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It’s pretty weird to see self-described leftists pearl clutching about technology while you’re out here churning out effective agitprop. I guess you’re supposed to spend multiple hours of labor for every meme? Can’t utilize dead labor since it’s a product of capitalism.
Too worried about the aesthetics of free-range, artisanal consumption.
is it effective agitprop?
who is this for, what is the message, and why would it be persuasive? Is the core message easily digestible for the target audience?
Effective is subjective and entirely beside the point, which is that a few terminally online people are obsessed with the fact that technology gets used in production. I don’t give a fuck whether you like this specific post or not, Yogthos is prolific in sharing news, information, and agitprop.
But sure, this specific example is fine. It’s a famous poem that’s frequently put on posters. It resonates with people for a reason.
Iconography featuring diverse, hopeful workers has been a mainstay of agitprop for over a century. Showing Lenin as a badass is always cool. A lot of people like the comic book style.
I highly doubt anyone would have a problem with this if it were laboriously hand-drawn.
I agree with you on the AI part for agitprop & that comrade Yogthos contributes greatly to the community.
I also agree that this piece being produced changes pretty much nothing materially about the world. It’s not resource intensive to produce a single image.
Please do not see my questions as an attack, I really just wanted to ask what others got out of the image and where they think this would resonate with people. I would like to produce more agitprop myself, and this image misses the mark for me so I wanted to know what I was missing.
Totally get that I’m probably catching strays because of the general vibe of this thread but I do want to engage respectfully.
That’s fair lol, hard to read tone
Sorry, no, not gonna unironically treat mass produced slop like it’s valid as art. That’s how we got Marvel movies.
Marvel movies are art though. They are very effective bourgeoisie art in selling the idea of militaristic intervention as necessary to “destroy evil”, simplifying the world into good and evil, getting you to side with imperialism and view it as individuals who are making tough moral choices rather than consciously exploitative systems of power, and all of this while making it a quippy spectacle. That they tend to be formulaic, shallow, and repetitive doesn’t change this fact. They are good at what they are trying to be. Some people just really despise what they are trying to be and for good reason.
Reminds me of
"The democratic-bureaucratic system has given rise to a great mass of functions which are not all justified by the social necessities of production, though they are justified by the political necessities of the dominant fundamental group. Hence Loria’s[13] conception of the unproductive “worker” (but unproductive in relation to whom and to what mode of production?), a conception which could in part be justified if one takes account of the fact that these masses exploit their position to take for themselves a large cut out of the national income. "
-Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, “The intellectuals.”
Gramsci can be quite thought provoking but sometimes one has to undo the western marxist baggage (though that is not necessarily applicable here).
Honestly im shocked Gramsci is popular with bourgeois socialist types. I mean, I really can’t see how you could apply most, if not all, of his ideas without being not only a Marxist, but a Leninist too.
Honestly im shocked Gramsci is popular with bourgeois socialist types.
His work has often been re-interpreted to put undue weight on the superstructure over the base, to emphasise the idea over the material, which dovetails nicely into nullification of praxis and denigration of actual existing socialism. It is maybe best exemplified by Western Marxists, who having failed to develop proletetiat revolution in the imperial cores resolved to intellectual naval gazing.
because the bourgeois socialists are of the intellectual class, and they love post-marxist postmodern yapping, neo-machianism, new critism, and whatever Lacanian freudian incest pathology they come up with.
Yeah like making captain AMERICA a symbol for the world (while wearing the us flag mind you) or like promoting assimilation of the formerly enslaved population of the usa into their enslaver nation - they literally had entire series which touches on it “yes the us did bad but now its better!”
That they tend to be formulaic, shallow, and repetitive does change this fact. Have you not noticed the increasing drop off in interest since Endgame? Even before that movies were either hit or miss with whether or not the audience was willing to tolerate the specific slop Disney was selling them. General consensus seems to be people are getting sick of Marvel slop - which is perfectly understandable since it’s slop, not art.
You’re confusing propaganda for art when they are not the same things. They can be if the creators in question are talented enough, but they are not inherently the same thing by default. Propaganda can be effective without being of good quality (up to a point).
General consensus seems to be people are getting sick of Marvel slop
Do you have any data to back this up or just “seems to be”? Cause companies typically don’t keep producing stuff that doesn’t sell. That some people are “sick of it” is no surprise, but it’s important to make sure we’re not confusing strong feelings about a thing with mass representation in opinions about it, i.e. if 5 of a 100 people are really super disgusted with Marvel but another 50 out of a 100 keeps showing up for it, that 5 is not the consensus, no matter how loud they are about it.
It could be Marvel is on a significant downward trend. It would be hard for anything that long-running to not be on some kind of downward trend. But is it on a downward trend because people evaluate it as “slop” or for other reasons? The imperial core itself is on a kind of downward trend, depending on how you look at it. It’d make a kind of sense if repetitive imperialist propaganda is losing some of its appeal.
“Slop” itself is becoming a kind of “slop” at this point as language. It’s kind of tiring seeing it repeated over and over, as if it’s some kind of magic word to show how valueless a thing is. What even is “slop”? What are the characteristics of a Marvel movie that make it that? What are the characteristics of generative AI that make it that? There is a certain irony in reactive hatred of generative AI claiming an inherent valuelessness resulting from handing off production of artisanal works to a computer and then turning around and handing off production of their analysis of the situation to vague, ill-defined buzzwords.
It’s interesting when asked to explain the sentiment of denigrating the technology of AI rather than just attacking the capitalism (which we should clarify is always a relationship not technology itself) people often end up having to resort to Nietchzean takes; the exaltation of the artist, preferred artistry, and those with discerning tastes against the unwashed masses; and then claim that is pro–worker - the tastes of the non-artisanal worker is immaterial compared to the ubermensch artiste.
We, as marxists, when doing the above should educate ourselves why the above is reactionary, and really double down on truly learning dialectical materialism.
There are too many in the western marxist tradition who are marxist because its like the “hidden gem” corner coffeshop of “ideologies” or because its “provocative” - so it becomes abstracted as a matter of social prestige capital (“I am the most morally forthright” “I believe in the secret little thing which makes me smarter than those hillbillies”)
I believe in the secret little thing which makes me smarter than those hillbillies”
I found this article an excellent attack on the above sentiment:
https://redsails.org/the-problem-of-recognition-in-transitional-states/
What a stretch. Incedible how the moment it’s artists under the bus y’all suddenly don’t care about them, even infering they somehow are not workers.
What a stretch. Incedible how the moment it’s artists under the bus y’all suddenly don’t care about them, even infering they somehow are not workers.
Did you throw the weaver under the bus when the loom was invented when you explained we aren’t getting rid of the loom? Did you burn the loom instead? Is the marxist solution to unemployment due to technologial advancement to resort to ludditism? Is that your idea of worker solidarity? Or should the marxist conception of worker solidarity sublimate that?
You’re going to have to explain how your take is not Proudhonism.
y’all suddenly don’t care about them
I can’t speak for them, but I didn’t take that from darkernations’ post at all. As far as I can tell, the general point here is that when arguments in defense of the status quo of what is considered “art” and “artist” start getting into elitist territory (e.g. “x is ‘real’ art, but y is not”, “people are fine with consuming shit and can’t appreciate ‘real art’”, “art has to pass a ‘je ne sais quoi’ vague bar of quality to be considered ‘good’”), it starts breaking from solidarity with working class interests and becomes this thing like “I don’t care if most artists never ‘make it’ as long as me the special artist who is a talented one and uplifted for it can be recognized for my contributions.”
That might sound like a lot to extrapolate from it and it’s not necessarily all explicitly voiced stuff in this particular thread, but it’s the kind of stuff anti-AI gets up to. People have a status quo which they depend on for their livelihood and so they want to defend it. That’s understandable. Some unions have already been fighting in this sphere to ensure they don’t get sidelined by shitty AI. Unions, for all their limitations they can have under capitalism, do tend to understand one thing, which is how to negotiate with circumstances. What internet anti-AI tends to do is more like trying to shame the genie back into the bottle and going for whatever argument is convenient to do so, without proper consideration of the implications of the argument.
For example, one of the common internet arguments against generative AI is that it “looks bad”. But what happens if the technology has a breakthrough that allows models to do fine details more accurately? And what about humans who make mistakes in their art? Here you get the people who say stuff like “oh well, their art is charming in spite of the mistakes because a human made it.” Well were they going and seeking out and buying that person’s “charming” art? Or were they spending their time liking video essays on how some piece of media has massive quality issues? Giving “sucky artists” a pat on the head for their effort doesn’t pay their rent. A limited number of artists can actually “make it” pre-AI and institutions justify their positions as them being “talented” or “working super hard”, whereas the ones who didn’t “make it” must be missing some special quality that would allow them to get through (the “X Factor”). Post-AI, that is still true. The main difference is even the “talented” ones are feeling threatened now. When people push vaguely-defined “bad art” further down the ladder, in order to try to protect the position of the “talented”, that only further splinters and confuses the issue and potential solidarity.
So it’s not that artists don’t matter or are not workers. It’s more that common anti-AI positions don’t even tend to support artists or artisanship as a whole. They instead tend to fall in line with the status quo, which is an elitist ladder of exclusivity, nepotism, and the movements of capital, and one that is largely controlled by major conglomerates, not individual artists or artist unions.
“Slop” itself is becoming a kind of “slop” at this point as language.
I thought I was the only one who noticed this lmao I’m so sick of this stupid ass word now
Do you have any data to back this up or just “seems to be”? Cause companies typically don’t keep producing stuff that doesn’t sell. That some people are “sick of it” is no surprise, but it’s important to make sure we’re not confusing strong feelings about a thing with mass representation in opinions about it, i.e. if 5 of a 100 people are really super disgusted with Marvel but another 50 out of a 100 keeps showing up for it, that 5 is not the consensus, no matter how loud they are about it.
I’m basing this mostly on the declining rates of ticket sales, Disney+ subscriptions, and positive reviews combined with the increase in Disney+ subscription cancellations and the upsurge in general anti-Disney attitudes.
It could be Marvel is on a significant downward trend. It would be hard for anything that long-running to not be on some kind of downward trend. But is it on a downward trend because people evaluate it as “slop” or for other reasons? The imperial core itself is on a kind of downward trend, depending on how you look at it. It’d make a kind of sense if repetitive imperialist propaganda is losing some of its appeal.
The efficacy of propaganda isn’t dependent on the state of the propagandizing entity but on whether or not the propaganda in question is convincing or at least compelling. Imperialist propaganda has certainly become less convincing in recent decades yet nevertheless remains compelling all the same; hence why even some “Leftists” will end up exposing their imperialist brainrot even while being more aware on other issues. BadEmpanada and Hasan Piker are a good example of this.
Marvel’s decline is due to fatigue, which is due to a mixture of both over-saturation of the Superhero Genre in general but also because of declining quality in the works presented.
“Slop” itself is becoming a kind of “slop” at this point as language. It’s kind of tiring seeing it repeated over and over, as if it’s some kind of magic word to show how valueless a thing is. What even is “slop”?
Unironically this is exactly how many non-Marxists react to Marxist language. Words have meanings - if you don’t know what they mean, look them up. The dictionary is freely available to anyone with internet access. This whole section feels performative.
What are the characteristics of a Marvel movie that make it that?
Poor writing, shallow worldbuilding, flat characters, one dimensional enemies, illogical plotlines, rushed pacing, bad storytelling, among many other multitude of things that are all a consequence of the movie only existing to sell toys.
What are the characteristics of generative AI that make it that?
The complete lack of human experience in the creative process. Any piece of art is a reflection of its creator and even if it’s ‘bad’ art you can still feel their experiences, their views, their feelings, etc. dripping through every page in a book, every scene in a movie, every line on a canvas, etc. An artist puts themselves in their work. AI does not do this because it cannot do this. It has no ‘self’ to place inside. It has no history, no experience, no values, no thoughts, etc. It’s an algorithm; a machine. It can ‘think’ only within the limits of its programming.
There is a certain irony in reactive hatred of generative AI claiming an inherent valuelessness resulting from handing off production of artisanal works to a computer and then turning around and handing off production of their analysis of the situation to vague, ill-defined buzzwords.
That you don’t know what a word means doesn’t make it a buzzword. This is naked pseudointellectualism. You’re not nearly as deep as you seem to think you are.
Okay. Here’s one definition, clearly taken from modern use:
digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence
But that doesn’t really say anything about what “low quality means”. It goes on to give quotes as examples:
An AI-enabled social media future also raises concerns around deterring AI slop—mass-produced, junky and superficial content that clogs up the web and social media accounts.— Katelyn Chedraoui
Slop can now be found anywhere, from unsettling images on Facebook of Jesus fused with prawns to poorly written Kindle books …— Tess Bennett
The closest to a concrete example given seems to be “Jesus fused with prawns” but it’s unclear whether it’s talking about a visual mess or a creative fusion of concepts.
So it’s largely just being circular saying that slop is low quality and low quality is slop.
Poor writing, shallow worldbuilding, flat characters, one dimensional enemies, illogical plotlines, rushed pacing, bad storytelling, among many other multitude of things that are all a consequence of the movie only existing to sell toys.
So… low quality? That’s what this boils down to, isn’t it? And if so, why not just say that? It’s more transparent in meaning than “slop”. Though also more revealing of the point of view behind it; that “low quality” artisanal work is deserving of disgust and rejection.
The complete lack of human experience in the creative process. Any piece of art is a reflection of its creator and even if it’s ‘bad’ art you can still feel their experiences, their views, their feelings, etc. dripping through every page in a book, every scene in a movie, every line on a canvas, etc. An artist puts themselves in their work. AI does not do this because it cannot do this. It has no ‘self’ to place inside. It has no history, no experience, no values, no thoughts, etc. It’s an algorithm; a machine. It can ‘think’ only within the limits of its programming.
What does this have to do with perceived quality though? If humans can churn out movies that are somehow still “slop” by your definition, then what’s distinct about AI generated stuff in this regard? There are already people who get fooled and can’t tell the difference because the differences aren’t actually as distinct as they think, on the surface. In fact, because generative AI is derived from human works, it would be weird if it felt nothing at all like human creations.
In reality, AI has biases based on how it was trained and what it was trained on. To use a basic example, an AI trained primarily on the works of shakespeare will largely produce things that sound shakespearean. Is this not a reflection of shakespeare and the culture that produced the form of his modern works than an AI might be trained on? Just more removed from his active involvement?
Another way to consider it, is if AI-generated stuff was truly lacking in anything resembling what humans make, it would not be at all relatable to humans. But clearly, in practice, it often is to a degree. It just lacks directorial intent a lot of the time. Instead of getting what you had in mind exactly, you get an approximation based on an amalgamated cultural lens.
Also, pseudo-rant incoming, as a writer, “their feelings, etc. dripping through every page” is some flowery bullshit. It’s a nice sentiment if you want to be poetic about it, but it’s not how the raw reality of it works. It doesn’t matter what I feel if the language I’m using and the mastery I have over it does not work for expressing it as I intended. This was one of the first things I noticed when I was younger and was trying to figure out how to translate “stories in my head” to novel-like prose. They are not the same and I still struggle with it sometimes.
An artist doesn’t put themself in their work. They take something, which is derived in part from their own self and in part from the world they have grown up in and are immersed in, and they try to translate it via the language that they know and the methodology they have to express themself, into something that we call an artform. And if they try really hard at this and fail on the craft of it and the logistical mechanics of how to excel at a given craft, their work gets called “low quality”, maybe even “slop”. The artistic world doesn’t give a shit how much “soul” you put into something if it doesn’t show in the work. If the value was about that, we’d be judging works based on proof of how many hours and how many crying sessions and personal revelations a person put in rather than the end result.
Never, when I see people critiquing or lambasting a work of art, do I see them going, “I wonder how many times the people involved spent long hours agonizing over a little detail. That would add to the value of it if they did.” People only give a fuck about that when it’s some individualist marketing campaign talking about an artist’s backstory to sell more of the product.
If art is subjective, isn’t it by defintion a relationship with its viewer? Wouldn’t that be the more dialectical approach?
I disagree with the assertion that art is subjective. Art - in my opinion - can be defined as something expressive made through the love and passion of its creator and which is a reflection of its creator. The argument that art is subjective comes from the assumption that what makes something art or not is how it’s interpreted, which I vehemently disagree with. I am very much opposed to the individualist thinking behind “Death of the Author” and similar ideas. Art has meaning to it; it’s given a purpose by the person making it. It exists for a reason and has a reason to exist.
Slop is devoid of reason. The creator is not saying anything through it; they are trying to make money - or in the case of AI specifically are just doing what they’ve been programmed to.
I disagree with the assertion that art is subjective. Art - in my opinion - can be defined as something expressive made through the love and passion of its creator and which is a reflection of its creator. The argument that art is subjective comes from the assumption that what makes something art or not is how it’s interpreted, which I vehemently disagree with. I am very much opposed to the individualist thinking behind “Death of the Author” and similar ideas. Art has meaning to it; it’s given a purpose by the person making it. It exists for a reason and has a reason to exist.
The artists can appreciate their art but it is in that engagement that transforms it into art. If somebody who is not the creator appreciates something as art does it cease to be art because the artist has decided what they produced did have not love or had passion in it? If “death of the author” could have an individualist take then what does collective interpretation of a creation, even against the artist’s intention, do? Could that collectivist action nullify the individualist interpretation (of death of the author)?
Art is a relationship of the consumer (insert better term there) and the creation - that relation is real but is borne out of the material conditions of the class society as it stands today. The art of the artist does not exist in a vacuum and it is this relation to the world that dismantles any invidualist take of what is an artist and what is art. The objectivity is in that real relationship.
I would strongly recommend Georges Politzer’s Elementary Philosophy, not necessarily to convince you of dialectical materialism but at least understand convincingly what it is about. One understands relations but has an objective reality. It is not positivist.
Death of the Author does not negate the love and passion to create art but to understand why one must understand how one sublimates individualist takes without resorting to reaction; dialectical materialism is how one sublimates this - it is very much a collectivist understanding.
The artists can appreciate their art but it is in that engagement that transforms it into art. If somebody who is not the creator appreciates something as art does it cease to be art because the artist has decided what they produced did have not love or had passion in it? If “death of the author” could have an individualist take then what does collective interpretation of a creation, even against the artist’s intention, do? Could that collectivist action nullify the individualist interpretation (of death of the author)?
That isn’t how it works. Neither the artist nor the viewer’s interpretation of something makes it artistic. The art itself comes from the time, energy, and labor poured into it. The investment of that time, energy, and labor is a reflection of the creator’s passion even if the creator isn’t aware of it or in denial of it.
Art is a relationship of the consumer (insert better term there) and the creation - that relation is real but is borne out of the material conditions of the class society as it stands today. The art of the artist does not exist in a vacuum and it is this relation to the world that dismantles any invidualist take of what is an artist and what is art. The objectivity is in that real relationship.
Completely disagree. Art, as a reflection of its creator, is defined by the passion of that creator in its production. The consumer and their interpretation of it is an irrelevant factor here. Art is not created to be consumed; it is created to express. That expression can occur without any consumption taking place. Art is not an economic transaction but the manifestation of a person’s whole self through a different medium.
I would strongly recommend Georges Politzer’s Elementary Philosophy, not necessarily to convince you of dialectical materialism but at least understand convincingly what it is about. One understands relations but has an objective reality. It is not positivist.
Death of the Author does not negate the love and passion to create art but to understand why one must understand how one sublimates individualist takes without resorting to reaction; dialectical materialism is how one sublimates this - it is very much a collectivist understanding.
I am a Marxist. I know what dialectical materialism, thank you very much.
You’re confusing propaganda for art when they are not the same things.
You are confusing good quality and effort for art. A childs drawing on the fridge looks absolute dog shit, but still made their parents smile and is artful in its own ways.
I did nothing of the sort. Not once did I equate “art” with “good”; that is a strawman argument you cooked up in your head. I am vehemently against such an interpretation. Bad art is still art, but that isn’t what this line is talking about - the line is specifically talking about PROPAGANDA.
Propaganda is not good art. Propaganda is not bad art. Propaganda is not art at all; they are distinct concepts.
I did nothing of the sort. Not once did I equate “art” with “good”; that is a strawman argument you cooked up in your head.
You simply exchanged “bad” for “slop” and think you made a different point entirely. In your post there is no functional difference between the two since you have described it. You criticised marvel movies with the language that one would use when they call something bad.
That’s why i said you are confusing the two. You now stating that is not what you meant doesn’t actually change the fact that you did say that bad art is not art.
I am vehemently against such an interpretation. Bad art is still art, but that isn’t what this line is talking about - the line is specifically talking about PROPAGANDA.
The line about propaganda is later in your comment. Besides, propaganda is still obviously art. It is an expression and aims to evoke a certain feeling and certain thoughts within you. There is, again, no functional difference.
You are against artists and actively trying to harm them. If you were in charge of such decisions in a socialists society then that society would undoubtedly be worse
You simply exchanged “bad” for “slop” and think you made a different point entirely. In your post there is no functional difference between the two since you have described it. You criticised marvel movies with the language that one would use when they call something bad.
Slop is bad, but it is not art. Art can be bad, but bad art isn’t slop.
This isn’t hard.
That’s why i said you are confusing the two. You now stating that is not what you meant doesn’t actually change the fact that you did say that bad art is not art.
No, that isn’t what I said. That is what you read and is a mistake on your part.
The line about propaganda is later in your comment. Besides, propaganda is still obviously art. It is an expression and aims to evoke a certain feeling and certain thoughts within you. There is, again, no functional difference.
This is wrong. Propaganda isn’t inherently art. It can be art but it is not art by default. The purpose of art is self expression while the purpose of propaganda is influence perspectives.
You are against artists and actively trying to harm them. If you were in charge of such decisions in a socialists society then that society would undoubtedly be worse
Fuck off.
We got marvel movies because internet leftists treated mass produced slop like valid art? Idealism lmao
Either way, who cares whether it’s considered art or not? We’re not leftists to revel in the essence of human creativity, we’re leftists to advance the interests of the working class. Agitprop isn’t produced to admire in museums, it’s to spread ideas and consciousness.
Im not going to litigate this because of a personal opinion on ai [i dont really care], but I think this argument misses material quality of the admirable aspects of “museum level” work [to use your terms] in agitprop. I mean obviously a random meme on lemmy doesn’t need to be held to that standard, but the agitprop made by the USSR is iconic and survives to this day, even after it’s intended audience is dead and outside of even the original language many of these were made in, for a reason.
I think there’s survival bias. For every super cool meme they made (like the “chad worker”), there were probably thousands of others that weren’t as cool.
I’m not equipped to argue the definition of art (I’ve read Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction twice and still don’t know if I get it). It seems like the concept of art is going through another radical transformation, and I’m not sure what it’ll look like on the other side.
I can see how usage of technology might reduce the artistic essence of a work (if we define it as something to do with human creation) but I don’t think it necessarily eliminates it. A human had a concept, thought of a way to communicate it, and used a fine-tuned tool to create a representation of it. It makes little difference in this case whether they used a paintbrush or a digital program.
That’s a pretty tangential response to your point.
I’d argue the survival of old agitprop has to do with its ability to resonate with people’s experiences, and human input is essential for authentic understanding. This isn’t precluded by the use of technology, but technology does make it easier for non-humans to pump out soulless garbage.
But it also can’t be understated that the experience of art in the 1700s is different than the experience of art in the 1900s is different than the experience of art will be in the next decade. The printing press obliterated the value of written text but made it accessible to the masses. Photographs and mechanical reproduction did the same to painting.
Even up until the internet, people might see a little bit of art occasionally when they travel or in poor definition on TV (ignoring TV itself as a new art form), so some essence of the old form still persisted.
But now we are inundated by content. I like the idea of buying a painting to hang on my wall, but after a month it stays the same while I’ve seen a hundred thousand new images.
The memetic speed of ideas spreads so much faster than it did in Soviet times, people don’t look at a single poster every day at their factory. They see a meme for five seconds and move to the next.
I’m not saying it’s a good thing, just that it’s new and unprecedented, so old tactics need to adapt.
We got Marvel movies because capitalists only value art insofar as it makes them money, leading to the aforementioned mass-produced slop. I’d rather not see mass-produced slop become a staple of any socialist future, personally.
AI slop as agitprop seems like a poor strategy when the average joe is polling as hating AI in general. You seem to have forgotten that this tech is primarily being developed by & for capitalists as one big pyramid scheme and has since become the aesthetic of fascist techbros. Who exactly do you think you’re going to win over by having an algorithm draw up a picture of Lenin with three eyes? Because the people you’re trying to appeal to are turned off by it by their own words. Sounds like you want us to shoot ourselves in the foot. How about we do everything we can to support actual creators on the Left instead of using the enemy’s cheap money printers to spam garbage?
I was of this opinion exactly but it is undialectical.
Please consider the following narrative:
While some will be turned off by this, they will also be by literally anything else.
As lenin states in left wing communism, purism is absolute idiocy. While the party ideology must remain pure, the outside world never is and never will be.
We have to use populism, demagoguery, every dirty trick in the book.
Also he states that we must only judge deeds, never words. Everything is okay that gets the job done.
Btw this also happens in Germany where the left party wont vote for reforms because the alt right does. This is called ultraleftism and is dysfunctional crap.
"Everything is okay that gets the job done.
The argument here is that AI doesn’t get the job done though if people reflexively reject AI. This isnt an argument of moral purity, it’s an argument of pragmatics and should be addressed as such.
To that point:
While some will be turned off by this, they will also be by literally anything else.
And others? There are of course people who are unreachable by any means. But foe those who are reachable by some means byt not others, it’s worth considering whether AI is the best route to do so. And there are definitely those who will see AI and immediately reject or ignore whatever message it contains. They may accuse the poster of being a bot, and doubt the veracity of communistic advocacy in general, which is the path of least resistance in a society that lends suppirt to every communist debunk.
It’s precisely because we are fighting from an anti-hegemonic position that we must safeguard our credibility. It is already too easy for our enemies to make our truth seem like lies, and perceived dishonesty will harm us more than the ease of AI will help us.
Would you please prove your arguments because they arent defined enough for me to falsify them. That ai is “reflexively rejected” requires significant knowledge of our focus group.
Then, your argument of a reflexively rejected tool being ineffective requires proof as well.
I said there are some that reflexively reject ai. Do you dispute that?
I understand what you’re saying here and to an extent I do agree but as a writer myself I won’t deny my immediate bias against AI in the arts. My passion is under assault from machines that lack that same passion, used by people who are lazy and unskilled, promoted by the very people making my life as a prole actively worse for their own profit, and polluting the very medium I want to participate in. The arts have already been placed under siege by capitalism and AI is just another front in that war against human culture. This is a very personal issue for me as a consequence.
I sympathize. Still, this is textbook reactionism. Please reread your theory to let go of this nonsense. Its the same reactionism the luddites had (also for even better reasons because the machines actually killed them at times, they were very dangerous). But the issue is misdirected. It is not the machine that kills you, it is the factory owner, buying the machine and the system, enabling him.
With ai it is the same. It is a tool, nothing more. Try to explore it dialectically and you will see how much energy you are wasting thinking about this. Its not worth it.
More idealism. If you want to support workers, do so by overthrowing capitalism, not demanding they use specific pre-technological methods when creating content for your consumption.
If you find personal fulfillment out of buying stuff from artisans, that’s cool! Me too! But individual consumption has nothing to do with leftism.
Oh and where is Lenin’s third eye in the image? You’re making shit up to get mad at based on tech from years ago.
Not everything you disagree with is idealism. Please learn the definition of the word and stop abusing it.
If you want to support workers, do so by overthrowing capitalism, not demanding they use specific pre-technological methods when creating content for your consumption.
AI is not a “method” of creation; it is an imitation of it. You have not created anything - a machine did it for you. This is not a tool like a pen and paper, typewriter, or even just a basic computer and keyboard. The algorithm made this; not you. The algorithm is the creator; not you. This is the usurpation of human creativity by an imitative, automated process that is devoid of the same passion and intellect that a human creator is capable of.
We’re literally being robbed of our own creativity and you’re doing everything in your power to find an excuse for why that’s a good thing. What is the point of overthrowing capitalism if all the passions we were supposed to spend our newfound time and energy on have been taken up by machines instead? Actually think about the consequences of what you’re advocating for, please.
If you find personal fulfillment out of buying stuff from artisans, that’s cool! Me too! But individual consumption has nothing to do with leftism.
Never said otherwise. Strawman argument.
Oh and where is Lenin’s third eye in the image? You’re making shit up to get mad at based on tech from years ago.
I was not referencing the image directly. That was apparent to everyone except you, apparently.
Oh no I have not “created anything”? Workers don’t “create”, they work. I have worked. Operating machines is work.
Have you created? Are you creating class? Is that class on the side of the working class or not?
How about we do everything we can to support actual creators on the Left instead of using the enemy’s cheap money printers to spam garbage?
Could the energy of tailism to artisanal reaction be better directed elsewhere? We are all products of liberal society, the phones we type and the internet we use as a result of capitalist production; it is in capitalism we find the seeds of its destruction.
It’s not “tailism” to point out that mainstream AI use is aiding in the capitalist destruction of not just culture and art but also our ability to think critically and engage with anything complex. There’s no “mass hysteria” going on here; these are legitimate concerns that deserve legitimate attention. You’re just doing the 21st century equivalent of what they did to the Luddites in the 1800s.
But then Marx happened and we’re not going back to ludditism. The point is to supercede ludditism; it doesn’t go far enough for worker emancipation.
Missed the point of the analogy entirely.
I brought up the Luddites because they’ve been dismissed out of hand as simply being technophobes - kind of like how critics of AI are being treated the same. It’s just dismissive of criticism without engaging with it. This is dangerous and definitely not dialectical.
Consider it differently. OP never used the word art in their comment (the one you’re replying to). Not everything is art just because it’s drawn. As a designer I was never under the impression my logos were art in any way. Yet they still existed and solved a problem for someone. Therefore, we can say something doesn’t need to be art to exist and this frees up a lot of effort being put into dead ends.
Are ai images art ? That’s not even a question I ask myself when I generate an image. I look for a specific thing when generating - how it handles text, “picture inside a picture inside a picture” and other technical details like that. At no point do I ask myself if this is art or not because I don’t need to answer that question like a sphinx riddle for the image to be born. We are experimenting, trying out different things, making a final shot out of a long process and you could argue this is part of the artistic process too but again I don’t even need to do that to keep doing what I do.
Its like we’re in two different physical places entirely. The people that absolutely demand the answer “is this art” (i.e. the ‘anti-AI’ crowd) and the people that are simply not (the ones that use these models). I’m far from the only person not caring whether what I make is art. I doubt many people, when they open krita or gimp, consciously think “hell yes I’m going to be making art today!” they just do their thing. To me, this argument betrays people as never having used AI image gen and actually contending with what it is. Though I agree on platforms like gemini and chatgpt you can just make a half baked prompt and the LLM will clean it up for the image model, but what I mean is that if one wants to have good arguments against AI, they need to find something better than “but it’s not art”, because the only response to that is “okay, I can still generate 6000 images per day though.” It’s not an effective argument and it’s a complete mismatch to what people who use these technologies currently do with them. It doesn’t speak to us whatsoever, basically.
In fact you could take this further. Do you really need a human to make art? I could, at this very moment, make a script that queries deepseek with a prompt “you’re an artist that [description that deepseek came up with of itself as an artist]. you make AI art, but since you can’t directly use the image platform, you instead send out these various parameters as a Json object: prompt, negative prompt, seed, noise algorithm, scheduler, image size (etc.). This data is then passed through an API to the actual image generator who will generate the image for you”
And then through some either prompting or scripting make deepseek into a ‘living’ artist that sends these out periodically when it feels like.
Would that be art? Would deepseek be an artist? What would that mean for art?
This is not a thought experiment anymore, this is completely doable right now by anyone who knows some python (or even the LLM itself could write this code now). Do we necessarily have to reckon with this riddle though to enjoy life and illustrative works? Not really.
I think part of the beauty of art is that it translates an idea through different mediums, and at each step of the translation it is transformed by the experiences of the author/artist. The flip-side of this is the more times it changes hands, the more the original input is distorted.
The process for the creation of TCG art is a good analogy. When using these tools to generate an image, you are the one creating the world and providing the concepts to be represented in the piece. The AI as the artist then interprets what you’ve provided through the training data (or in the case of a human artist, their life experience) and produces an image.
I’m not the arbiter of what is / isn’t art, but I don’t think the distinction matters for the rest of the discussion.
As a consumer there are multiple lenses in which you can view the art:
- How do you interpret the image
- What choices did the artist make in the production of the image
- What can you tell about the artists experience / worldview from the image
- What historical / external context might have impacted the image creation process
I think you can do those for AI art, but most people aren’t interested in those questions regarding AI (it’s entire existence is dictated by training data scraped from the entire internet, and it has absorbed all of it completely uncritically), and since the prompter is one step removed from the final product it is more difficult to find interesting information about the prompter through the image.
So ultimately I think that AI obscures the prompter in a way that makes it difficult to “see” intentionality in the final work. ie.
- Did Yogthos intend for this to imitate a particular art style, or did the AI choose the art style because of the darker themes of barbed wire / war imagery
- The color choices in the final panel evoke a kind of eerie twilight rather than a sunrise, is that a representation of anything?
- Despite the red star rising, the sky is still gray, does that say anything? Does that have different meanings to us vs. the artist (cultural norms / history). Is that because the training data contains a lot of western propaganda depicting the “specter of communism” haunting the world?
And that’s not an argument against using AI to generate images. Sometimes you don’t need it to be that deep, but I think truly effective propaganda has an intentionality to it that is missing from the AI generated pieces I’ve seen.
I don’t disagree with your comment, I’m often asking these questions as thought exercises because like I said I don’t think they need to be answered for the end product to exist (and this doesn’t go for AI images only).
There is intention, but intention is also subordinate to one’s own skill. I have in my head a very specific picture I would love to see in the real world with my eyes, but I can’t make it myself. This isn’t just me, it’s just that you need to have the skillset for your intention to be represented. All I can offer from my own two hands at this time will be an MS Paint stick figure and not the full, detailed digital art piece.
Prompting is similar, and in fact teaches us to communicate our visual thoughts better. It’s like passing the information off to the artist - and freelancers have been complaining for a long time that clients don’t know what they want and can’t express it lol. If you don’t specify something, the artist/AI will just take a best guess (edit: or if they’re a nice artist, they’ll ask you about it which is definitely something AI could improve on, actually asking you about what you want before getting to work). We can argue about how the AI does it and how that differs from how a human would do it, but I also think that soon enough the difference will be imperceptible and this argument won’t matter.
I don’t know if I’m coming across clearly lol. Perhaps to analogize your analogy:
Did Yogthos intend for this to imitate a particular art style, or did the AI choose the art style because of the darker themes of barbed wire / war imagery
Did yogthos intend for this style to transpire, or did the artist pick this because of the theme? We could ask the same question on an art commission.
This is also exactly how we find traditional artists using AI. They already know what they want to convey in their piece (it doesn’t come naturally to people when they first pick up the brush, it’s a learned skill!) so they know how to prompt AI to get stuff the way they envision it and convey something specific. As a designer I know how to look at the details, it’s also a learned skill that newcomers don’t have - I’ve seen my share of designs that people think looks acceptable, but to the designer has a lot of problems; textboxes not being aligned is a big one, but most people don’t necessarily see it and therefore don’t worry about it.
I think you are coming across clearly!
There are only two further points I’d make:
There is intention, but intention is also subordinate to one’s own skill. I have in my head a very specific picture I would love to see in the real world with my eyes, but I can’t make it myself. This isn’t just me, it’s just that you need to have the skillset for your intention to be represented. All I can offer from my own two hands at this time will be an MS Paint stick figure and not the full, detailed digital art piece.
- I think you’re undervaluing your own artistic ability, people like shitty drawings because they can empathize with the artist. Most propaganda now is done through the lens of memes & pop culture references and don’t necessarily resonate better because of the additional detail added by a fully rendered piece. So ultimately I’d only encourage you to produce some crap drawings where you think appropriate, presuming you have time. Every pixel in that piece was placed there on purpose by you, and that has value. Also consider whether visual mediums are where you’re most effective, this piece is inspired by a poem, there are countless mediums through which you can express yourself and I think it’s a joy to engage with and get better at.
Did yogthos intend for this style to transpire, or did the artist pick this because of the theme? We could ask the same question on an art commission.
- The artist’s worldview and perspective shaped their previous work, this work inspired the commissioner to select them, and their decisions show in the final piece. I think you’d get very different outcomes if you commissioned someone familiar with Lenin’s work vs. someone who wasn’t. Facial expression, lighting, pose, medium / constraints, etc. all tell a story and I think that story is interesting when it’s a conscious decision made by a person.
I would be interested to see more examples of what the prompt is vs. the image outcome, just to analyze it more.
I would be interested to see more examples of what the prompt is vs. the image outcome, just to analyze it more.
Well, by experience I would say a lot of it comes down to prompting differently if you can’t get the exact result you want. Or adding keywords and keywords to just slightly change the outcome. There’s some tricks and keywords you pick up on to get a certain result. I’ll try to find a video that showcases all of this because there is a lot that goes into it beyond the commercial LLMs, what they do is take your text prompt and reformat it for the image generator. But you also lose some control and that’s how we end up with yellow-filter GPT images (though you can absolutely fix that with some additional prompting).
I would say though the biggest factor is the seed, which determines the original gaussian noise that gets generated. The checkpoint (the image model) then denoises that incrementally over X many steps (all of this is decided by the user). But most models have a sampler and scheduler that is clearly superior and you would not use any other once you find it. The seed however completely changes how the picture looks, because what the checkpoint does is hallucinate patterns in the noise. This post is a good example: https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1p80j9x/the_perfect_combination_for_outstanding_images/. If you click through the gallery quickly, you’ll see it immediately.
You can reprompt though, even with the same seed. You could say, instead of a closeup of a wolf (or whatever keyword they used to get that picture of the wolf), “taken from afar”. Some models even start to understand “taken from 10 meters away”, “macro photography”, etc. It really depends on what it’s trained on, but you have to think like a descriptor - you’re not describing what you want the picture to look like, you’re literally describing what’s in it. “Person, happy, smiling, in the pouring rain” - you have to add that happy otherwise the model will just “best guess” the expression, or might give them a blank expression.
People in the stabdif community (that subreddit I linked) generally share their prompts, you can explore a little and see how they got the results they did. But it’s very dependent on the model itself, and then you can also add LORAs, which introduce purposeful bias. Loras can do a whole bunch of stuff, for example I have one that can produce pixel art. The model generates the picture, and then the LORA intervenes on some level to modify the weights of the neural network and make the output look pixel art. You have loras for everything, and anyone can train them. This is one of the example outputs from the pixel art lora:
edit: I forgot to add, this makes the process very different from other forms of illustrative work. But this is true of painting vs digital painting vs logo creation too, or sculpting vs 3d modeling. Imo image prompting is more akin to a lottery, since it depends on the seed so much you generate a bunch of images (people even generate a whole grid of 9 or more pictures at once and then select the best one), then once you find something good enough you lock the seed in or use img2img, then reprompt over and over again. I’m sure that’s even still just entry-level stuff and the ‘pros’ do a whole bunch of more technical stuff to find exactly what they want.
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Consider it differently. OP never used the word art in their comment (the one you’re replying to). Not everything is art just because it’s drawn. As a designer I was never under the impression my logos were art in any way. Yet they still existed and solved a problem for someone. Therefore, we can say something doesn’t need to be art to exist and this frees up a lot of effort being put into dead ends.
This is fair, though considering that the image uses the text of a poem I think it exists in a nebulously defined area between “art” and “not art” - but at the very least I can agree that OP didn’t explicitly mention art. That was perhaps just me jumping the gun; this is a bit of a hot-button topic for me as a writer.
Are ai images art ? That’s not even a question I ask myself when I generate an image. I look for a specific thing when generating - how it handles text, “picture inside a picture inside a picture” and other technical details like that. At no point do I ask myself if this is art or not because I don’t need to answer that question like a sphinx riddle for the image to be born. We are experimenting, trying out different things, making a final shot out of a long process and you could argue this is part of the artistic process too but again I don’t even need to do that to keep doing what I do.
Okay, yeah, all fair arguments to make.
Its like we’re in two different physical places entirely. The people that absolutely demand the answer “is this art” (i.e. the ‘anti-AI’ crowd) and the people that are simply not (the ones that use these models). I’m far from the only person not caring whether what I make is art. I doubt many people, when they open krita or gimp, consciously think “hell yes I’m going to be making art today!” they just do their thing. To me, this argument betrays people as never having used AI image gen and actually contending with what it is. Though I agree on platforms like gemini and chatgpt you can just make a half baked prompt and the LLM will clean it up for the image model, but what I mean is that if one wants to have good arguments against AI, they need to find something better than “but it’s not art”, because the only response to that is “okay, I can still generate 6000 images per day though.” It’s not an effective argument and it’s a complete mismatch to what people who use these technologies currently do with them. It doesn’t speak to us whatsoever, basically.
My only issue here is that art isn’t necessarily something you consciously decide to do - but other than that I can understand your arguments here. They’re all fair and reasonable and I confess to having had a pretty strong bias already. I may have been making an argument appear where it didn’t to and I’ll own up to that mistake.
In fact you could take this further. Do you really need a human to make art? I could, at this very moment, make a script that queries deepseek with a prompt “you’re an artist that [description that deepseek came up with of itself as an artist]. you make AI art, but since you can’t directly use the image platform, you instead send out these various parameters as a Json object: prompt, negative prompt, seed, noise algorithm, scheduler, image size (etc.). This data is then passed through an API to the actual image generator who will generate the image for you”
I don’t think you need a human - specifically - to make art but I do think you need a human experience (or something equivalent to it) to make art. What makes “art” art is what its creator imbues into it; thoughts, feelings, perspective, history, understanding, etc. Art is a reflection of its creator. For lack of better words it has a ‘soul’ to it that an AI cannot replicate. What AI can do is imitate art; it can’t create it. There’s no deeper meaning behind what it makes. It churns out whatever you put in the prompt. The AI isn’t ‘saying’ anything through what it makes nor is it expressing itself because it has no self to express. Thus it isn’t an artist and what it makes isn’t art.
And then through some either prompting or scripting make deepseek into a ‘living’ artist that sends these out periodically when it feels like.
Would that be art? Would deepseek be an artist? What would that mean for art?
This is not a thought experiment anymore, this is completely doable right now by anyone who knows some python (or even the LLM itself could write this code now). Do we necessarily have to reckon with this riddle though to enjoy life and illustrative works? Not really.
I think we do, actually. If some of the attitudes in this thread are to go by there seems to be a sizeable amount of people who think art is being gatekept by actual artists and that only through AI can all people make art - an attitude I find reductionist and technophilic. There is also the troubling notion of just surrendering human creative works altogether to automated machines - the very thought of which I find horrifying. As if automating culture itself is something desirable. I would expect this kind of argument from an Objectivist that wants even more proles stuck in the workplace. As many critics of AI have noticed: our culture is being automated while our labor remains manual when it should be the other way around.
AI has an important place in the continued technological development of human civilization - this I do not question - but for art, specifically, it has no place. Our culture is a reflection of us; it is part of who we are as a species. It reflects what we feel, what we think, and what we experience in life. It needs to remain a wholly human experience lest we risk losing our very identity as a species. I don’t think this should be controversial to anyone who isn’t one of those extreme transhumanists that unironically thinks humanity needs to ‘ascend’ or whatever.
We could potentially consider:
- if all labour should be socialised why should this be any different?
- would the art of the fascist Dali be more valid than marxist agitprop, and if so then whose class interests would that validity be reflecting?
Socializing art means giving people more free time to pursue their artistic passions allowing them to develop those skills to produce quality works.
If you want to talk about fascist art then you need to be willing to address the elephant in the room that is the open embrace of AI “art” by fascists. They were not only the first to start doing it but have pretty much made it their entire aesthetic. There’s nothing proletarian about mass-produced AI slop; it is a modern symbol of fascism and reflects the fascist disdain for creativity & imagination, driven directly by the tendency of creatives & artistic types to be anti-fascist on account of open mindedness being a boon to the creative mind.
Socializing art means giving people more free time to pursue their artistic passions allowing them to develop those skills to produce quality works.
What do you mean when you say “socialising art”? Because I mean socialising labour.
If you want to talk about fascist art then you need to be willing to address the elephant in the room that is the open embrace of AI “art” by fascists. They were not only the first to start doing it but have pretty much made it their entire aesthetic. There’s nothing proletarian about mass-produced AI slop; it is a modern symbol of fascism and reflects the fascist disdain for creativity & imagination, driven directly by the tendency of creatives & artistic types to be anti-fascist on account of open mindedness being a boon to the creative mind
How do you get mass production without the proleteriat?
If we have establised lack of mass production does not absolve its “validity” to fascism then it may be worthwhile re-examining that presumed axiom.
What do you mean when you say “socialising art”? Because I mean socialising labour.
There’s more to art than just labor.
How do you get mass production without the proleteriat?
Redundant question in a world that is becoming increasingly automated. We’re literally talking about computer algorithms generating content on their own without human labor involved.
If we have establised lack of mass production does not absolve its “validity” to fascism then it may be worthwhile re-examining that presumed axiom.
We have established nothing of the sort and so the axiom remains firmly in place.
There’s more to art than just labor.
That’s exactly right. It is paid art where the quibble is, right? So if advancement in technology causes unemployment why does marxism propose not to burn the tech down? How do we sublimate this? GenAi is effectively showing us the limits of trade unionism, it is forcing us to confront capitalism itself and not be happy with concessions anymore.
Redundant question in a world that is becoming increasingly automated. We’re literally talking about computer algorithms generating content on their own without human labor involved.
All dead labour is still labour.
We have established nothing of the sort and so the axiom remains firmly in place.
Do you think if you haven’t figured it out it makes it true? I mean I’m happy to clarify but at some point people may take it personally, and therefore may just need some space. I’ve sent a link in the other reply if you’re interested in further reading.
That’s exactly right. It is paid art where the quibble is, right? So if advancement in technology causes unemployment why does marxism propose not to burn the tech down? How do we sublimate this? GenAi is effectively showing us the limits of trade unionism, it is forcing us to confront capitalism itself and not be happy with concessions anymore.
Now this is idealism. You have no evidence for this assertion at all; it’s purely speculative.
And no, “paid art” wasn’t where the quibble was. That is a problem, certainly, but the crux of my issue with AI art is its soullessness and that it takes away the experience of creating & consuming art from real people and replacing it with a complete imitation devoid of the same substance. AI “art” doesn’t make you feel anything, think anything, or give you a memorable experience. It lacks the passion of something conceived of by a human mind and brought to fruition by human skill.
All dead labour is still labour.
And all automated mass production is still mass production.
Do you think if you haven’t figured it out it makes it true? I mean I’m happy to clarify but at some point people may take it personally, and therefore may just need some space. I’ve sent a link in the other reply if you’re interested in further reading.
Curious what you think I haven’t “figured out”? You’re already making this pretty personal with this very clear dig at my ability to understand so it’s a little late for the hand-wringing when the sentence before it is basically an insult.
Automating the proletariat’s necessity away.
Automating the proletariat’s necessity away
So should we then harken back to reaction? Re-employ the weaver and burn the loom?
(And all dead labour is still labour anyway. The machine is the product of labour)
Why should the proletariat strive toward replacing their self-expression with mindless, autogenerated slop manufactured by a machine? I genuinely cannot think of a more effective way a capitalist society could create a false-consciousness and cultural hegemony. Not only are large studios and producers part of the superstructure, but any and all individuals part of the masses should be conditioned into giving up the last vestiges of ideological resistance and means of preventing alienation from their fellow worker.
I’m not even talking about working artists, I’m talking about the masses casting aside any method of self-expression other than the machine provided to them by the capitalists.
Fascists also made the gym and self improvement their thing.
Bench pressing does not make me a Nazi. Using AI to make art does not make me a Nazi either.
Another strawman argument. Never called you a Nazi, never said using AI makes you one.
Engage with what I actually wrote or move along.
Another strawman argument. Never called you a Nazi, never said using AI makes you one.
Yes you did. You have the tendency to not know what you said. Your intent does not matter.
By saying that AI art is fascist symbolic and engaging with it furthers along the fascists disdain, you are saying that one supports fascism in some way by using AI art.
Therefore you are calling people fascist when using AI to make art.
Engage with what I actually wrote or move along.
I believe you are the one that needs to engage with what you wrote.
This exchange is over. The others have made better points and are less antagonistic than i am and thus more useful for you to talk with anyway.
Much of the anti-AI narrative is literally being funded promoted by large right wing corps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRq0pESKJgg
Some points from the video to consider
But I’m afraid that if we aren’t careful with how we critique the use and abuse of artificial intelligence, we might end up, as leftist philosopher Mark Fischer once warned, foreclosing the possibility of a technologized anti- capitalism. I fear that framing this debate as anti-tech versus pro and handing the pro tech position to the right-wing is a generational blunder. Again, I need you to listen carefully, okay? I don’t like big tech. I’m not here to promote a cryptocurrency. No Gen AI was used in the creation of this video. In fact, my videos have been used to train AI against my will. There are legitimate problems with the ways AI is being developed and implemented. And it’s not as simple as doing the predictable leftist video essay thing that handwaves problems away by concluding that actually the real problem is capitalism.
But we’re stuck with unanswered questions that have kept the left and progressives in a state of constant defense, running aimlessly into the future, swinging a sword around with their eyes closed. What is it exactly that we’re fighting for? What is it exactly that we should resist? What are we trying to build? What is foreclosed within this well-intentioned AI backlash? What types of futures are we abandoning in the race to counter AI hype? What regimes of private property are reinforced when AI training is called art theft? Who actually benefits from the narrative that AI is reaping environmental destruction? What are the human costs of anti-tech humanism?
People often think of the battle over AI art as the conflict between the interests of small independent artists versus large multinational corporations. But the full picture is more complicated and in many ways more insidious. In fact, large multinational corporations stand to benefit from the artists arguments in cases like Stability v. Anderson. The anti-AI art movement might actually result in the largest expansion of media corporations power over copyright law in recent memory. Here’s the thing about copyright law. Capitalism doesn’t really care about artists. It cares about property and therefore the property owning class. In the United States, the dominant intellectual property owning class aren’t independent artists. It’s the mouse. It’s Warner Media, NBC Universal, Paramount, Comcast, not you. When it comes to generative AI, the property owning class is doing everything it can to consolidate its power and promote its interests, even if that means misrepresenting whose interests they defend. One of the artists in the Anderson v. ability case is named Carla Ortiz. She’s a concept artist who’s worked on big name Marvel films and video games, and she’s staunchly opposed to the current uses of generative AI. She’s also a board member of the concept art association who in December of 2022 launched a GoFundMe campaign that raised nearly $300,000 for a lobbying effort marketed as protecting artists from AI technologies. So, what did this campaign do to support human artists? Well, for one, the lobbying team at the Concept Art Association join forces with fellow intellectual property associations like the Copyright Alliance. The Copyright Alliance is a nonprofit organization that claims to represent the copyright interests of millions of individual creators and creative organizations in the United States. They are also one of the most powerful and prominent voices when it comes to generative AI and copyright. But the Copyright Alliance does good work, right? We definitely need advocacy groups like the Copyright Alliance to advocate for the interests of small-time exploited creators like Adobe. Oh, uh, and Disney. Okay. Uh, and NBC, Universal, uh, News Corp, Nike, Oracle, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers. Okay. Well, that’s unnerving. But these aren’t the only people that the Copyright Alliance claims to represent. You can technically sign up to join the organization for free, but whose interests do you think might be disproportionately represented when someone like Troy Dao, the vice president of Disney’s government relations and IP legal policy team, sits on the copyright allianc’s board of directors, or when their board of directors, is stacked with representatives from America’s largest media companies and copyright holders. And it gets worse. The Copyright Alliance has uncomfortably strong ties to the Nichols Group, a consulting firm started by former Republican Senator Don Nichols. When Nichols wasn’t consistently trying to make women and gay people’s lives worse, he spent much of his time as a corporate shill supporting tax cuts for the wealthy and introducing anti-UN legislation. In 2005, he started a lobbying firm called the Nichols Group, which has consistently sided with big corporate media interests like lobbying for monopolistic media mergers and against net neutrality. The Nicholls Group also lobbies and or works with really awesome people like Coke Industries, giant health insurance companies, Walmart, Exxon Mobile, and Jewel. You literally could not assemble a more evil list. But what does the Nicholls group have to do with the Copyright Alliance? Well, let’s check the Copyright Alliance’s list of staff in 2008, shortly after its founding. Nickels. Nickels. Nickels. Nickels. Nickels. That’s like 25. Okay, so what if tons of Nickel Associates, including one of its founding partners, were on the Copyright Alliance’s initial staff list. 2008 was like a 100 years ago. That proves nothing. If only we had firm evidence of a nefarious connection. Something like, I don’t know, a copyright alliance member organization sending dues directly to the Nichols Group. But I guess we’ll never know. LM2 is a financial disclosure form that labor organizations with receipts of 250,000 or more are required to submit yearly. These contributions are legally required to be disclosed to the public. For example, if we look up one of the copyright allianc’s member organizations like the Graphic Artists Guild, tons of reports about their financial transactions come up. So, let’s just quickly verify that they really did pay the Copyright Alliance and not the Nicholls Group. Okay, everything looks good. Wait, that address looks familiar.
Wait, no, wait, no. 6013th Street, Sweet 250. That can’t be because the Copyright Alliance says they’re located at 1331F Street. Okay. Well, uh, maybe they switched addresses or something. What we need to show is that the Graphic Artist Guild sent money meant for the Copyright Alliance to what is exclusively the Nickel Group’s address. All right. So, in 2017, the Graphic Artists Guild sent $10,000 to the Copyright Alliance, which is supposed to be located, as it says here, at 60113th Street. According to the Wayback Machine, in 2017, the Copyright Alliance was located at 1331H Street, not 6013th Street. Now, the Nicholls Group. In 2017, they were located at, you guessed it, 60113th Street. So, can anyone please explain why members of the Copyright Alliance have been sending thousands of dollars in member dues to a corporate lobbying group’s address for at least a decade? Oh, I know why. Because the Copyright Alliance is a front. The point is that campaigns like this GoFundMe, lawsuits like Stability V. Anderson, the Copyright Alliance’s lobbying efforts, all claim to represent the interests of human artists. In theory, they do. and maybe some of the artists on board with the coalition sincerely believe in the work they’re doing. This video is absolutely not a call to harass all the plaintiffs of these cases, but in practice, these high-profile efforts to regulate generative AI disproportionately represent the interests of the intellectual property owning class. Now, there are tons of independent artists who own their own intellectual property. But by far, those who stand to benefit from the expansion of copyright law are not independent artists, but the multinational corporations that the copyright alliance represents. The means of artistic production are disproportionately held by media giants, and copyright law keeps it that way. That’s why companies like Disney have consistently led the way on copyright expansion in the US, spending millions in lobbying dollars every year. Do independent artists stand to benefit from the expansion of copyright? The answer is usually no. Here’s why. If these lawsuits were successful, the end result is not going to be that author’s works are excluded from AI training. This is Dave Hansen. He’s a copyright attorney and executive director of the Authors Alliance, a nonprofit organization that supports authors who want their work to contribute to the public good. The end result is going to be that we will have a group of very very large tech companies entering into licensing deals with very very large content holders and everybody else gets sort of left out in the cold.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Never, not once, at all, ever, did I say anything about copyright. I didn’t even allude to it. I’m not anti-AI, either, for the record. Just in case that needs to be said.
You’re attacking an argument I didn’t make with a video that isn’t relevant to what I’m saying. Please actually engage with what I am arguing; not what someone else is saying.
My point was that anti AI narrative is directly sponsored by large far right corps.
I’m not anti-AI
Most obvious lie ever
Bad art is still art
E.g half the artists out there who never “make it big” because their art is mid af.
There are also all the shite artists who make it big by paint 3 lines and sell it for 10 million dollars to a CIA funded art house because the artist is a fervid anti-communist.
And the other half are great artist who never make it big because their art isnt marketable or useful to propagate the empire.
Correct, bad art is still art. But slop is not bad art because it isn’t art at all.
Take for example the movie 300: a perfect example of how art can be bad without being slop.
Marvel movies are bad because they are afraid to “say anything” and reflect bourgeois values - not because they get pumped out en mass
Marvel movies are bad because they are poorly written, poorly directed, poorly paced, and lack passion behind their creation - all of which are a consequence of their mass production to sell toys like everything else Disney does.
You’re letting your politics influence your view of whether a work is good or bad; which is not a good idea. That’s quite literally textbook media illiteracy. By all means: hate Marvel movies for being inoffensive bourgeois propaganda. But that is an entirely separate discussion from their quality as works.
You instantly lost me when you used the term “media illiteracy” which has been so misused it has lost all intellectual value and basically just devolved into “you dumb dumb doesnt like what I smarty smartpants like”.
You know as Marxists who build their relations to the world on dialectical materialism, one would think that works of art are not divorced from the ideology of their creators - there is no objective anti-ideological vacuum where art can be discussed on a “pure” level and would give quantification about their objective quality. Ironically the marxists of today have adopted postmodernist new criticism as their intellectually beacon -> the very thing used to destroy the marxists in the west in the first place.
Furthermore, you also have some deprogramming to do because what you said seems to indicate you view mass production as inherently inferior to artisanal handicraft, which is its own bourgeois - nay, even feudalistic elitist brainwormery. The whole slop vs true art discussion reeks of elitism via petty bourgeoisie thinking and hatred of the masses in the first place. Mind you, I enjoy artisanal work/low volume production of arts quite strongly as well. Also I hate Marvel movies for being OFFENSIVE bourgeois propaganda, they are offensive because of their successful marketing as “inoffensive”.
I liked it.
I wonder if people were this up in arms when the printing press came out 😂😂😂😂
lol there was the same moral panic when photography first appeared, the original slop 🤣 https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/
It’s the same kind of sentiment lol! Always some abstract property that we assign to art that somehow elevates it above whatever it was before 💀 it’s always “it feels like” when it comes to criticism of these new technologies
History repeating as a farce and all that.
Yes
Honestly we need to stop calling LLMs/Image generators AI because it actually causes so much misunderstanding about what that technology actually is - AI usually conjures up images of a terminator/sky-net endtimes.
yeah these are just tools humans use to do things, it’s automation and nothing more
Oh gosh what a contentious discussion. I used to be anti AI and am still reluctant about it. But for reasons i admit that are not practical. And when it comes to practability… art has always been both practical, and ideal. The first cave paintings are of practical use, they serve as guideposts and acts of communication. However, their depiction— of humans playing, dancing with animals— are ideal. They set intentions to reverence, even though the practical reality of humans and animals is predator and prey. They give a moment of awe and imagining to other possibilities. Worship is implored, and through this culture an interconnection cosmology forms… humans arent just predator, they are receiever/giver. This translates to practical understanding of cycles and relationships both important and integral to hunter-gatherers.
At a more personal level, I recently had a partial finger amputation. I’m a musician of 30 years. You can imagine my grief. I felt ruined, that my art could never be seen again. Yet now i have even more drive as an artist. I use electronic instruments and incidental sounds which perform themselves. I do the orchestration, composition and conducting. I, having an ideal objective, am letting go of my decades of training as mandatory for that practical expression.
Maybe I can never play music the way i could ever again. But I am still an artist and still I express. Whether its ability or accessibility aids, an artist articulates the material as expression in form. A brush stroke or stable diffusion are tools, just as a violin or algorithmic synth program are tools, to express their ideals in practical, material ways.
To me that’s the key distinction between the artist and the tools they use. I do photography, and you could argue that I’m just pointing my camera at things and pressing a button to get an image. Yet, if you give the same camera to an amateur, they’re unlikely to produce anything interesting with it. Being able to identify an interesting picture is the skill I developed. My eye is now trained to spot interesting composition, subject, lighting, and color. The tool itself is incidental. If I had the time to spend to learn to draw, I could apply these same skills within that medium and produce interesting results that way. Similarly, you’re able to come up with interesting notes and patterns of music, and using different mediums to express yourself does not diminish that in any way.
Beautifully put. The human element can still persist.
With all due respect commands. This is the most pathetic, utterly asinine struggle session I have ever seen in a leftist space. Hexbear ain’t got shit on the level of mouth foaming hate that some of you are spewing. The fact that someone could come in and post a meme made with AI and some of you all will rabidly attack your so called “comrades” over it to these extent I am seeing in here really ought to cause some of you to sit back and contemplate of you really should even call yourself a comrade.
This shit is utterly disgraceful.
On side note, I thought it was a pretty cool little meme. Can I get my mandatory 3 or 4 downvotes for not spewing hate fueled vitriol about it now?
tbf if it was hexbear someone would have threatened to kill another with a tire iron or something
We really need to steal more Hexbear emojis too. There’s not enough pig poop balls being thrown around. Maybe someone can make an AI version to really stoke the fires.
I’m starting to realize that AI generated memes are a great way to expose reactionaries who are LARPing at being Marxists.
The upside is some people have had their minds changed about this subject over time, which makes me think it’s worth it at least going through it. The downside is every time we have to deal with uncharacteristic levels of vitriol.
It’s a good example of how one can believe in the theory, but still have issues seeing how the culture they’re immersed in impacts them. Like how common talking points for anti go in the direction of definitions about art, but don’t take into account how art has been defined by capitalist culture over time; the premise of it starts from the status quo and proceeds from there, rather than trying to work out a communist view of art first and then looking at how “AI” impacts it. I suspect this is because anti talking points have largely come from people who are not remotely in the realm of marxism and are basically just trying to bludgeon in whatever way they think will work to keep the status quo going as is.
I just think anti-AI people (for lack of a better term, idk how you can be “against” a whole new branch of technology) just find LLM content annoying or unpleasant or distasteful on a personal level, or it threatens their class interests, so they reverse-engineer a smart sounding block of text using terms from real theory to justify that which almost never holds up to scrutiny from those like yogthos who are more informed on the actual facts and data.
Why is it so hard for one to just say you personally don’t like it and move on? Why do the rest of us have to cater to such personal hangups? It’s just become cyberbullying atp. You’ve got people coming up with funnee epic new slurs for people who use LLM’s and then crybullying about it when called out like “it’s from star wars bro it’s fine what about muh poor artists”. Are they really gonna keep chanting the word slop for the rest of time? I give it like 2-3 years before they just kinda quietly stop and move on to the next cause celebre. Nobody whines about NFT’s or crypto anymore after all lol and those things are definitely still around. Just move tf on. Or better yet, use the technology to further our class interests because god knows capitalists are. That’s how technology works.
I also found the humble agitprop artisan image very funny lol
Slopaganda
🤣
with all due respect, this looks AI generated
When are we going to stop perseverating over AI?
Don’t you know? Only the finest hand crafted memes printed on virgin linen parchment, drawn with natural carbon neutral inks and colored with vegan dyes can win over the working classes.
Thats fucking awesome. How much prompt wiggling did that take?
haha here’s the prompt: A candid photograph of an elderly artisan with a focused expression, wearing a tweed apron in a cluttered studio, meticulously using a fine-tipped brush to paint a crudely drawn meme on a large piece of textured linen parchment. The meme shows a muscular figure with the face of Lenin wearing a backwards cap, labeled “CHAD LENIN” in blocky letters, next to a thought bubble that says “SEIZE THE GAINS.” He is surrounded by small glass jars of natural pigments and a palette, with a sign on the table that reads “VEGAN DYES & CARBON NEUTRAL INKS ONLY.”
But how many tries did it take?
first shot with nanobanana believe it or not
huh, that’s the best text i’ve seen yet from an llm, neat
It’s really wild how much they’re improving every few months
deleted by creator
This, unironically! If we didn’t set some standards, then even poor people could do it! 🧐
Anyone can pick up a paper and pencil. Art books are widely available in libraries, or for piracy online. Some communities have communal art events or clubs. Digital art and graphic design programs are all cracked online or open source. Hundreds of thousands of Youtube and Bilibili videos and tutorials. Your own imagination is also perfectly free to use. Famously no poor people have ever drawn or created any form of art, ever, in the history of humanity.
How is this a class issue? Are you saying poor people aren’t able to pick up a pencil and doodle for 15 minutes if they wanted to, or open photoshop or blender? Hiding behind the poor as an excuse is an insane defense for a corporate slop machine.
Instead of a poor trying to come up with a way to express themselves, they should instead type their thoughts into the capitalist machine and alienate themselves further from their humanity and self. No need to improve, no need to think, no need to interact with the world around you.
One of my colleagues teaches Art and English as a foreign language. She’s not even poor because we’re in a country that doesn’t shit on teachers, but even she uses generative AI to illustrate her slides and create grammar posters. She’s time-poor, and she’s not giving the school any labour for free making posters in her free time when she’s got a family life to live. Nobody cares if the capybara character on the poster has 5 or 4 toes. It’s not a maths poster. The students think it’s funny and we move on. No artists are losing work, because even without the AI option there’s no budget for decorating lesson slides or making posters to take home. Unless anyone wants to work for exposure. Can pay plenty in exposure.
And on the flip side, neither of us is using AI to replace artists in situations where we use artists. She still does her own personal art, and I just wrapped a Christmas gift for a valued friend that I paid another artist friend to create. Took her seven months because she’s also pressed for time, and the chats we’ve had over the creative process are one of my fondest memories for this year.
Is this a regional thing? Is it different in your country, wherever you are? I’ve got musician friends using AI to help make music videos and artist friends using AI to make music for their comic strip posts, and nobody’s losing any sleep over it. There’s some other variable and it’s not the AIs.
Please try and employ the dialectic. As always, lets work together on finding an avenue for progress.
While poor people might be gifted in creativity, they dont need to able to draw. using ai slop machine may even be able to help a person without arms to express themselves in pictures which only those learning to draw with their mouths or feet were able to before.
ML still firmly anti ai imo need to get their progress machine checked and reread left wing communism as the denial of a tool for the working class out of ideological reasons is ultraleftist insanity.
Its of course also reactionary, which makes it no better.
This does still not mean that we tell everyone to use chatgpt for therapy but there is room for nuance between the two.
The exception does not make the rule. How may people with no arms do you think there are relative to the population of the globe? They also don’t need to draw if they don’t want to. They can write, using voice to text, they can use a specialized mouse to create 3D animations, they can sing, they can express themselves beyond a slop machine. Hiding behind the poor and amputees is disgusting.
I believe AI is perfectly dialectical in regard to medical research for example, but not in automating self-expression. All that will do is lead to the “sameification” of human culture.
You’re being highly reactionary and are personally attacking a comrade. Do better.
Honestly you could probably make do with half a broken pencil and the back of a receipt. A bunch of digital art programs are also free or easy to pirate.
maybe you could make do but I feel like many people would come up with something like this and it isn’t very inspiring.
Oof nice drawing! Unless it is ai too…
That goes hard honestly, I love that
Everyone starts somewhere too, and I don’t think anyone would expect a beginner’s skill would stay at that level for very long.
I don’t think that I could create a Rembrandt level comic but I’ve been slowly learning to draw and going from what you created to even just something a little better is a lot of fun.
I’m not taking the piss though, minimalist images like that are genuinely funny. Plus knowing that someone took five minutes to open up MS paint and make that makes the image more endearing in a way? Like the person obviously cares and they’re trying their best to show it with the skills they have. Even making something silly like that requires creativity.
You’re kind of doing the same thing here that anarchists do where you make the implicit assumption that everyone else thinks the way you do. Some people enjoy drawing, and investing time in developing this skill. Some people enjoy the aesthetic of poorly drawn memes, absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, it’s not for everyone, and other people like different things. The niche you’re advocating for exists, and nobody will take that away from you. Nobody will stop you from drawing as many silly memes as you want to draw. But imagine how obnoxious it would be if every time you posted one of these silly memes, then somebody would inevitably sealoion to moan how it’s not the type of aesthetic that appeals to them and therefore nobody is allowed to enjoy it.
Psychpost: this “thinking everyone thinks what you do” often stems from a lack of a theory of mind which is part of the neurodivergent package. Many autistics suffer from this, such as i. This means, in my mind, everyone is able to do what i do, will like what i like, will think what i think, at least instinctively. Consciously, of course, i know that this isnt the case but i have to stop a second and remind myself every time. I think we need to remember that this can be the case and might even be the reason for many fights. For myself it was theory that helped me overcome the resulting reactionary stupidity and ultraleftism (i actually used to be an anarchist because of exactly that crap). One of the most important pieces of theory to thoroughly stamp that out was left wing communism by lenin.
I used an LLM to make it.
🤣
Lmaooo
That cool! At least it wasn’t in the regular slop style!
That also doesn’t negate anything I said lmao, but oh no! You got me! I got debatebroed!
Would have been quicker just opening ms paint
I don’t think anyone would expect a beginner’s skill would stay at that level for very long.
I tried drawing for a very long time. I tried it on paper, for years. I tried it on computer, with gimp, with krita, with a graphics tablet (good for playing emulated professor layton too). But I wasn’t even getting close to stuff like the illustrations on ccg cards. I tried rendering. Vertices, bezier curves, even raymarching. I tried AI diffusion.
But only raymarching and AI diffusion allowed me to create results that were close to what I had imagined.
Have you finished through both trilogies yet? My favorite out of them all is Unwound/Lost Future. The ending still puts a lump in my throat even on repeat playthroughs.
When you start declaring AI-generated things AI-generated
Sorry, I’m never going to waste my brain power on doing that.
Really? I’m not wholly opposed to ai art but, yknow, that’s just basic common sense to label ai generated things as ai generated. I mean, China even requires it on their social media [https://cadeproject.org/updates/china-enforces-new-ai-content-identification-rules-starting-today/].
Plus, if you want people to use ai for things like this, it’d be nice to know what model you used. You’re just being disrespectful for the sake of being disrespectful.
They’ve been very quick to discuss the methods and tools when people ask. They have multiple replies doing so in this thread.
This isn’t an image or video claiming to be real, it’s illustrated. We aren’t being led to believe that’s actually Lenin lol, what would a disclaimer even accomplish?
- Sorry I didn’t find the few comments where he does say so. I didn’t see it in these 3 dozen comments on this post so I guess that’s on me, even though it doesn’t actually prove what i said wrong.
2.Common courtesy. A simple “this art was generated using x program” in the post would have prevented this exchange we’re having now. And isn’t he expending the same, if not more, “brain power” replying to these comments as he would have if he had simply put it in the description of the post?
- If he had drawn the art himself then I would have the same problem with him not marking it as “oc” for clarity sake and then getting mad at someone who says “hey you should say it’s oc in the post.”
Should we ask people to differentiate between analog and digital art? Should we ask people to post a disclaimer that they used machine-produced paint instead of harvesting it themself or buying it from an artisan?
Are slop consumers entitled to a creation tutorial under every meme? Or can they just politely ask for information and have a conversation?
OC as a disclaimer exists to differentiate self promotion on consumerist platforms. It doesn’t matter here, we don’t care about the intellectual property of memes or links.
I just don’t find that treating AI generated content as a special category is terribly useful. The case you point with China is around making sure people aren’t mislead into thinking something is real when it’s AI generated. Here I completely agree with labeling something that was rendered as opposed to real. And it doesn’t matter whether it was rendered by a model or in Blender or some other tool. If somebody asked what technique was used to make the image then that’s completely different discussion I would happily engage with.
Also, most of the time I’m likely going to be sharing a meme I found somewhere, and I’m certainly not going to waste time scrutinizing it to see whether it was AI made or not.
Wasting your brain power is when 1 sentence 💀
This discussion is wasting more brain power than simply disclosing your stuff is AI generatedDid you always disclose how you made it whenever you made anything?
Most memes don’t say how they’re made. Go to their pages, complain there too.
When it stops looking like ass.
oh good, you’ll all finally get over it in the next couple of months then
That’s because it is, and looks terrible in general
Educate me: what’s terrible about it?
In the painter one Lenin has 4 fingers on his left hand and 5 fingers on his right. It’s been years of this same problem showing up in AI “art” again and again. I’m not as confident as you are of everytjing being magically better in 6 months.
Also label your AI. Crediting artists is basic shit
Let me get this straight: you want copyright to also cover fair use and some other cases so AI training and use are illegal for everyone inside the empire EXCEPT disney and adobe?
Was this reaponse intended for somebody else?
Drop your mask already, we can see right through it, copyright crusader.
No seriously, I’m confused. Was this intended for somebody else?
Oh no the quickly made shitpost isn’t first try 100% perfect, therefore there will never be any progress ever anymore, its the end of history
fingers
I hope for their sake they never get exposed to the Simpsons.
Simpsons have 4 fingers on both hands
You asked what was wrong with it. Were you being facetious?
Those are two different people
Okay, they asked what hat wrong with it and I answered.
The current piece, or the original post?
The original post was in the generic GPT style with weird plasticy people, general incoherent composition, elements that were just straight goofy, Lenin speaking in nordic runes and tongues, and a weird mass-produced slop feel, among other issues. As was mentioned in another comment, the original post felt like the Marvelification of Lenin.
I don’t entirely remember the original (OP updated the picture in the header for anyone confused) but what I remember from it is basically it illustrated Langston Hugh’s poem about Lenin with comic panels.
People look at memes for all of 3 seconds before moving on, this new one in two panels might actually be more effective for that lol. Though of course we can ask if a poem straight up about Lenin will make anyone stop and think, but that’s another topic - what matters is the possibilities this offers. I don’t think most people when they’re scrolling on socials will stop and pass a magnifying glass over every detail of a picture, especially if they can’t readily tell it’s AI (I’m better at it on a computer, phone screens are so small that the inaccuracies mostly disappear personally, but most people now browse the web on smartphones still).
My mind has been relatively changed on AI since I’ve started using this board. I don’t agree with the hysterical attitudes and reactionary thought on LLMs and originally I had those thoughts too.
Something I do agree with though, is that people should have the option to consume something that is “A.I” generated or not. Just like with any other form of media or expression, people should be able to choose either or not that is something they want to consume. I don’t think people choosing not to consume charcoal paintings doesn’t mean they’re a reactionary who thinks charcoal is inherently a bougie artistic choice or moral failing but just a personal preference.
I think the same attitude should be had towards “A.I” art. That’s pretty much my only “complaint” about it. I think this solves both worlds as well; those who complain of “A.I” can filter it out entirely. Those like me and others on this board who don’t have a problem with it can keep the filter off. Makes sense?
I disagree with the idea that we should be singling out LLM generated content on principle. I don’t really see LLMs as being fundamentally different from other forms automation. The reason we see a hysteria over this tech is because automation is now encroaching on domains that retained their artisanal nature up to now. Visual artists, musicians, writers, and so on, are all of a sudden seeing their jobs becoming proletarianized.
Ultimately, what we should be focusing on is the end result as opposed to the process. Is the graphic, or song, or a piece of writing effective. Does it convey something useful, is it resonating with the viewer, etc. These are points worth discussing. What tool was used to produce the content is entirely beside the point. Perseverating over that is not productive, and I don’t think this behavior needs to be encouraged.
I disagree with the idea that we should be singling out LLM generated content on principle. I don’t really see LLMs as being fundamentally different from other forms automation.
Just because we might have that thought or understand this, doesn’t mean that other people will feel obviously conned or lied to when they consume something they think isn’t “A.I” generated only to figure out it is. I don’t have an issue with A.I but I don’t want to consume any writing or pieces created by it. Don’t want to limit anyone from doing so, nor do I have an issue with the art on a moral or philosophical level. Often, I can just tell, just as I was able to with this one and it doesn’t spark any artistic curiosity or appreciation for it.
This is why I brought up charcoal painting, I don’t really care for it nor have any appreciation for it myself nor do I want to limit people from it. But in every “media website” or collection, I can filter out specific forms of media or expression. “A.I” should be subject to that as well…like any other form of art.
Is the graphic, or song, or a piece of writing effective. Does it convey something useful, is it resonating with the viewer, etc.
All of that goes out the window when the original viewer feels as if they are conned. Priming that the piece is made with LLM or “A.I” prevents and circumvents that entirely. Someone complaining about A.I on a filtered post actively chose to view an A.I piece and complain about it. With any other form of art, presenting it as a comic/graphic novel media and finding out it was old-school traced (this is an example) feels deceptive even if it was a legitimate form of expression and art. It comes down to proper classification to me, honestly.
EDIT: I should say there has been a piece or two that has struck me as good, but I should be able to seek those things out specifically amongst other forms of art if I so chose.
I’m going to argue that this is just a short term phenomenon we’re seeing right now because this tech is new, and people are really fixated on whether LLMs were used to make something or not. In a few years, this will just become another tool that everyone uses, and completely accepted practice for creating content.
What’s going to be interesting to watch is how art form evolves now that the barrier for making images that used to require a lot of technical has been drastically lowered. We kind of saw this happen in video game industry already where graphics have gotten so good now, that simply making a game graphically impressive is no longer a selling point. The space is saturated with tons of great looking games, and it’s no longer the interesting aspect. As a result, we’ve actually seen a resurgence of indie games and styles like pixel art. There’s charm in having simpler graphics, and focusing on interesting and innovative gameplay has become the real challenge. I suspect that a similar thing will be happening in the art world where people will start focusing on other things than simply making something look technically impressive.
I’m going to argue that this is just a short term phenomenon we’re seeing right now because this tech is new, and people are really fixated on whether LLMs were used to make something or not. In a few years, this will just become another tool that everyone uses, and completely accepted practice for creating content.
I don’t disagree with you. There’s plenty of forms of automation that are widely used in every form of media today. In terms of static imagery/art-pieces though, there is still some definitive “genres” of expression, forms and pieces. I also think there is going to be plenty of pieces that wont use these forms of automation; not all, I would say most, art is meant to be competitive or “breaking edge” and plenty still use classical or “antiquated” methods of automation for creation.
I think no matter what, people should still be able to choose what forms of expression or art they want and there will be plenty of people to satisfy that need/want.
Right, I don’t think generative tools are going to replace traditional art any more than Photoshop has. These forms will continue to coexist side by side. If anything, I’d argue that once production of commercial art becomes automated, people will actually start producing more art for the sake of art itself. People will paint, make music, and write novels because they have an urge to express themselves and share an idea in their heads with others.
To me that’s what art is about at the end of the day, and the way I’d define slop is not based on the tool used but based on the intent. Things like advertisements, commercial illustrations, and so on, that are generated by humans have far less artistic value than LLM generated images that somebody made because they wanted to express some idea they had.
