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  • 39 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
Cake day: September 29th, 2025
  • Atlas@lemmygrad.mltoSocialism@lemmygrad.ml•Langston Hughes: LeninEnglish
    1·
    12 days ago

    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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

  • Atlas@lemmygrad.mltoSocialism@lemmygrad.ml•Langston Hughes: LeninEnglish
    21·
    12 days ago

    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.

  • Atlas@lemmygrad.mltoSocialism@lemmygrad.ml•Langston Hughes: LeninEnglish
    51·
    12 days ago

    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.

  • Atlas@lemmygrad.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Thoughts on putting down elderly pets?English
    2·
    13 days ago

    I’d personally not do this considering the monthly costs of keeping a pet in stasis could be redirected to anything else and it seems to me that the technology is far enough out I probably won’t live to see it.

    Additionally you have to trust that the company you’ve chosen will remain solvent long enough for the technology to reanimate them from stasis.

    Not trying to be a bummer, but they’re important aspects to consider.

  • Atlas@lemmygrad.mltoquotes@lemmy.ml•For those leftists who always feel superior to the proletariatEnglish
    3·
    23 days ago

    The closest analogy I can think of is Malcom X’s words on house slaves and field slaves.

    There were two kinds of slaves, the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes-they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good because they ate his food what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved the master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master’s house-quicker than the master would. If the master said, “We got a good house here,” the house Negro would say, “Yeah, we got a good house here.” Whenever the master said “we,” he said “we.” That’s how you can tell a house Negro.

    […]

    And if you came to the house Negro and said, “Let’s run away, let’s escape, let’s separate,” the house Negro would look at you and say, “Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?” That was that house Negro.

    – “Malcom X speaks” p. 10-11

    I hesitate to directly equate chattel slavery to comfortable white collar westerners, but it seems relevant to the question of why wealthy proles would act against their own class interest. There is this brain-worm burrowed deep that shouts “Where is there a better house than this?”, “Where can I eat better food than this?”, “Where can I get more treats than this?”.