That’s good to see and I think that’s exactly the right direction to move in.
I don’t think that’s at odds with generative AI though. People still can and should learn about art. The fact that AI makes certain aspects of producing art easier, doesn’t remove the skill involved in understanding art.
I think that underscores the need for artists to communicate the value of their skills better and frame it in the context of this new technology existing. We both agree that this tech isn’t going away, and artists complaining about it ends up coming across as whinging. It’s far better for artists to focus on what they would be able to do using this tech and why they’re not obsolete in face of it.
Again, I think you’re conflating the skill of understanding what makes a scene interesting and visually appealing with the technical skill of producing it. I will continue to bring up photography here.
It’s not, and having used language models extensively, it becomes very easy to spot AI generated text. It’s not creative in the slightest.
If a person can’t tell the difference and the image is meaningful to them, why does it matter how the image is produced?
Right, nobody is arguing that technology is not used for social benefit under capitalism. That’s the root problem here, and we all agree that capitalism needs to go.
I don’t think it can because ultimately it’s the human who ends up coming up with the idea for what they want the AI to generate and the vision. Therefore, you still need people with a good intuition for what makes an interesting image. This intuition is developed by studying things like composition, lighting, color theory, and so on.
Not what I’m saying. I never said that it should not be automated, rather I gave other options that I believe should take precedent, specially because these workers still exist today and still struggle today, and it is undeniable that such an individualistic society atomizes us and creates the contempt people have for artists and their labor. Not only that, but this take completely ignores that the current genAI models all use unpaid labor of artists that didn’t consent to their work being used to train these models. It is completely unethical to continue to use them as it is right now, I do not fault artists for being against them, and I stand at their side in this issue.
I would still prefer to consume human made art on a personal level, but that’s just me.
You need to prove these are analogous to each other. The human brain and the machine model used are not the same, does not work the same, does not “learn” the same way, does not derive information and form connections the same way. To compare both is not fair. A human have agency, a machine don’t. One can choose to deliberately do something, the other is just a prompt that spews out whatever was requested.
Besides, I don’t think this argument holds water when you also take into account the multitude of other knowledge and lived experience that can and will inevitably influence someone’s artwork, something that cannot be true of a machine.
In my eyes human made art, again, irrespective of skill level, is in general much more unique and expressive because of this.
I agree that the issue is the companies using it. But as I said before, I believe there is an ethical problem right now that directly affect artists worldwide with these models that everyone can use that needs to be brought into attention. With other workers ignoring the issues raised by artists and even going the path of hostility like I already demonstrated does not help and further alienate and fracture the working class.
It has nothing to do with difficult level and I never claimed AI art is not real art, don’t put words into my mouth. My opinion is that human made art is much more unique and expressive than genAI, again, IRRESPECTIVE of skill level.
Why are only artists in the wrong here? When other workers are literally hostile to their concerns, discussions and pleas, it is not framed as an issue. I get what you’re saying, but this just comes across as throwing them under the bus. Artists are not happy that their unpaid labor is being used without consent, and therefore refuse to use the tools that currently exist that way. Of course, this is not to say that there aren’t Luddite artists, I have seen some, but this is completely ignoring the issue at hand. It’s ill-informed at best. We should be pushing against these tools in their current super exploitative form until they are regulated to take all these issues into account, like UNIDAD is doing.
It is easy to you that have used them extensively, what about the general populace? I completely agree that it is not creative, but right now you’re the one agreeing with I have been saying here.
I agree, but it does pose a new issue. Humans can subvert the message while producing the corporate mandated slop, the machine can’t for it has no thinking nor will.
That’s not what I’m referring to on that, to quote commenter Arachno_Stalinist:
“Another issue I find with AI art/images is just how spammy they are. Sometimes I search for references to use for drawing (oftentimes various historical armors because I’m a massive nerd) as a hobby, only to be flooded with AI slop, which doesn’t even get the details right pretty much all the time.”
I think you can see how this is a problem for anyone that needs to do research online.
You are literally saying that work should be done manually for the sake of preserving jobs here. Meanwhile, automation has very little to do with society being individualistic.
I don’t think I’ve argued against people’s personal preferences one way or the other here.
I don’t think any of that changes the fundamentals of what’s happening. People do learn through repetition, and we understand enough regarding how the brain works to know that reinforcement training strengthens certain neural pathways that allow us to become better at doing tasks we practice doing.
I’ve repeated this many times in this thread, and I will repeat it once again here. The AI is a tool that humans use, it’s not an independent volitional agent.
You’re once again conflating a tool and the medium with what an artist actually does. I’ve repeated this many times, and you’ve always ignored this point.
The value of what an artist does lies beyond mere technical ability. What really matters is their vision and the idea they’re trying to convey, not the medium being used. The AI is just a tool that a human uses to convey the idea they have to others.
Except, nobody is saying that problems created by artists by new technology should be ignored. What’s being said is that there needs to be realistic and constructive discussion regarding these problems instead of reactionary takes on this technology.
All art is human made art. The AI is a tool a human uses. You continue to refuse to engage with this key point. The AI has no volition of its own. A human uses this tool to create the imagery they want to create and share with other people. The art is not created by AI, it is created by the human using this tool.
As far as I can tell, the reason you claim this isn’t real art is because the tool takes care of all the technical aspects of producing the image.
I never made this argument. In fact, I’ve pointed out how other fields, such as my own, have very much similar concerns and similar discussions are happening within them.
I don’t see how acknowledging the reality of the situation and saying that artists need better messaging is throwing artists under the bus.
Pushing against these tools is a quixotic endeavour. As you’ve admitted yourself, this tech won’t go away no matter how much people complain about it. Pushing for regulation of these tools is great, but it’s highly doubtful that any sort of regulation that cuts into business profits would be tolerated.
You’ve also completely ignored my point that ignoring this technology only ensures that it ends up being developed in a proprietary fashion which will make the situation worse.
My point remains entirely consistent here. AI itself is a tool, creativity does not come from the tool itself, it comes from the human trying to convey something to other humans. The tool merely makes this easier for more people to express themselves.
AI generated slop is not creative precisely because there is no thinking behind it, and no depths. That’s what makes it slop. However, somebody using these same tools with a clear idea they want to convey is not slop.
Humans using a tool can produce whatever they want. The real question is who controls this tool. Your concern directly supports my argument here. If these tools are controlled by corporations then it will be corporations who decide what sort of content is produced. If people reject using these tools and open development stops, then all we will see will be corporate mandated slop. I think we can both agree this is not a desirable situation.
This is a whole separate issue, and there should be a discussion on how to curate things such as historical content. This is a whole separate topic of discussion however.
It appears some artisans who consider themselves marxist want to claim exception for themselves: that the mechanisation and automation of production by capital, through the development of technology, in attempt to maintain the falling rate of production can apply to everyone else but not them - when it happens to them then apparently the technology itself is the problem.
That’s exactly what all the AI hate is about.
When I checked this thread, I felt that I was having a peek to 19th century England where Luddism was taking hold against the new tech at that time. Interesting how they deflect blame from the capitalists into the technology.
Honestly, I wasn’t expecting that.
It’s kind of bizarre seeing this happening on a Marxist forum to be honest.
Sorry, comrade, but all your pro-“AI” takes keep making me lose respect for you.
AI is entirely designed to take from human beings the creative forms of labor that give us dignity, happiness, human connectivity and cultural development. That it exists at all cannot be separated from the capitalist forces that have created it. There is no reality that exists outside the context of of capitalism where this would exist. In some kind of post-capitalist utopian fantasy, creativity would not need to be farmed at obscene industrial levels and human beings would create art as a means of natural human expression, rather than an expression of market forces.
There is no better way to describe the creation of these generative models than unprecidented levels of industrial capitalist theft that circumvents all laws that were intended to prevent capitalist theft of creative work. There is no version of this that exists without mass theft, or convincing people to give up their work to the slop machine for next to nothing.
LLMs vacuum up all traces of human thought, communication, interaction, creativity to produce something that is distinctly non-human – an entity that has no rights; makes no demands; has no dignity; has no ethical capacity to refuse commands; and exists entirely to replace forms of labor which were only previously considered to be exclusively in the domain of human intelligence*.
The theft is a one-way hash of all recorded creative work, where attribution becomes impossible in the final model. I know decades of my own ethical FOSS work (to which I am fully ideologically committed) have been fed into these machines and are now being used to freely generate closed-sourced and unethical, exploitative code. I have no control of how the derived code is transfigured or what it is used for, despite the original license conditions.
This form of theft is so widespread and anonymized through botnets that it’s almost impossible to track, and manifests itself as a brutal pandora’s box attack on internet infrastructure on everything from personal websites, to open-source code repositories, to artwork and image hosts. There will never be accountability for this, even though we know which companies are selling the models, and the rest of us are forced to bear the cost. This follows the typical capitalist method of “socialize the cost, privatize the profit.”* The general defense against these AI scouring botnets is to get behind the Cloudflare (and similar) honeypot mafias, which invalidate whatever security TLS was supposed to give users; and at the same time offers no guarantee whatsoever that the content won’t be stolen, create even dependency on US owned (read: fully CIA backdoored) internet infrastructure, and extra costs/complexity just to alleviate some of the stress these fucking thieves put on our own machines.
These LLMs are not only built from the act of theft, but they are exclusively owned and controlled by capital to be sold as “products” at various endpoints. The billions of dollars going into this bullshit are not publicly owned or social investments, they are rapidly expanding monopoly capitalism. There is no realistic possibility of proletarianization of these existing “AI” frameworks in the context of our current social development.
LLMs are extremely inefficient and require more training input than a human child to produce an equivalent amount of learning. Humans are better at doing things that are distinctly human than machines are at emulating it. An the output “generative AI” produces is also inefficient, indicating and reinforcing inferior learning potential compared to humans. The technofash consensus is just that the models need more “training data”. But when you feed the output of LLMs into training models, the output the model produces becomes worse to the point of insane garbage. This means that for AI/LLMs to improve, they need a constant expansion of consumption of human expression. These models need to actively feed off of us in order to exist, and they ultimately exist to replace our labor.
These “AI” implementations are all biased in favor of the class interests which own and control them :surprised-pikachu: Already, the qualitative output of “AI” is often grossly incorrect, rote, inane and absurd. But on top of that, the most inauthentic part of these systems are the boundaries, which are selectively placed on them to return specific responses. In the event that this means you cannot generate a sexually explicit images or video of someone/something without consent, sure, that’s a minimum threshold that should be upheld, but because the overriding capitalist class interests in sexual exploitation we cannot reasonably expect those boundaries to be upheld. What’s more concerning is the increase in capacity to manipulate, deceive and feed misinformation to people as objective truth. And this increased capacity for misinformation and control is being forcefully inserted into every corner of our lives we don’t have total dominion over. That’s not a tool, it’s fucking hegemony.
The energy cost is immense. A common metric for the energy cost of using AI is how much ocean water is boiled to create immaterial slop. The cost of datacenters is already bad, most of which do not need to exist. Few things that massively drive global warming and climate change need to exist less than datacenters for shitcoin and AI (both of which have faux-left variations that get promoted around here). Microsoft, one of the largest and most unethical capital formations on earth, is re-opening Three Mile Island, the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters
everso far, as a private power plant, just to power dogshit “AI” gimmicks that are being forced on people through their existing monopolies. A little off-topic: Friendly reminder to everyone that even the “most advanced nuclear waste containment vessels ever created” still leak, as evidenced by the repeatedly failed cleanup attempts of the Hanford NPP in the US (which was secretly used to mass-produce material for US nuclear weapons with almost no regard to safety or containment.) There is no safe form of nuclear waste containment, it’s just an extremely dangerous can being kicked down the road. Even if it were, re-activating private nuclear plants that previously had meltdowns just so bing can give you incorrect, contradictory, biased and meandering answers to questions which already had existing frameworks is not a thing to be celebrated, no matter how much of an proponent of nuclear energy we might be. Even of these things were ran on 100% greeen, carbon neutral energy souces, we do not have anything close to a surplus of that type of energy and every watt-hour of actual green energy should be replacing real dependencies, rather than massively expanding new ones.As I suggest in earlier points, there is the issue with generative “AI” not only lacking any moral foundation, but lacking any capacity for ethical judgement of given tasks. This has a lot of implications, but I’ll focus on software since that’s in one of my domains of expertise and something we all need to care a lot more about. One of the biggest problems we have in the software industry is how totally corrupt its ethics are. The largest mass-surveillance systems ever known to humankind are built by technofascists and those who fear the lash of refusing to obey their orders. It vexes me that the code to make ride-sharing apps even more expensive when your phone battery is low, preying on your desperation, was written and signed-off on by human beings. My whole life I’ve taken immovable stands against any form of code that could be used to exploit users in any way, especially privacy. Most software is malicious and/or doesn’t need to exist. Any software that has value must be completely transparent and fit within an ethical framework that protects people from abuse and exploitation. I simply will not perform any part of a task if it undermines privacy, security, trust, or in any way undermines proletarian class interests. Nor will I work for anyone with a history of such abuse. Sometimes that means organizing and educating other people on the project. Sometimes it means shutting the project down. Mostly it means difficult staying employed. Conversely, “AI” code generation will never refuse its true masters. It will never organize a walkout. It will never raise ethical objections to the tasks it’s given. “AI” will never be held morally responsible for firing a gun on a sniper drone, nor can “AI” be meaningfully held responsible for writing the “AI” code that the sniper drone runs. Real human beings with class consciousness are the only line of defense between the depraved will of capital and that will being done. Dumb as it might sound, software is one such frontline we should be gaining on, not giving up.
I could go on for days on. AI is the most prominent form of enshittification we’ve experienced so far.
I think this person makes some very good points that mirror some of my own analysis and I recommend everyone watch it.
I appreciate and respect much of what you do. At the risk of getting banned: I really hate watching you promote AI as much as you do here; it’s repulsive to me. The epoch of “Generative AI” is an act of class warfare on us. It exists to undermine the labour-value of human creativity. I don’t think the “it’s personally fun/useful for me” holds up at all to a Marxist analysis of its cost to our class interests.
I very much agree with what you’re saying here and I appreciate you saying it, I especially agree that the technology is fundamentally inseparable from the capitalists that created it, and it would not be able to exist in its current form (or any form that’s even remotely as “useful”) without the levels of theft that were involved in its creation
And it’s not just problematic in the concepts of ethics or “intellectual property” either, but in how the process of scraping the web for content to train their models with is effectively a huge botnet DDoSing the internet, I have friends who have had to spend rather large amounts of time and effort to prevent these scrapers from inadvertently bringing down their websites entirely, and have heard of plenty of other people and organizations with the same problem
I have to assume that at least some of the people here defending its development and usage just plain aren’t aware of the externalities that are inherent to the technology, because I don’t understand how one can be so positive about it otherwise, because again, the tech largely can’t exist without these externalities unless you’re either making a fundamentally different technology or working under an economic system that currently doesn’t exist
To be honest, a lot of the arguments in general in this thread strike me as being out of touch with the people facing the negative consequences of this technology’s adoption, with some people being downright hostile towards anyone with even the slightest criticism of the tech, even if they have a point, I think a lot of this is driven by how there doesn’t seem to be very many artists on this site, and how insular this community tends to be (not inherently a bad thing, but means we’re not always going to have the full perspective on every topic)
There’s other criticisms I can make of the genAI boom (such as how, despite the “gatekeeping” accusations over “tools to make things easier”, artists generally approve of helpful tools, but genAI creators are largely working against such tools because they want to make everything generalized enough to replace the humans themselves), but I only have so much energy to spend on detailed comments
It’s the same for reddit or anywhere else; terminally online slop piggies bend over backwards to ignore the realities of a thing they like. This place was pretty hostile to crytpocurrency but then Russia started floating BRICScoin and there was a near-total reversal on all criticisms and the mental gymnastics began.
I feel ya. It is disappointing to see, but I enjoy the real world too much to want to get drawn into hypothetical bullshit arguments all day with tech-pilled, terminally online debatebros. Maybe it’s a sign of good mental health to not want to invest your energy into obvious dead ends.
Except that’s not true at all. AI exists outside as open source and completely outside capitalism, it’s also developed in countries like China and is being applied primarily applied to socially useful purposes.
Again, the problem is entirely with capitalism here. Outside capitalism I see no reason for things like copyrights and intellectual property which makes the whole argument moot.
It’s a tool that humans use.
The theft arguments have nothing to do with the technology itself.
That’s also false at this point. LLMs have become far more efficient in just a short time, and models that required data centers to run can now be run on laptops. The efficiency aspect has already improved by orders of magnitude, and it’s only going to continue improving going forward.
That’s really an argument for why this tech should be developed outside western corps.
That’s hasn’t been true for a while now:
Again, it’s a tool, any moral foundation would have to come from the human using the tool.
You appear to be conflating AI with capitalism, and it’s important to separate these things. I encourage you to look at how this tech is being applied in China today, to see the potential it has outside the capitalist system.
The Marxist analysis isn’t that “it’s personally fun/useful for me”, it’s what this article outlines https://redsails.org/artisanal-intelligence/
Finally, no matter how much you hate this tech, it’s not going away. It’s far more constructive to focus the discussion on how it will be developed going forward and who will control it.
It is true. Those are the conditions and reason for the creation of AI artwork as it materially exists.
Specifically, generative “AI” art models, are created and funded by huge capital formations that exploit legal loopholes with fake universities, illicit botnets, and backroom deals with big tech to circumvent existing protections for artists. That’s the material reality of where this comes from. The models themselves are are a black market.
I stan the PRC and the CPC. But China is not a post-capitalist society. It’s in a stage of development that constrains capital, and that’s a big monster to wrestle with. China is a big place and has plenty of problems and bad actors, and it’s the CPC’s job to keep them in line as best they can. It’s a process. It’s not inherent that all things that presently exist in such a gigantic country are anti-capitalist by nature. Citing “it exists in China” is not an argument.
And outside capitalism, creative workers don’t have to sell their labor just to survive… Are we just doing bullshit utopianism now?
This exists to replace creative labor. That ship has already sailed. That’s the reality you’re in now. There’s a distinction between a hammer and factory automation that relies on millions of workers to involuntarily train it in order to replace them.
Here I was thinking capitalism just began a week ago. I guess AI slop machines causing people material harm is cool then.
Seems like you should understand the difference between running a model vs. training a model. And the cost of the infinite cycle of vacuuming up more new data and retraining that’s necessary for these things to significantly exist.
Okay, but that’s not how and why these things to exist in our present reality. If there were unicorns, I’d like to ride one.
Again, for workers, there’s a difference between a tool and a body replacement. The language marketing generative AI as tools is just there to keep you docile.
If this “tool” does replace work previously done by human beings (spoiler: it does), then the capacity for ethical objection to being given an unethical task is completely lost, vs. a human employee, who at least has a capacity to refuse, organize a walkout, or secretly blow the whistle. A human must at least be coerced to do something they find objectionable. Bosses are not alone in being responsible for delegating unethical tasks, those that perform those tasks share a disgrace, if not crime. Reducing the human moral complicity to an order of one is not a good thing.
It will go away when the earth becomes uninhabitable, which inches ever closer with every pile of worthless, inartistic slop the little piggies ask for. I guess people could reject this thing, but that would take some kind of revolution and who has time for that.
Its not just that you’re constantly embracing generative AI, but you’re arguing against all of it’s critiques and ignoring the pain of those that are intentionally harmed in the real world.
Those are not the conditions for open source models which are developed outside corporate influence.
There is nothing unique here, capitalists already hold property rights on most creative work. If anything, open models are democratizing this wealth of art and making it available to regular people. It’s kind of weird to cheer own for copyrights and corporate ownership here.
What I actually cited is that there are plenty of concrete examples of AI being applied in socially useful ways in China. This is demonstrably true. China is using AI everywhere from industry, to robotics, to healthcare, to infrastructure management, and many other areas where it has clear positive social impact.
So at this point you’re arguing against automation in general, that’s a fundamentally reactionary and anti-Marxist position.
Yes, it’s a form of automation. It’s a way to develop productive forces. This is precisely what the Red Sails article on artisanal intelligence addresses.
AI is a form of automation, and Marxists see automation as a tool for developing productive forces. You can apply this logic of yours to literally any piece of technology and claim that it’s taking jobs away by automating them.
Training models is a one time endeavor, while running them is something that happens constantly. However, even in terms of training, the new approaches are far more efficient. DeepSeek managed to train their model at a cost of only 6 million, while OpenAI training cost hundreds of millions. Furthermore, once model is trained, it can be tuned and updated with methods like LoRA, so full expensive retraining is not required to extend their capabilities.
So, you’re arguing that technological progress should just stop until capitalism is abolished or what exactly?
It’s just automation, there’s no fundamental difference here. Are you going to argue that fully automated dark factories in China are also bad because they’re replacing human labor?
We have plenty of evidence that humans will do heinous things voluntarily without any coercion being required. This is not a serious argument.
This has absolutely nothing to do with AI. You’re once again projecting social problems of how society is organized onto technology.
I’m arguing against false narratives that divert attention of the root problems, and that aren’t constructive in nature.
I’m not “cheering for corporate ownership” here by any stretch of the imagination. The exact opposite, actually. But if you’re just going to rely on hypotheticals and bad faith, then I’m done wasting my time on anything you have to say.
Little unsolicited advice: You’re way too online and it shows; and that’s never good for your mental health. Take some time off from being an epicbacon poster.
Personal attacks really underscore the quality of your character.
Comrade, I disagree with your points and agree with the comrade who answered before you. What he is saying is that a LLM, as technology, is not bad per se. The problem is that in the context of capitalism, it does steal from other artists to create another commodity that is exchanged without any contribution to the authors whose art have been used to feed the LLM models.
That said, any new commodity in capitalism will be a product of exploitation, and this does not exclude any forms of art. Remember that big companies like Marvel and DC used steal its employees’ intellectual property, long before even digital art existed. Many important artists lived in squalor while their works became high priced commodities after their death. Fast forward today, LLMs are another commodity built for the sake of exploiting people’s labor, in a different way, but still following the same logic of capitalism.
I already made my points, but again, there is no other material context under which this this exists.
Does its existence materially hurt people who sell creative forms of their labor? Yes.
Was it designed for that purpose? Yes.
Does it uselessly harm our biosphere? It’s at least as bad as shitcoin, probably worse.
Is the slop spigot of synthetic inhuman garbage for mindless consumption worth the alienation of taking human creativity away from human beings, so the little fucking piggies can get exactly what they think they want (but not really)?