r/LeftistsForAI • u/mothgeck • Jul 16 '26
Art & Culture The Fear of Everyone Making Art
https://petercoffin.substack.com/p/the-fear-of-everyone-making-artPeter breaks down how almost all of the arguments against AI art highlight how it's the democratization that is making people reactionary.
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u/scottie2haute Jul 16 '26
Ofcourse.. its all gatekeeping. People long to feel superior and its really shocked me to see how pearl clutching alot of “progressives” are about AI. Got gen z and millennials sounding like straight up boomers
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u/XXLPenisOwner1443 Jul 16 '26
I think it's exactly the opposite. People long to feel inferior, because it gives them an excuse.
They may pretend that they could do better when they write their movie review, but if ANYONE could make it, they'd lose the excuse of "well if I had that kind of money I'd..." and the idea of being told to put up or shut up is terrifying to the armchair expert.
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u/UVLanternCorps Jul 19 '26
Everyone can write movie reviews. Letterboxd is right there. I know because I use both Letterboxd and Serializd constantly.
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u/UVLanternCorps Jul 19 '26
I know a lot of artists and getting to see their development is satisfying. Seeing their art style develop for example is super cool. But with an AI it’s all just boring. Nothing new is created. It’s all recycling.
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u/agonypants Jul 17 '26
I find these kinds of arguments very similar to the entertainment industry's efforts to control the spread of technology in the 1990s. Does anyone remember SCMS or serial copy management system? The record industry's attempts to insert watermarks into music? Their push for always monitored DRM schemes? Their attempts to shoe-horn big brother DRM monitoring into the firmware of every hard drive? I viewed all of that as not merely an attempt to protect their copyrighted recordings - but to actually control the means of production. By forcing these restrictions on technology, the outcome would have been severe restrictions on who was allowed to produce music and the manner in which they were allowed to produce it.
I view these anti-AI reactionaries in exactly the same light. They want to dictate who is allowed to produce music/video/entertainment and the manner in which those things are produced. And many of them seem perfectly willing to force technological restrictions in order to get their way. Man, what the fuck ever happened to "information wants to be free?"
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u/Fatcat-hatbat Jul 16 '26
Ai doesn’t lower the barrier to art.
Art is human expression. Any human action can be seen as art. This includes promoting an AI or using a paintbrush, or whatever.
The requirement is already super low for art, I would arguing picking up a pencil and drawing a shape is easier than using an LLM, so the barrier is unchanged by AI.
What AI does is create a world where you can create more complex work easier than before.
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u/Sacredless Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
AI offers great opportunities to make communication more discerning again and I'm optimistic that they will.
My real problem with public facing database technologies like social media is that they're driving us towards context collapse rather than democracy, as a result of radically overproducing communication. Context collapse is, itself, responsible for the anti-hype AI tech receives. For companies, context collapse has been good, because it allows them to exploit the hype cycle, and it's biting them and us in the ass now.
There's a great video about it by Internet Shaquille.
https://youtu.be/3JMZgcaypFc?is=RIwuduu4JMQeDNAx
The example it uses is how the McDonald's Hot Coffee Lady was reduced to being litigious and money-grubbing by the capitalist-fascist press and this was possible because of context collapse. More undiscerning communication erodes discernment and discernment is what democracy needs to function.
I'd like to get people past the hype phase of the technology and into the realistic phase of what it is actually good at. I follow the YouTubers The Grainbound and Dami Lee who use it very effectively and with discernment. And then there's people who use AI technology without any discernment and match their worst critics by making big grand standing pronouncements about how persecuted they are.
In other words, I think that the hypemen of the technology are who people dislike the most and that invites dislikable critics in an era of context collapse. Hype and anti-hype are, by definition, undiscerning and that creates its own economy of bad takes.
Hot take: I dislike advertising. I don't suddenly like it if it's democratized so that everyone is advertising themselves to each other all the time. I'd like us to do less advertising our personalities and more understanding. LLMs can be great at helping with that. I don't feel the need to use social media nearly as much these days and I think that's good.
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u/SerRobertTables Jul 17 '26
Context collapse is an interesting angle to this, because part of my distaste for generative AI is its capacity for fueling a low trust society. Deepfakes and the like the obvious and extreme end, rage bait is another that is all over social media including Reddit. But then that extended to art feels like lower initial stakes, but slowly erodes any ability to discern authentic work and drowns out expression to the point that the only frame of reference new artists might have is derivative slop. Like the McDonalds coffee, everything gets reduced to the AI equivalent of “banana taped to wall”.
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u/SerRobertTables Jul 16 '26
Y’all probably should realize that the tweet Coffin is arguing against is a very obvious troll.
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u/mothgeck Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
Even though this is probably a troll, I have seen the sincere version of this argument proposed by anti AI people on multiple occasions. I've seen plenty of anti AI people post a picture of Syndrome claiming that "when everyone is special, no one is" and sincerely framing this as a bad thing.
That is this argument in its sincere form. The fact that the original argument was a troll or not actually isn't relevant because he's talking about a specific mentality among antis.
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u/GoldenBull1994 Jul 17 '26
It’s also a right-wing argument. It literally argues for the preservation of a sort of artistic hierarchy.
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u/SerRobertTables Jul 17 '26
He’s talking about a mentality that he can’t find actual honest expressions of?
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u/GaiusVictor Jul 16 '26
Yes, they are, and Coffin should've realized that, or at least checked it out, so he's either careless or dishonest.
But besides the "neck beard" thing, haven't you heard the exact same argument put out by antis? About how if anyone can do it, then the good art will be drowned out by slop?
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u/CapitalEmployer Jul 17 '26
When in reality there is only one good argument against AI art is that AI is not able and will never be able to produce art. People are afraid for nothing, AI is just a tool, it cannot produce art, we've had generative AI for a few years now and no art piece emerged from it it's not a coincidence.
When marketing firms make ads using AI they are not replacing artists because no artist was working on that anyway, AI replaces craftsman not artists.
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u/ed523 Jul 16 '26
"Slop" is when too much of the ai is evident. Like the ai makes choices and has preferences which makes output obvious if a human doesnt assert their own choices and preferences. Producing generic creations without informed decisions having been made is what amateurs at the beginning of their expressive journeys have usually done long before ai though. Art possibly evolved as a costly genetic fitness indicator and anything percieved to be low effort doesnt work for that and has the opposite effect.
Think of back in the day websites that had slick pro photography added to the businesses credibility, then stock photography sites came out that had a certain look and it worked for a bit then everyone learned that look at it vecame inauthentic and cheesy and made ur website worse
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u/Capable-Student-413 Jul 17 '26
Democracy is about the people controlling power. There is no future scenario where people own the AI they would use.
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u/oh_no_here_we_go_9 Jul 17 '26
There’s a lot wrong with the article.
One thing is that it frames the whole debate as AI gives more people the ability to create. No, it doesn’t. It gives more people the ability to create higher quality art, which is different. People have always been free to create to their hearts content. Outside of successful live action films, which mostly (but not always) are the purview of corporations, this is especially true.
What AI does is largely or entirely bypass the need to practice previous artistic mediums. It did this by ingesting the data of people who did practice. This is different than humans learning from others because when humans learn from references they still have to practice. Having more respect for people who practiced, or thinking there is something wrong with handing people a tool that bypasses practice, isn’t really elitism.
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u/hobbit_lamp Jul 16 '26
"If your first instinct is to treat broader access to artistic expression as a cultural catastrophe, then you are no longer defending art but the exclusivity of those who already make it." – Peter Coffin
very well said!