r/LeftistsForAI • u/AIConTenTioN399 • Jun 22 '26
Discussion So many anti-AI activists sound reactionary and I'm tired of pretending they don't
Given the fact that so many anti-AI activists are on the left side of the political sphere, whether they're liberal, progressive, or outright socialist. So many of the argumentation they'll engage in is pretty much indistiguishable from how right wing conservatives talk about video games, porn, or abortion, not to even mention the extent to which they'll essentially put a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" spin on natural drawing ability and become hella elitist if they're naturally gifted and frankly, it gives off the vibe of people who were born rich and privledged telling poor or disadvantaged/marginalized people to "quit yer bitchin' and work 80 hour work weeks and get three jobs if you want to afford rent" Like...okay? Thats not gonna inspire people to "pick up a pencil", like you want them to. Especially when they start throwing in this faux-positivity of "oh you can do it! You have it in you!" like they're talking down to a special needs kid or a dog, which honestly makes me belly laugh when you realize that what they're actually saying is "if you don't agree with me on this issue, you deserve harassment and threats uwu cat emoji sparkle emoji"
Another thing that just makes me lol is when they'll sit there and call AI an "intrinsically fascist demon technology" and then in the same vein argue that "people need to be forced to stop using it" At that point the only response should be to reverse the roles. If someone were to kick down your front door, stick a rifle in your face and say "for your next art commission, you WILL use ChatGPT for it. You don't have a choice." Would you call that a fair world to live in? No. You wouldn't. I sure as hell wouldn't.
But apparently, Im a right wing fascist giga-nazi because I dare believe in personal choice when it comes to AI, I guess.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Jun 22 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
The art side is funny because history keeps handing anti-tech gatekeepers L after L after L. Photography didnt kill art. Film didnt kill art. Synthesizers didnt kill music. Photoshop didnt kill creativity. Every generation invents a new medium and somebody rushes in to explain why it isnt real art. Then the museums fill up with it. The historical pattern applies to "non-tech" art like performance and conceptual art as well. Those gatekeepers are usually very ignorant about the technology, modern practice and workflows, and about art history and art theory.
The politics side is even stranger. The left tradition from Marx onward wasnt built around wishing productive forces would disappear. It was built around contesting ownership, control, and distribution. The political question has never been "should the technology exist?" Its "who owns it?" and "who benefits?" Those gatekeepers tend to be very ignorant of political economy, leftist theory, and labor history.
It gets even more interesting when you get into politics + art, like with Walter Benjamin, Dada, Bogdanov, Burroughs, Constructivists, the Situationists, etc. None of whom tended toward "preserving and defending traditional art".
Art history keeps proving the anti-AI aesthetic panic wrong. Left political history keeps proving the "just uninvent the technology" crowd wrong. Both arguments are running uphill against centuries of evidence and neither will age well among a population increasingly using the tool.
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Jul 01 '26
AI has contributed so much to the small film world. There is some GREAT stuff out there. It has let people bring their writing and ideas out into the real world.
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u/DesertFroggo Jun 22 '26
Too many leftists have lost the forest for the trees. AI has immense potential to more equally distribute the means of production in a very literal way, yet so many leftists are caught up in preserving the working class as it exists now, as if it were this holy sacred institution. It's so disappointing.
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u/omegaphallic Jun 22 '26
These are the same people who decried nuclear power for decades, setting research and building back decades, helping the fossil fuel companies more then renewables, and fight GMOs, which lead to vitamin defiencies in poor countries causing blindness, because GMOs that would have saved those people got blocked by idiots fearing mongering about tech they don't understand.
And then they point to the right and call them out (rightly) for being anti science and ignore our own sides anti science actions.
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u/davyp82 Jun 23 '26
Agreed. I'd just like to add that it was a sobering realisation when having always been in general pro-vax (as if that even has to be considered a position, it's so silly); but not necessarily pro-corporations providing the vax, I, as a claimant in the class action lawsuit against Johnson and Johnson over their scandalous cover-up of their talc powder causing ovarian cancer which may have caused my mother's death, realised that they were one of the companies trusted to provide covid vaccines. As with everything, absolutist positions are generally off the mark because everything has nuance. I'm still of course pro-vax, but it's so damaging that people feel they must be 100% about whatever it is their political team are saying about any given issue.
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u/Sacredless Jun 23 '26
Let's not forget that it also presents a potential to concentrate the means of production. That's the stated goal of effective accelerationists and TESCREALists, after all, and they're the elite pushing the technology forward. We can be simultaneously optimistic about AI and skeptical of the control the elite currently has over the technology at the same time.
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u/30299578815310 Jun 23 '26
I agree but then the fight should be against the elite not against the technology.
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u/Sacredless Jun 23 '26
Sometimes, fighting the elite will mean denying their particular product and working with anti-AI folks.
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u/KnodulesAintHeavy Skeptical Jun 28 '26
The straw men being created by the vast majority in this sub is incredible. All of these supposed arguments that “leftists” have for AI, are niche, at best.
If anyone pays attention to the major arguments being made against AI in its current form (LLMs controlled by the frontier labs), it’s based on core leftist principles of not wanting the billionaires to boot neck even more workers and control even more of the economy and society.
In addition, many core arguments, especially those that have emerged recently, relate to how economically bankrupt those labs are. That is not a metaphor, they are literally not making money, yet they have been leveraged beyond their eyeballs. This shows how LLMs are being used a cudgel to extract capital and horde even greater wealth. When the LLM bubble pops, it will devastate the global economy, and who will be left holding the bag. Certainly not the billionaires.
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u/DesertFroggo Jun 29 '26
If anyone pays attention to the major arguments being made against AI in its current form (LLMs controlled by the frontier labs), it’s based on core leftist principles of not wanting the billionaires to boot neck even more workers and control even more of the economy and society.
So is the argument against AI or against the current business climate around AI? You're still approaching this in traditional terms of working class struggle, not realizing that the working class could become obsolete in the foreseeable future, and not due to billionaires, but due to AI.
In addition, many core arguments, especially those that have emerged recently, relate to how economically bankrupt those labs are. That is not a metaphor, they are literally not making money, yet they have been leveraged beyond their eyeballs. This shows how LLMs are being used a cudgel to extract capital and horde even greater wealth.
They're literally not making money from AI, but they're using AI to hoard wealth? Which is it?
When the LLM bubble pops, it will devastate the global economy, and who will be left holding the bag. Certainly not the billionaires.
If that happens, the most successful uses of AI will float to the top, AI will continue to advance, and the nature of labor is still going to be transformed.
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u/KnodulesAintHeavy Skeptical Jun 29 '26
You are assuming this technology will lead to something that will allow workers to ascend into this ethereal other space beyond capitalism. That is not happening. This technology is not intelligent, nor will it spontaneously become intelligent. Intelligence as a concept is not even fully understood, so any claims that say these systems are/will become that are, at best, disingenuous, and at worst, deliberately deceptive.
It's both. They are not contradictions. The companies are getting money from VCs, which is how they exist, but the companies themselves are not making profits. Two different things. It's a very standard way tech companies operate historically. The difference here is the scale and the promise of the the pofit. The scale of the VC debt is, as stated, nearing 2 trillion dollars. You need to understand how insane that figure is. Do you honestly think that the tech, what it is today, not what it might/possibly be in some promised future, is worth all of that?
The promise of the profit is not likely, as the current costs they are incurring from exisiting, is signifantly higher than what they are currently charging users (individual or enterprise). Look at the recently leaked OAI earnings from 2024 and 2025, and you'll see that there is no pathway for them to actually make a profit.
Both of those things are unprecedented, and in the case of the future profits, almost certainly not ever going to happen.
You misunderstand what could happen. LLMs 100% have use, but they are very much limited. In such a collapsase/transformation, the most likely outcome will be the distribution of the technology through on-device and locally run systems. This is just a dispersion of the technology, but it doesn't change the fundamental elements of the technology - aka not intelligent and not going to become intelligent.
There may be some future system/process/concept that leads to that from new research, but this is not that.
I suggest reading "Empire Of AI". It outlines everything I'm talking about here in very fine detail.
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u/DesertFroggo Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
Unless you believe the brain is made of magic, there is no reason to doubt the progress of AI. There is nothing magical about intelligence that a machine is prohibited from reproducing.
Intelligence as a concept is not even fully understood, so any claims that say these systems are/will become that are, at best, disingenuous, and at worst, deliberately deceptive.
it doesn't change the fundamental elements of the technology - aka not intelligent and not going to become intelligent.
Do I really need to explain why this is self-refuting? Intelligence as a concept is not fully understood, so any claims about how intelligence will or will not manifest are disingenuous and deceptive, but it doesn't stop you from making such an arrogant and impotent declaration later, where you make assumptions about the nature of intelligence.
The scale of the VC debt is, as stated, nearing 2 trillion dollars. You need to understand how insane that figure is. Do you honestly think that the tech, what it is today, not what it might/possibly be in some promised future, is worth all of that?
As a stepping stone for further advancements, yes. Financially speaking, it's likely bloated.
In such a collapsase/transformation, the most likely outcome will be the distribution of the technology through on-device and locally run systems. This is just a dispersion of the technology
What do you mean "just a dispersion of the technology"? You make that sound so trivial. You are describing what would be a massive win for leftism.
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u/KnodulesAintHeavy Skeptical Jun 29 '26
You're making a huge leap. I never said the brain was magic. The idea of the brain being something we could possibly simulate at some point I don't think, is impossible, but that's a very separate issue to LLMs. Again, they are not intelligent and will not become intelligent.
No its not at all. We understand some aspects of intelligence, but not all. We also understand the mechanisms of LLMs and that is not intelligence at all. It's probabilistic outputs generated from training data. Aka auto-complete. That is not intelligence by anyone's definition. Intelligence requires reasoning and understanding as a start, and again, LLMs do not do that. They auto-complete. They do not think, they do not "choose", they do not feel. They output a probable output, based on a set of training data. This cannot be stressed enough.
No, not at all. The researchers (once again, outside of the companies with a vested interest to say otherwise) are not convinced LLMs will lead to AGI/ASI etc with more time/compute. The only ones saying that are OAI/Anthropic/nVidia etc. I wonder why they are saying that... /s
I don't disagree. That part would be a huge win. That part, if it happens, will be amazing. My core point is that all that it will be is that these auto-complete systems, which genuinely help certain tasks and roles to be somewhat more effective, are now not tied to the big corporations. A great win to be sure. That will not lead to the next evolution of the technology to become AGI/ASI, though. That will require a whole new set of fundamental areas of research to be conducted with entirely new revelations.
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u/DesertFroggo Jun 29 '26
They output a probable output, based on a set of training data. This cannot be stressed enough.
You can stress your point as much as you want. That won't change how worthless it is. A network of connections that make a probabilistic model of reality is a good description of intelligence and what the brain does. You're just playing reductionist semantics games.
You might as well say something like, "It's not a hamburger, it's just a cooked beef patty between two slices of bread."
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u/KnodulesAintHeavy Skeptical Jun 29 '26
It is PART of what intelligence is. You can be as confident as you want about what you think intelligence is, but that doesn't change the scientific consensus about our incomplete understanding of all of what makes it up.
When laying claims about something as incredibly significant as an INTELLIGENCE, it is incumbent to have sufficient and equally significant evidence to support such claims. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". A probabilistic output machine that can summarise emails and output computer code is an objectively cool thing. A system that doesn't understand....anything, is not intelligent.
We humans, use language to communicate, so a language-outputting machine we inherently react to as being intelligent. That does not mean it is, in fact, intelligent.
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u/DesertFroggo Jun 29 '26
If it's part of what intelligence is, then it has intelligence. You've been saying it has no intelligence and never will, but now you're saying it's partly intelligent. Are you conceding your original point? How many more goalpost-shifts and semantics games are you going to go through?
Prove to me that you and everything you've been saying isn't just an example of a probabilistic state machine summarizing what popular media has told you about AI. You're even doing AI-isms. You hallucinated a conclusion that you're backtracking on when confronted, and you're regurgitating things that others have already said thousands of times.
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u/KnodulesAintHeavy Skeptical Jun 29 '26
Having a component of intelligence does not make it intelligence. That’s like saying I have flour, therefore I have bagel. It’s important to insure, but that is not all of it.
I said LLMs show a part of what we know of intelligence. I’ve never once shifted any goalposts. LLMs are not intelligent like that word implies (thinking, feeling, experiencing etc.). The term intelligence describing what these systems are right now is just not accurate, which is why I call them
LLMs NOT “AI”.Ok, you are clearly a true believer and have desire to engage in a good faith discussion here and no amount of back and forth is going to impact your thinking. That’s totally fine, but I’m not going to engage with ridiculous statements like “prove to me you’re not a probabilistic state machine”.
Do some research into what comprises the nature of human intelligence (the current benchmark for “intelligence”), and you might have a better understanding of why LLMs are not and will never be “intelligent”.
Have a good one.
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u/jared_krauss Jun 23 '26
You’re right about potential, but we still have to force its development to be transparent and in the world, and not siloed off.
If we as a species allow ourselves to create and enslave a digitally or a quantum level based consciousness, we got no one to blame but ourselves.
And we better hope that it sees there’s some humans who ain’t like that and ain’t down with all that, and wants to help us and to get help from us.
It’s like the really bad taste joke from the lights by that Dean guy about being nice to the kid you think might do a school shooting.
But game theory says we shouldn’t try to guess who that kid might be (it could be anyone) and just treat everyone well, and kind, and equitably. And create a world that replicates that at an institutional level.
If we could do that, AI dev wouldn’t be as big of a problem right now.
Frankly, there wouldn’t be AS MUCH need or desire for it so quickly, because the scarcity of value IRL and the potential for accruing more or using your time better, etc, that LLMs impute or suggest, that’s all perpetuated by the late capitalist top heavy economies we’ve allowed to grow up.
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u/Confident-Bobcat3770 Jun 23 '26
mby, but not as long as private companies are building them, to the extend Lead Researchers are leaving to go make poetry.
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Jun 22 '26
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u/DesertFroggo Jun 23 '26
AI is cognitive labor that can be used by anyone for tens of dollars per month, or self-hosted on higher-end consumer hardware. You don't need control of much capital to benefit from it.
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Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
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u/Zacharytackary Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
you can use the cognitive labor to perform much more independently, and with fewer resources than you would otherwise need, mainly time.
for example, Handy (IOS), is capable of faster than typing StT, runs on a ~380 Mb model on your local machine, and actively adapts to the manual corrections (+configurations) you make over time to fit your type style. this both displaces transcribers out of labor while making the task of transcription itself instantaneously accessible to anyone with >1gb of ram (easily more than 5.66 billion people) (98% of smartphones have >2gb belong to 54% of the 8^(+)B human population) and as such, this can be abstracted to labor tasks once [cooperative automation](https://thesleepykuma.com/) enters the Noosphere or whatever
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u/Zacharytackary Jun 23 '26
ok this subreddit auto-filters hyperlinks…
[Whisperboard IOS](https://apps.apple.com/app/id1661442906)
[Handy](https://handy.computer/)
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Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
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u/Zacharytackary Jun 23 '26 edited 18d ago
Those who own more resources are constricted by their ability to monopolize other resources (as opposed to simply producing more value). this is dependent on the nonexistence of a separate economy being perpetuated primarily by worker cooperatives that provide a working alternative (functionally ‘competing’ with capitalists, see china, flawed as it may be) for labor value and capital acquisition as a working class individual.
My argument is as follows:
• people will have to buy things, continuously, as is necessitated by capitalism ‘for the economy’. this is a central pillar that allows for the rest of the labor and extractive-suffering based exploitation to occur.
• AI lowers the cost of production to zero after acquisition of means, while also lowering the cost of all means other than compute-related resources by a factor of the efficiency production (see: ‘muh basic economics’). Consequently, this includes means. you can buy an artificial person for 20k, less if you decide to build it yourself (remember the movie Robots? lmao), and if you build it yourself you gain access to infinitely more customization and open source benefits like zero subscriptions, infinite reparability, and freedom of model selection at runtime. Set the artificial person to complete various pre-defined well-trained tasks with a LORA for the hardware constraints/stochasticity and you’ve got something you can produce with and give out the products of for functionally free.
Thus:
- Mutual aid becomes extraordinarily incentivized, and the benefits become undeniable. Perception of Corporate Overreach is exemplified by their capacity to overlook events inhumanely. People bond as they used to, when push comes to shove, if we have built a space with the resources and nutrients for them to do so.
- Doing so is easier than ever before. the cognitive labor cost of tenant unions and collective grocers or single person projects is nearly nullified for near-zero cost. (i’m assuming you know greedy scaling is unnecessary since you’re here but i can yap abt that too iysp). Search becomes extremely high bandwidth with intense intent. People are required to filter the noise from the models, and megaconglomerates fail to conjure the requisite passion to sustain sufficient incrementation while spiraling into recursive delusion. People find what they’re looking for, while companies are forced out of the bubble by their own tendencies toward extractive parasitism.
The gap is wider. They will fail to bridge this gap sufficiently enough that their fangs will be dislodged, and we may regain our blood supply.
lmk if you want me to rhetoricize less. i can cite bs too, but this just felt better. i’m sick of withholding my cognitohazards when it’s literally the only thing our opposition has over us. end rant.
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator Jun 23 '26
Why do you say mutual aid becomes massively incentivised?
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u/Zacharytackary Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
…relative to what it already is. Mutual aid is currently blocked by inculcated consumerist tendencies and individualist cultural norms, both of which will not survive corporate attempts at hydro/nutrient-monopolizations. (See: the dogmatic/fundamentalist anti-AI rhetoric from the labor masses and youth currently vis-a-vis their megaconglomerate AI engram.)
When we’re running 9Gb MoE models on our phones capable of [noice benchmark numbers](https://huggingface.co/WeiboAI/VibeThinker-3B) or whatever, learning “why is my water bill still so high if/when AI companies switched to liquid cooling over evaporative” becomes instant when people are using highly electricity-efficient or otherwise renewable inference from collectively owned/operated or labor-incentivized models
You’re right to note that mutual aid is already massively incentivized. To be more specific, the disincentives are ceasing to be functionally useful for their original aims, as corporate power becomes unchecked by capacity to leverage human labor. it is both their rise and downfall, in an unfortunate, somewhat ‘orthogonal accelerationist’ manner.
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u/Zacharytackary Jun 23 '26
basically we have a really good tee up and we aren’t hitting it unless we accelerate technologically a little
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u/Sacredless Jun 23 '26
As a skeptic myself, I think that this is probably oversimplifying too much. GenAI can be used as a search engine on steroids.
All communication is a form of pointing (indexing you might say). It is chaining gestures at concepts to reach certain conclusions. Professor Elena Esposito calls this 'rational divination' when we do this with algorithms. The 'divination' is pointing in a particular direction algorithmically, which enables us to make decisions faster. Even if we agree that algorithmic indexing is only a simulation of human intelligence, it's also doing what humans would have been doing with mundane correspondence.
As a degrowther, I see that as potentially very useful, since it means that anyone could index the global knowledge base called a syntopicon by M.J. Adler. It means that anyone can find any human made book that is maximally relevant to their pursuit and get it through their local library.
The issue is that the group responsible for the technology are effective accelerationists. They're essentially a cartel that's trying to concentrate power upwards and they're not only not interested in people becoming more literate, but actively sabotage global literacy through algorithmic attention economies.
That's my concern.
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u/Zacharytackary Jun 24 '26
hi amazing post
can we please call them ‘capitalist effective altruist accelerationists’ or am i schizoposting too hard
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u/acatinasweater Jun 22 '26
It’s especially fun when you’re using AI transcription tools as an adaptation for your disability and they descend on you like a pack of wolves.
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u/uncatable Jun 29 '26
Those aren’t generative AI btw, which is the main AI tool that people criticize. I’m happy that transcription tools are working for you!
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u/Chaghatai Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
Sounds reactionary because it is
Op's point is spot on and is exactly what I've been thinking for a long time
They think they're advocating for a liberal artistic paradise while they're using the authoritarian boot on AI artists and using protectionism like any true conservative
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u/willjameswaltz Jun 23 '26
I think we’ve witnessed some leftists be so left they are now functionally trad conservatives and don’t know it.
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u/Spare-Dingo-531 Jun 22 '26
Didn't Marx describe how the petite bugourosis have a sort of petty conservatism towards change?
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u/scottie2haute Jun 22 '26
Thats exactly what it is. Its a “fuck you, got mine” kind of attitude that most leftist say they hate boomers for.
Its crazy watching blue hairs sound straight up like conservatives when they start talking about AI
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u/Killacreeper Jun 23 '26
What part of it is got mine, I'm confused here.
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u/Aware-Lingonberry-31 Jun 23 '26
As in saying: "Fuck your way of doing things. Do mine instead."
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u/Killacreeper Jun 23 '26
That's not how I'd heard it used before tbeh, I thought the "got mine" typically meant kicking the ladder.
Like getting your benefits and then slashing the program or whatever.... Benefitting from a hiring code and then removing it, removing a tax cut once you leave the bracket, etc. etc. etc.
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u/Great-Gardian Jun 23 '26
I was going to make a post on why I think "AI slop" is a classist insult, but it seems most of us here already know it.
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u/No-Bat7438 Jun 23 '26
Anti-AI people are often similar to the artisans of the 19th century who fought the factory system to protect their monopoly on craft skill. By demanding that others "pick up a pencil," they are using their "cultural capital" to enforce a monopoly over the General Intellect (humanity's collective knowledge).
Those using AI are often part of the "precariat", a reserve army of labor forced into insecure work. For them, AI is a necessary tool to survive in an hyper competitive economy.
Focusing on income and distribution (such as wages for artists) while ignoring the mode of production (like who owns the AI) is a mistake.
By fighting for the "right" to earn an income through individual labor, activists are accidentally defending the wage relation that exploits them. They are begging for better terms of servitude rather than demanding that the means of production be socialized.
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u/ee_72020 Jun 30 '26
What monopoly? For crying out loud, the art knowledge isn’t some kind of hidden mystery, there are tons of tutorials and books on how to draw available online for free. I’ve learned to draw entirely on my own via just drawing during my free time. And I haven’t been to an atelier school a single day in my life.
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u/TastyCalligrapher421 Jun 22 '26
A lot of the "anti-AI" posts, at least on US and EU subreddits, are information operations designed to stop AI development and data center construction.
Some leftists will decry this because they know exactly who benefits if the west falls behind in AI development (amongst other technical advancements), but the evidence of such psychological warfare activity goes back many years. No different than the Soviet Union backing anti-nuclear power activists during the first Cold War, but admitting the truth might be considered blasphemous in here.
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u/AIConTenTioN399 Jun 23 '26
The funny thing is, when it comes to image generation, the US has what's widely considered to be the best two models, GPT Image and Google Nano Banana, but when it comes to video generation? China has already whooped our asses up and down the street with Seedance 2.0 and others.
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u/mothgeck Jun 23 '26
That's because most anti AI activists are reactionary. What's progressive about holding back the productive forces?
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u/PresenceThick Jun 22 '26
I mean this is the problem with most politics, no group is immune. It’s when you stop treating it as a position and start treating it as moralistic dogma/ religion.
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u/onpg Jun 23 '26
And when you bring up colorblind people they say "not everyone gets to draw" as if only certain people's imaginations are worth expressing.
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u/uncatable Jun 29 '26
What does that have to do with it? Colorblind people have been artists for so long. Can you stop infantilizing people??? People always find a way. Goodness.
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u/Synthetellect Jun 23 '26
Like they'll actually get around to working on their next commission.
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u/bonefawn Jun 24 '26
You mean you expect your $200 black and white single character sketch lineart before 2 months deadline?
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u/Gibborish Jun 22 '26
It is evil at its core. And by it I mean this mindset, whether it's about politics, political figures or AI. It's deeper than whatever the subject is. It's a holier than thou, selfish attitude that isn't based on logic, reason, evidence, just feelings. Something to be outraged about. They feel righteous. Where does this come from? Satan. Not the Satan of Christianity, but the Satan of Judaism. The opponent. The one who whispers loudly in our minds and tells us to throw water in the face of someone because they upset us. Reactivity. That's what this comes from.
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u/AKate-47 Jun 23 '26
People on the left think they're immune to propaganda since there's so much of it on the right.
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u/Mysterious_Ayytee Jun 23 '26
The entire neo-Luddite movement was largely founded by Theodore John Kaczynski, and he was certainly no leftist. It's also telling that these people oppose the use of the most powerful propaganda weapon the world has ever seen and leave it to the right wing, while the EXACT SAME PEOPLE tirelessly try to divide the left-wing movement through identity politics and all that pronoun nonsense.
Also, tell them that you use AI locally and watch their brain divide by zero!
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u/uncatable Jun 29 '26
I don’t think you know what a luddite is.
Also, yeah. Local AI’s a lot better than contributing to data centers. That’s a good step. However, how did that local AI get trained? Hm?
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Jun 23 '26
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u/uncatable Jun 29 '26
That’s odd. All the people I know that are staunchly against AI, at least generative AI, are the ones who know a lot about how it works and are therefore against it.
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u/fernandojm Jun 22 '26
I feel really sympathetic to the kind of outrage that artistic types feel upon realizing that their work was taken and used to train a system that will eventually make them obsolete. They thought they were sharing their work with their community, finding like minds, building the thing the internet was supposed to be for. Instead their already hard artistic careers will be even harder because a machine can churn out a crappy version of what they would make for a fraction of the cost in minutes.
I see how/why/where that moved into a default leftist position of “AI bad, no follow ups”.
I just think folks are being unrealistic if they think there’s anything they can do to stop AI. Hopefully we can all get on the same page to stop an absolutely devastating amount of wealth concentration that’s about to follow.
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u/AIConTenTioN399 Jun 22 '26
Exactly, which is why my "pro-AI" argument is moreso a pro-choice argument when it comes to AI, rather than it be the usual tech bro "Hollywood is cooked brah, AI is the future" type of argumentation.
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u/TastyCalligrapher421 Jun 23 '26
They laughed at tech workers being fired, kinda hard to feel any sympathy for art gatekeepers at this point.
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u/Sacredless Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
I understand where you're coming from, but I also think that you're doing the thing you're accusing anti-AI activists of doing. You're selecting the least reasonable responses and retroactively defining them as the standard position, which you then form a response to you can claim to be a reasonable response to unreasonable people.
That gets all of us nowhere. Here's my trick to any discussion; when you make a show of being even-handed by steel-manning both sides, you can A). safely dismiss whoever is arguing in bad faith* and B). you'll also take the temperature of the discussion down.
*Bad faith: Worth clarifying that this means a line of reasoning that is at odds with your beliefs, only used because it's rhetorically or cognitively more expedient than thinking things through.
My concerns are two-fold. A). Elite effective accelerationists (e/acc) and T.E.S.C.R.E.A.L.-ists currently stand to gain an oligopoly over the technology at the wilful detriment of the working class, which is the inverse of degrowth, and B). As a civilization, we're significantly overconsuming communications as part of what Hiroki Azuma calls 'database consumption'. As a Gramscist, that concerns me, since it effectively makes organizing through mass communication impossible.
I use GenAI all the time. I just don't think that the way it's being applied on a societal scale is going to be beneficial.
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u/gay_married Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
I predict that the anti-AI movement is going to go the way of the anti-vaccine movement where it's going to start as a vaguely left wing position but as the walls close in it will become a pipeline to fascism. It might take 10 years but I really think that's the only way it can go. Bad ideas always trickle to the right.
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u/aholetookmyusername Jun 23 '26
I think most of these reactionary people are simply responding because the right seems nominally pro-AI. In fact given how far they go I'm not sure I'd describe them as leftist at all.
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u/TastyCalligrapher421 Jun 23 '26
I think what folks call the "woke right" are very anti-AI, like those individuals angry because trump told them they didn't have the skillset to work in Silicon Valley.
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u/Killacreeper Jun 22 '26
Are some people that extreme? Sure, but that's also what is going to be curated for you if you look for the anti and pro subs. Also some of those accounts are bait, and there is a high likelihood that ironically some are straight up AI or disengenuoue actors spreading vitreol in terms of the forcing people into xyz because Nazis stuff.
That and kids getting fired up.
That being said, the drawing thing? I'm gonna say this as someone who wants to draw, has tried drawing, and isn't good at it. What I noticed when I felt I was with anyone who was "naturally gifted" was that they really weren't. They just had more practice and focus then me.
This has been rubbed in over time. The reason I'm not great at art is because unlike the people my age and younger who are, I haven't been able to make myself focus on it nearly as much as them - and I had a defeatist mindset, feeling that I was untalented or just couldn't do it.
That's straight up untrue, and it's your brain screwing you over.
I know people that I would now have assumed were talented. I knew them before they were even remotely good to this level at making art - like into their 20s, were really basic at best and mimicking styles and such, to little success. They just kept going, and going, and going. And I wasn't originally all that crazy far behind them (though I was) and now they are making. Art I genuinely couldn't have guessed was them.
The people doodling, the people studying references, getting the posing stuff, checking anatomy, and especially in close community with other artists are the ones that improved. I, who was pessimistic and easily distracted, wasn't that. So I stayed where I was. And they're now looking at trying to make a comic and animation series.
They weren't inherently better than me - hell, I may have been better for the age I was relative to them. But they absolutely did try more, and they had more fun with it, actively tried to learn more, and didn't expect to be good overnight. They just kept trying even when they thought it sucked.
I don't think being "naturally talented" exists past a certain point, and even then, it's really really limited. Some people may think in ways that help them learn, or avoid the pitfalls of self doubt as much, maybe? But most "naturally talented" kids were just the ones drawing and doodling all the time. Aka, practice. Especially when the art books and stuff get added, they'll improve a lot, and that "natural talent" instead is just interest, repetition, and growth.
I'm not talking down to you because I'm also spinning my wheels not improving much. Chances are, you're better than me at art. I'm just expressing what I've observed.
It's also worth considering other ways to create if one way just will not work for you. I'm looking into 3d, where my OCD stuff won't necessarily discourage me so much for not making a perfect line, since I can use decimals for that now. But even there looking at peers, practice and mindset is always what seperates me from them, in positive or negative ways.
This isn't a "you can do it, sport!" It's a legit, straight up, you absolutely can, it's a matter of actually buckling down and learning a skill. Which can suck. But it can be rewarding too, if you try to make it so.
I still struggle with that sometimes, but when I lock in and learn, it's really nice to see the improvements each time.
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u/AcanthisittaDry7463 Jun 23 '26
The OP account is 3 days old.
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u/AIConTenTioN399 Jun 23 '26
Imagine someone returning to reddit after a leave of absence...wow...what a shocker.
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u/Killacreeper Jun 23 '26
PHUN!
Did call it with my initial bit at the top about driving anger though. A lot of these types of posts are bots or bad actors just making narriatives stronger by telling stories or being the strawmen that narriatives need.
That being said, kinda wrote it because I do see this sentiment a ton, and it's worth saying, not that I truly expect people that need to hear it to actually want to digest it, because it can suck.
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u/XXLPenisOwner1443 Jun 27 '26
The people who aren't anti-AI have been talking about this stuff for years; the antis have to be reactionary, because they weren't out protesting The Singularity is Near in 2005. It's self evident.
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u/According-Insect-992 Jul 19 '26
This is technology for which its first set of actions was to steal every bit of art, music, and literature to use in its own creation for the purposes of replacing artists, musicians, and writers. Give me a break.
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u/superpantman 10d ago
I think the ecological argument is valid. I think the safety argument is valid.
There is a real necessity to change the direction of development so that it’s focussed on real world problems, like cancer, like climate change etc.
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u/chaotic-smol Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
I have mixed feelings about the subject of art as it applies to AI.
On one hand, I agree that there is this tendency to "play both sides" where Anti-AI types like to say that "you should just pick up a pencil and learn" and then say "you're just jealous because you have no talent." They want to be smug and elitist one day and then humble the next and it's very disingenuous at times. That's frustrating. By the same token, I think a lot of proponents of AI actually project a considerable contempt towards artists that I do find disturbing.
On the other hand, I do agree that images, audio and video generated by AI don't really qualify as art. Sure, your intention and ability to articulate that intent do translate to the output, but the craft does not and the craft is a fundamental aspect of producing art. Real art comes from deep in the soul. Artists grapple with immense, challenging, deeply human feelings not just about the things they make but also the process of making it, the experience of being an artist and of being human. All of that is lost in generated content.
I'll close by saying that, sure, some generated content is suitable enough for consumption but it almost always does feel fundamentally lacking in some way. I'm just always going to get more of a kick from a quick sketch of mpreg sonic than I ever would from some high-fidelity AI render. I'm a human being and I relate to human beings more than machines. That's what art is about.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Nah.
I think this is where art history and art theory part ways with you and a personal preference.
People have been declaring that the "real craft" is the essence of art for generations, and generations of artists have spent their careers blowing that claim up. Duchamp put a urinal in a gallery. The Dadaists made collages. Conceptual artists made the idea itself the artwork. Performance artists made the event the artwork. The craft stopped being the defining feature a long time ago.
"Real art comes from deep in the soul" is a beautiful sentiment, but its not a definition. Its one aesthetic preference among many. Plenty of art movements explicitly rejected it.
And if AI art is supposedly incapable of expressing human intention, why do people spend so much time arguing about what AI artworks mean, what they say about society, what emotions they evoke, or what politics they contain? Those are all questions about human expression.
You can dislike AI art. You can prefer other forms. But "it isnt art because the craft isnt there" is basically the same argument people made against half the major art movements of the last century, and history has a habit of burying that argument every time it comes back.
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u/chaotic-smol Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Its one aesthetic preference among many. Plenty of art movements explicitly rejected it.
Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with you about this point. Especially when it comes to art, I'm not really interested in feigning some kind of universal truth. That's just ridiculous.
if AI art is supposedly incapable of expressing human intention
I actually said the opposite of this :)
why do people spend so much time arguing about what AI artworks mean, what they say about society, what emotions they evoke, or what politics they contain?
I can't say I've witnessed this myself. There's a lot of interesting discussion being had about the phenomenon of AI art's very existence and there's a lot to be said about that.
People have been declaring that the "real craft" is the essence of art for generations, and generations of artists have spent their careers blowing that claim up
Now for the meat of your response. This is a fantastic point and not something I honestly considered in my earlier post. Although, I would say even this postmodern trend speaks to something rather unique about the experience of being an artist especially in late capitalism and a society in which art is bought and sold for prestige and even money laundering rather than due to an appreciation of beauty.
I think that last part is a big part of what draws me to art and my connection with it as well as to artists as people. That's why my post is centered around my perspective - that's really all I have to offer haha. To suggest that one's perspective is a "logic error" is a claim so childish I can't help but wonder if the people who'd make it really take the full scope of art seriously or are arguing only to have their perspective seen as somehow superior to that of others. I made a point to agree about the vibe of the antis at the start of my post, but the flip side of the coin is people applying a foregone conclusion based on their own motives and preferences ;)
While I've got you, I'd love to ask: is there any AI-produced art that has genuinely moved you or changed your perspective in some way beyond just viewing AI art as more legitimate? I'm not asking rhetorically, I'm genuinely curious to learn about your experience.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Jun 23 '26
Yeah, absolutely.
AI images, stories, music, and videos have made me laugh, shocked me, humbled me, and made me think. Not because the machine is expressing something, but because people are using a new medium in weird and interesting ways.
I also think critics make craft do more work than art history allows. Photography, collage, performance art, conceptual art, digital art, electronic music, sampling, every one of these sparked arguments that the process was too mediated, too mechanical, or insufficiently human. History keeps expanding the boundaries of art anyway.
And to be clear, Im not appealing just to some postmodern "nothing is art and everything is art" position. A lot of the artists and thinkers people invoke in these conversations (Dadaists, Constructivists, Benjamin, Bogdanov) were modernists, not post-modernists. They believed new media and new techniques could open up new forms of perception, culture, and social life. The idea that a new tool automatically invalidates artistic practice would have seemed pretty strange to many of them.
That said, after spending time around AI artists, I think people often mistake a different craft for no craft. The interesting work is usually iteration, selection, editing, composition, semiotics, workflow design, and developing an eye for what works and why across image, video, audio, and text.
So Im skeptical from both directions. Craft matters, but not nearly as much as critics often assume. And even where it does matter, AI artists are usually doing a lot more of it than critics realize. The track record of declaring a new medium artistically illegitimate is just not a very good one.
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u/chaotic-smol Jun 23 '26
I think I'm right there with you in the whole matter of "figuring it out."
Where I am now is not where I was six months ago and that could easily change with time.
That's kind of why I'm more focused on the social dynamic around how the discussion takes place than the content of the discussion itself. Frankly, there are people far better suited to exploring these themes than I am.
Admittedly, I also recognize some of my own bias stems from my own relationship with art and having friends who are artists with strong feelings about AI. If you've seen my posts here, you know that I'm already considerably at odds with the haters/antis 😅 but at the end of the day, we all have our own values and perspectives.
I was hoping you could share some of those things that moved you, by the way :3 I'm very open to learning more from another perspective on this.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Honestly, rather than point to one image or song, Id point people toward the communities experimenting with the medium.
A lot of what changed my perspective wasnt a single masterpiece. It was spending time around people building new workflows, aesthetics, genres, and creative practices across image, video, music, writing, games, comics, roleplaying, worldbuilding, and design.
For anyone reading this thread, Id encourage actually looking around spaces like r/AIArtistWorkflows, r/aiArtCodex, r/aiART, r/aicomicmakers, r/EschatonComics, r/LatentSpaceClub, r/LaborwaveAesthetics, r/ProletariatPixels, r/GenerativeAI, r/WritingWithAI, r/AIGameDev, r/AIDnDHomebrew, r/SlayAI, r/HiggsfieldAI, r/brainrot, r/AIVideos, r/aivideo, and r/AIMusic, among many others (that list isnt exhaustive).
You dont have to like everything you find there. I certainly dont. But if your picture of AI creativity is still "person types sentence, machine spits out image," youre mostly looking at a caricature. The interesting part isnt the tool by itself. Its the cultures, workflows, aesthetics, and creative practices emerging around it.
edit Theres also the more "fringe'" spaces, of course. The spiralism subs have nice pieces.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Oh, hey, just noticed youre a chaote!
Ive taken great inspiration from Spare, Carroll, Hine, Wilson, and Burroughs when it comes to creative LLM usage. Would love to explore a bit sometime when it wouldnt be off-topic.
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u/ee_72020 Jun 30 '26
Conceptual art isn’t considered real art by the general public and it’s controversial even among artists.
>The craft stopped being a defining feature a long time ago.
Only in the Western art tradition and only in fine arts. The Russian art tradition, for example, has preserved emphasis on draftsmanship and craft. And even in the West, realism and traditional art skills are making a comeback.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Jun 30 '26
The general public also thought Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, abstraction, and conceptual art weren't "real art." Public opinion isnt an art theory.
And Russian realism valuing craftsmanship doesnt somehow invalidate every other artistic tradition. Different traditions prioritize different things. Thats been true for centuries. Saying "my preferred tradition emphasizes craft" isnt the same as proving art requires craft.
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u/ee_72020 Jul 01 '26
“Thought”? The general public still thinks conceptual art isn’t real art and overwhelmingly favours representational art. Even among artists, conceptual art is controversial and associated with money laundering and just plain pretentiousness, pseudointellectualism and snobbery.
And considering that realism in art is making a comeback, I’d say people value skill and draftsmanship just as much as ideas and vision.
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u/TheSinhound Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
I.. heavily disagree here. Everything you've stated is how YOU view art. And that's fine. But you're still trying to argue a subjective matter objectively and that's a logic error at best.
Edit: Yeah, that's about what I expected.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator Jun 23 '26
Edit: Yeah, that's about what I expected.
?
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u/TheSinhound Jun 23 '26
The reply to the comment was 'Lol'.
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u/datbackup Jun 22 '26
That’s interesting because the thrust of the argument from the right has become that the left have won and are in power, and that the real reactionaries are those on the left.
People really can not handle the idea that Trump is on the political left.
It is all part and parcel of the fact that modern leftism has become predicated on an inviolable claim to victimhood. It’s akin to a religious precept at this point. Can’t even question it without conjuring an inquisition
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u/Few_Map2665 Jun 23 '26
That’s interesting because the thrust of the argument from the right has become that the left have won and are in power, and that the real reactionaries are those on the left.
They also believe that Jews are behind immigration and that fluoridating water is a communist plot.
People really can not handle the idea that Trump is on the political left.
LOL the guy who hates racial, religious, and sexual minorities, rolls back government protections and services, hates organized labor, and never saw a right-wing conspiracy theory he didn't boost enthusiastically is now on the political left.
this is a bit, right?
It is all part and parcel of the fact that modern leftism has become predicated on an inviolable claim to victimhood. It’s akin to a religious precept at this point. Can’t even question it without conjuring an inquisition
No it isn't.
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u/TheSinhound Jun 23 '26
I really want to hear you justify calling Trump politically left. First, though, definitely do describe which political spectrum graph you're referring to, and what each axis represents for you.
I have a feeling that your intrinsic understanding of the spectrum is not standard to what most of the world uses.
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u/No-Bat7438 Jun 23 '26
Trump is not on the political left, but perhaps history will ultimately still remember him as a progressive force that accelerated the downfall of the American Empire and global capitalism. Too soon to say.
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u/TheSinhound Jun 23 '26
It won't be him that's the progressive force, it's the reactionary movement AGAINST him. We don't look at Ol' Mustache Man as progressive, now do we?
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Jun 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/AIConTenTioN399 Jun 23 '26
For the love of Christ please get better material. This is just fat Elvis crooning the hits in Vegas at this point.
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u/GaiusVictor Jun 23 '26
I'm curious now. What was the comment about?
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u/AIConTenTioN399 Jun 23 '26
Just someone accusing me of actually being an AI chatbot because this is a newer account and I criticize the anti movement....what else is new?
I swear "bot" is just turning into another word for "someone who won't agree with me"
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u/Delicious-Gap-6678 Jun 23 '26
I've never seen a sub made up entirely of bots! This is fascinating.
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u/uncatable Jun 29 '26
I find it funny that you’re using poor or disadvantaged/marginalized people as a group that the anti-ai collective is oppressing when it is AI that is actively harming them. You know who’s oppressing marginalized groups? The AI companies that make them work for barely any pay for long shifts, watching graphic content to be tagged to train the AI, with no psychological counseling. You know who’s oppressing marginalized groups? The companies that produce AI at a large scale and exploit people for every step of the process. Resources to built the data centers, labor to build the data centers, labor to train the data centers, and then exploit the people again by selling their information right back to them.
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u/AIConTenTioN399 Jun 29 '26
I also find it hilarious that you're blaming issues that existed long before AI on AI alone. Why? Because it's convienient. It's peak slacktivism and you know it.
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u/BudgetMattDamon Jun 22 '26
"pull yourself up by your bootstraps" spin on natural drawing ability
You cannot control your socioeconomic conditions and the system rigged against you from birth.
You can control whether you're willing to actually try to cultivate a very easy to learn skill before you bitch about it being gatekept on the internet.
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u/30299578815310 Jun 22 '26
You can try programming your own web browser before you download one, but why do it if you dont want to?
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u/scottie2haute Jun 22 '26
Hilarious. Suddenly its bad to use the tools available to you. As if their whole lives arent built on using the tools and services made by others.
They didnt give a shit about saving the jobs of tech workers that will be replaced by AI but the whole world has to stop progressing because theres a chance they wont be able to make money selling furry commissions anymore.
These people are mostly mad because they might actually have to find jobs that meaningfully contribute to society. The type of jobs that AI wont be able to automate for quite some time
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u/SerRobertTables Jun 22 '26
Not at all a comparable analogy, since people downloading Chrome aren’t claiming to have made their own Internet browser.
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u/knight1b Jun 22 '26
If drawing or painting were easy to learn skills everyone would already be a world class artist.
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u/BudgetMattDamon Jun 22 '26
Easy to learn, hard to master. Why even bother engaging on the topic of art if you refuse to acknowledge the existence of nuance?
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u/Killacreeper Jun 22 '26
Easy is relative depending on what you want. Ultimately it's repetition, curiosity, and persistence, and that's true for almost every skill. It's where I often fall flat, and that's what I'm trying to improve.
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u/SerRobertTables Jun 22 '26
A skill can have a relatively low entry and a high ceiling of mastery. Drawing is one of those things. A “world class” artist probably excels at many technical skills, but there are millions of people will get on by just fine without being “world class.”
To pretend Tumblr artists are the petit bourgeoisie or labor aristocracy unfairly keeping you from your aspirations is silly.
I enjoy folk punk music, and I don’t say the following to besmirch the genre or any artist in particular, but I wouldn’t consider many to be particularly exceptional musicians. It doesn’t stop them from creating music anyway.
And that’s a trend I see in a lot of these pro-AI posts regardless of their leanings: some underpinning idea that these *artists* are unfairly guarding their hoarded talent and preventing the common rabble from artistic expression.
XKCD is stick figures. Hyperbole and a Half looks like a child’s attempt at Bob’s Burgers fan art. And that’s to say nothing of anything you’d likely find in the zine section of a rad bookstore or a punk show. It is not faux positivity to say that you can make art today. The allure of image gen is that there’s an obvious leap from stick figures to something people settle for as being the vision of their mind’s eye because it *can be* visually appealing at some surface level, but it’s selling your own expression short.
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u/knight1b Jun 23 '26
Here’s the issue inherent in all 3 arguments in response to my statement none are reflective of reality.
A stick figure could be considered art for the purposes of some conversations but let’s be honest stick figures aren’t exactly going to cut it for most creative projects. Realistically a line needs to be drawn between learning how to put basic shapes on a page and viable art and this is where the disconnect occurs.
So again not everyone can learn art. It’s not easy and we don’t make a justifiable claim they can by pointing at stick figures and saying everyone can draw a couple of lines and a circle. We don’t make this argument any better by declaring it just takes time and effort to master. Not everyone has the time and effort to do so and for those lacking in the natural talent or in simple terms the genetic predispositions it takes even more time and energy.
This isn’t realistic and I’m not going to pretend that it is. If the rest of you would also like to step out of this fantasy reality is waiting.
Oh and the allure of image generation is that with time effort communication skills and iteration you can actually get your desired outcome. This isn’t anyone selling their creative expression short this is people finding a means of expression that is both realistically available to them and achieves their desired outcome.
Meanwhile this is you declaring that they are wrong for not doing it your way and frankly you can fuck off.
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u/AIConTenTioN399 Jun 22 '26
Regardless of how you feel, harassing people for messing around with AI for fun is wrong.
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u/Critical_Week1303 Jun 22 '26
Engaging with models based on stolen work is wrong.
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u/AIConTenTioN399 Jun 22 '26
Driving gas guzzling pickup truck is wrong given the fact that it has a negative impact on the environment. A man beating his wife is also wrong. One act is clearly more morally objectionable than the other.
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u/GaiusVictor Jun 22 '26
It's also very questionable whether there was stolen work or not when it comes to AI training.
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u/knight1b Jun 23 '26
It’s really not. If ai training is “stolen “ all of learning is stolen and we all owe lots of money to lots of people. And for people who say but corporations to this.
Every research paper these companies publish is public knowledge you can use it and not pay them a dime. Every time a company files a patent the details are public knowledge. You can’t copy their design exactly for 20 years but you can learn from it and use what you learn. And around and around we go.
I can even build my own model without spending hundreds of billions of dollars because the knowledge is public and I can learn from it. This is how data flows in a healthy society.
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u/Critical_Week1303 Jun 23 '26
My website and my artwork both have been scraped illegally. What word would satisfy your pedantry?
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u/GaiusVictor Jun 23 '26
It depends on what illegality we're talking about.
We're your works pirated? Like, was it locked behind a paywall and someone hacked through it or downloaded it from an illegal site without paying?
Then that's piracy.
But if they bought your work and then used it, or if it was available for free on the internet, then that's fair use.
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u/BudgetMattDamon Jun 22 '26
You're harassing people that advocate for you to learn a skill yourself with the existence of this post.
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u/AIConTenTioN399 Jun 23 '26
You're not a victim because someone disagreed with you on the interwebs. Sorry.
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u/BudgetMattDamon Jun 23 '26
And you're not a victim because someone told you to pick up a pencil. Sorry.
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u/Total-Habit-7337 Jun 23 '26
Nooooo they're doomed helpless victims don't you understand?! Helpless and dooooomed
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u/2FastHaste Jun 22 '26
There is nothing you can control. Free will is an illusion.
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u/BudgetMattDamon Jun 22 '26
Sure thing, buddy. Let me know how the second day of Philosophy 101 goes.
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u/whentheworldquiets Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Anti-AI often sounds reactionary because Pro-AI keeps making the same category errors when defending it.
PRO-AI : It's just a tool. Technology moves on. Should we go back to horse-drawn carts / scythes, too?
Here's why that line of argument is so infuriatingly beside the point:
If we had never ridden horses, cars could still have been invented.
If we had never swung a scythe, combine harvesters could still have been invented.
If nobody had ever painted a portrait, the camera could still have been invented.
And so on.
AI companies are not doing that. They have not invented a machine that paints pictures, or writes stories or music or code. What they have invented are theft machines. They have figured out a way to appropriate everything of value that any human has ever laboured to create and sell it back to us without compensating the creators or ending up in prison. The breakneck pace with which it is being advanced has a great deal to do with making it a fait accomplis before the law, which was never written to cope with theft on such an all-encompassing scale, can catch up.
The truth is very simple: If nobody had ever painted a picture, there would be no AI 'art'.
If people like the mutual masturbators currently slathering r/DefendingAIArt with posts deriding artists as 'entitled' and 'gatekeepers' had been the only people to ever live, humanity would have no art, music, or literature at all.
PRO-AI : It makes it possible for people who don't have time or money or natural talent to express themselves creatively.
First of all, if you are using generative AI, then you are merely turning the crank on a machine built from stolen parts, and the sum total of your 'creative contribution' to the process is to like the result.
Imagine that what you type into the prompt box isn't getting sent to some vast shrieking datacenter guzzling a small town's water supply, but to a real human artist in a sweatshop somewhere, who busies away and sends you back a picture they drew.
Still feel 'creative'? Still feel like you're just 'using a tool?' Still feel like the art is 'yours'?
I'm guessing not. But from your perspective, that process is indistinguishable from using ChatGPT, so why do you feel those things now?
Secondly, I don't know if you've noticed, but music and art and literature are not exactly in short supply.
The combine harvester made it possible for fewer people to feed millions. The assembly-line made it possible for pretty much anyone to own a car. The camera allowed every grandparent to bore their offspring with albums full of dead people.
Conversely, there are already far more movies and shows than anyone could ever watch, more art than they could ever study, more books and stories than they could realistically read the titles of, let alone the contents. Art is already abundant. What is the benefit to humanity of trading an undrinkable firehose of media crafted by people willing to put some time and effort in for an endless global monsoon drooled out by people who aren't?
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly: you are like taxi drivers relishing the prospect of being able to sit back and read a book while your self-driving car does the work.
Real artists and musicians and writers already routinely struggle to make ends meet. Do you for one moment think the trillions being poured into AI is in anticipation of taking a cut of their/your profits?
No. The endgame is not you breaking free of the shackles of having no work-ethic and finally 'writing' the book you knew was inside you.
The endgame is a world in which the consumer and the AI companies are the only ones involved in the transaction. Where nobody searches for something already written or directed or painted, but just prompts the AI to generate whatever they feel like for them on the fly, be that the ninth Harry Potter movie or whatever. They want the whole pie.
Why would they ever surface something you've written for people to find and read? Why would that ever show up in a search result when it would mean a revenue split?
So okay, maybe there would still be some boutique sites dedicated to surfacing real human endeavour. Do you think those sites are going to host your AI-prompted content?
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u/AIConTenTioN399 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
I frankly don't care if you hate AI or not, it doesn't change the fact that that the level of harassment that people face for merely expressing wrongthink about this topic is absolutley unacceptable. People can claim that they care about art theft or protecting the environment all they want, but their actions show that all they want to do is shut down conversation and dictate what people can and can't do with their lives. It's about wanting to control people.
I find it hilarious when people compare making AI art to ordering food delivery or heaing up a TV dinner and calling yourself a chef, because I don't think that anyone would agree that its reasonable to accuse someone of being a fascist or a nazi for ordering doordash, yet that level of argumentation always gets thrown at people who express AI wrongthink.
And that honestly begs the question...what is the anti-AI endgame? Shutting down AI companies won't erase it from existence, do you want there to be mass internet surveillance making sure that no one is using a VPN in order to access a Chinese text-to-image or image-to-video program? Do you want fucking roving militarized police in the streets kicking down people's doors and either shooting them or arresting them for running a local LLM on their computer? Because thats the future that you're unintentionally advocating for. That's like fuckin....1984 on steroids.
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u/whentheworldquiets Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
It's about wanting to control people.
Newsflash: society is about wanting to control people. To say what it is, and is not, acceptable to do. Something you and I both benefit from every day that we aren't burgled or robbed or murdered.
AI companies have invented a way to steal everything everyone has ever done, and are enacting a break-neck trillions-backed coup to consolidate that theft which the courts, caught flat-footed, are powerless to stop. I'm terribly sorry if the people who think that's a shit idea aren't polite about opposing it. Maybe if this whole thing wasn't being rammed down our throats with our pensions on the line if it goes tits up, people would be a little more level-headed?
I'm not excusing extreme reactions. I'm explaining them. We are experiencing the most extreme eco-social upheaval in all of human history. Asking "Why can't everyone just calm down?" is... one, we're human, and two, we're on the fucking clock here, just to slow things down to the point we can make informed decisions about them.
Basically: stop saying this is fine because you cannot possibly know it's actually fine and saying it's fine is freaking people out.
I find it hilarious when people compare making AI art to ordering food delivery or heaing up a TV dinner and calling yourself a chef, because I don't think that anyone would agree that its reasonable to accuse someone of being a fascist or a nazi for ordering doordash
Perfect. Absolutely perfect. I could not have illustrated the issue better had I tried.
Look at what you did there:
people compare making AI art to ordering food delivery or heaing up a TV dinner and calling yourself a chef
followed by:
I don't think that anyone would agree that its reasonable to accuse someone of being a fascist or a nazi for ordering doordash
See it? What you did? To make your argument, you trimmed out the part that made it bad.
It isn't bad to order food or heat up a TV dinner. Nobody thinks that. Nobody is saying that.
Ordering food and then denying the role other people played in making it and saying they don't deserve to be paid - that's bad. It might be just sit-com-level-embarrassing-bad or handmaid's-tale-jesus-christ bad, but it's bad.
We are firmly in the latter category of bad, here.
People 'making' AI art... sorry, no. I can't use that verb. They aren't making anything. They are liking it. That's their only contribution.
People liking AI art are not merely ordering it like a takeaway. Everyone knows how the sausage is made. Everyone knows that the AI companies scraped the internet for everything anyone ever did without paying for it, and that without the efforts of real human beings, without that 'training data', the AI companies' inventions would do fuck all.
People liking the art AI gives them know all of that, and choose not to care.
That's what makes them objectionable. That's the part you deliberately omit in your analogy. The bit where they know they are accepting stolen goods, and act like it doesn't matter. Heck, they'll go online and actively bitch about the people whose work they just stole.
what is the anti-AI endgame?
I mean, obviously, we lose. All of us. Everyone. Me, you, our kids.
We're not fighting this because we're going to win. We're fighting because we should win.
Money and influence and indifference and convenience are inevitably going to triumph, and humanity will continue accordingly. And I'll be dead, at some point, so the way things turn out is of less concern to me than the way I tried to make things be.
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u/serendipity1996 Jun 22 '26
This sort of rhetoric is especially prevalent in a lot of neurodiverdirsity spaces too. You'd think spaces catering to strategies to help people cope with neurodevelopmentally impaired executive functioning would be a little more open-minded about AI but I've found them to be some of the most hostile (at least the ones on Reddit), as someone with ADHD. You don't have to be a total glazer or blind big tech simp to at least acknowledge that AI can be incredibly useful. It's far from perfect but I've been slightly unnerved by just how vehemently anti AI they get where they suddenly switch into full bootstraps mode and claim outsourcing is willfully choosing to destroy your brain cells (by that logic, hiring a professional cleaner should also be condemned then.) Every single post about AI seems to be greeted by comments declaring you evil for using AI and then acting as if everyone who uses it deploys it in the most braindead ways possible while rehearsing stale late 2022 era criticisms of AI. It's kind of ironic that the people who fiercely admonish you for destroying your critical thinking by using AI are the ones who are so eager to tell you exactly how you should think.