The comic maker needs to pull their head out and read a book. hitler was a fucking painter. His art work was a large part of how he showed his vision to other members of the nazi party and convinced them to follow his lead.
There is nothing special about professional artists. They are just a profession where it was harder for the big bourgeois to control the means of production. This bred a class of petite bourgeoisie artists who are now having their monopoly on the means of production challenged by open source technology.
Anti-AI sentiment is vibes based and emotional which is the basis for all reactionary thinking.
It also overlooks how there are artists who have worked in other mediums that also work with AI as a medium to, as if AI can’t be a medium, when it is one. There’s are also artist who train models off of their own works as well. Which only makes this comic logic more nonsense.
Hitler’s art fucking sucked ass.
Both his writing and his painting. Reading Mien Kampf is easily among one of the most excruciatingly painful reading experiences I’ve encountered over the course of my life, and I have nothing to say about that book other than that it’s incoherent garbage.
Hitler’s paintings are also awful and show a complete disregard and misunderstanding of basic art principles and compositional cohesion. His work is incredibly amateurish at best.
Also his artwork wasn’t how he showed his vision to anyone? Unless you meant his writing. His paintings are just castles and random still life pieces.
awful and show a complete disregard and misunderstanding of basic art principles and compositional cohesion. His work is incredibly amateurish at best.
You could say the same things about Picaso.
His paintings and writing may not be to your taste but they were certainly evocative to his followers.
Not all of his artwork was terrible. (Possibly NSFW.) Some of his drawings like Selbstporträt and his WWI scenes certainly do look lousy, but other pieces like Schloss Neuschwanstein actually look pretty okay. He was a petty bourgeois who made a living vending his artwork, so apparently some of it was good enough for the German market.
That being said, Mein Kampf is such a slog that not even Benito Mussolini could finish it.
“They see art as a threat because it questions and deciphers the myths, dogmas, lies and illusions that fascism is built upon.”
Bullshit: it just as easily supports the ‘myths, dogmas, lies and illusions’ that fascism is built on. Panzerlied was a banger of a song and carries just as hard as Bella Ciao, and Hugo Boss’ uniform designs put all the Allied uniforms to shame.
AI is a problem because the capitalists control it, and anyone who ignores that qualifying clause and calls AI ‘unconditionally’ a problem is a fucking idiot, and a useful idiot to fascists. It’s the same thoughtless lack of nuance that ACAB has when it includes police in China. Police are an arm of the state and they are a problem when capitalists control the state. That kind of myopic stupidity had so many western leftists supporting the wrong side in Hong Kong which caused such a high degree of harm that it nearly passed a catstrophic tipping point. And now they’re doing it with AI. They’re making it cultural anathema for a ‘progressive’ to touch what could be one of the most powerful progressive tools that Educators in the West have in their struggles as the fascists take their textbooks away.
Really great points. I think it would have been a lot more helpful without the insults though.
That’s true. I have friends who were harmed during the riots in Hong Kong and I’m angry about it.
Okay i feel that. The amount of shit happening is off the charts, no doubt.
The people who died supporting palestine while the whole fucking country in many cases (looking at you germany) were also completely unnecessary.
I think the issue here is that the anti AI crowd is basically left wing reactionaries. I’m just starting to learn about left reaction (e.g. moralizing) which seems to be used to derail the left by the bourgeoisie. Today I heard a podcast on rev left radio which was very good and they basically explained how people were trained like pavlovs dog to react a certain way when presented with positive sentiment about the ussr for example. I think this is what is happening with AI as well. Since the discussion is so loaded with emotion, normal debate seizes to work.
I’ve had this issue on here already. Myself being on the anti AI side. While the argument is correct that ai will never replace human art, the possibilities shown are very numerous. That imo is the key to winning this argument. The issue that I see with some pro ai sentiment is that the fear that rises in people through massive chaos around the world isnt taken seriously enough and that leads to increasingly negative responses.
But I guess this (AI topic) discussion needs more back and forth and probably q&a style answers to get anywhere long term. Otherwise increasingly scared left reactionaries will scream at increasingly frustrated ai proponents.
But I guess this (AI topic) discussion needs more back and forth and probably q&a style answers to get anywhere long term. Otherwise increasingly scared left reactionaries will scream at increasingly frustrated ai proponents.
I think a few critical parts of the conversation surrounding AI to keep things grounded in perspective is:
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Recognizing that how art is perceived culturally is not a static, universal thing across cultures and time periods. (A good example of this is how Hula dance in Hawaiian culture is a means of telling stories and passing down history. It’s not merely some tool of “self expression” and commodity that western capitalist art tends to be.)
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The western investor class are not the only ones working on AI research. (Socialist China is playing an important part in its development too.)
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Generative AI (text, image, audio, etc.) is only a portion of AI research. Automation that could be called AI has been around for decades. The difference is that its level of capability is now being seriously compared to humans in some skillsets in limited contexts; anyone who tells you generative AI is overall nearing levels of capability comparative to humans is selling you a bridge. What people tend to hate in a reactionary way is generative AI, but they talk about it like it’s AI as a whole, which confuses the issue.
I find there’s also just a lot of basic things about it that people don’t know and this ignorance probably makes it harder for them to approach it in a grounded way. For example, even among people who use generative AI, it’s not uncommon for people to think a model has a “database” of information. As if it saved everything it was trained on intact and calls on it to make new things. When it’s closer to something vaguely like the model has a Katamari Damacy ball of concepts glommed together by association and it makes probablistic guesses on what should come next, depending on where in the glom of “things like what it was trained on” you have ended up in.
People also tend to associate text gen AI with ChatGPT, but the underlying architecture of those models is just a continuation model; it tries to guess what “token” (which may be a whole word “go” or a component of a word such as “-ly”) comes next. The chat format AI are just designed with special UI and other tweaks to make sure that it stops before writing your part of the conversation. If you removed that component, what you would observe is the model seemingly having a conversation with itself. That’s what it’s always doing because it doesn’t know there’s a you and and it, truly, but with the right presentation, it can appear as if it’s waiting for you to say your part.
The point of all this info dumping is like… if someone is bent on hating it, at least understand what it is, ya know? And when you do understand, you might realize it’s a bit more complicated than you thought. Some people might hate it anyway, even if they understand fully what it is because of it threatening their livelihood, but I’d still rather them know than not know.
I agree to all of this.
What I think people hate is the capitalist way of treating it and selling it. As a world wonder that will solve everything and make thinking obsolete.
But at the same time they hate the people who believe this, which feels like the majority, which points at the contradictions in society.
Then what I personally hate on top is the layer that we are made to fight about this constantly and so on.
And all these are the material conditions we are forced to exist in which makes my neighbor use chatgpt in a discussion with me which ultimately just breaks my spirit at any future for us human monkeys. Its literally heartbreaking.
So yes, i absolutely see the potential that ai has for leftists and people in general, I just totally refuse to have a discussion with what feels like ai evangelicals who seem to think its the best thing since bread.
I mean the contradictions show up in myself too. I positively wept looking at rosa fucking luxembourg singing a marxist rock song because I’m fucking easy to emotionally manipulate and I understand that this will work on goddamn everyone. But it ultimately means we are going to lose because it means whoever has the bigger model will win the fight to manipulate the masses. Then again china is showing that socialism even in its infancy is the fucking terminator of capitalism if properly applied. This does show strong promise and pretty much proves that they are right playing the ai game.
This list can go on forever, going back and forth (which I alluded to before).
I can understand that, I have definitely had some back and forth on it myself. I think like with anything, we have to keep firmly in view that it’s a tool distorted by the societal model it exists under and that most of what it’s doing in the bad way is intensifying issues that were already there. For example, when someone uses chatgpt as a source, is that bad because AI is bad or is it bad because it highlights the problems with people individually turning to the internet for answers to questions (which has long been a problem with web searching and wikipedia and so on, just wasn’t as bad before). Or when a publishing platform gets flooded with AI genned low effort crap, is that bad because AI is bad or is it bad because it highlights the unsustainable nature of internet platforms that have little to no gatekeeping and the inability to manage the volume of “content” that gets uploaded on a regular basis.
I do think it’s contributing to the acceleration of some problems. But it’s not as anomalous as it’s made out to be, if that makes sense. If it didn’t exist, similar problems would still exist because (I would argue) AI in its current form is an accelerated stage of automation rather than a wholly new form of development. There are aspects of it which are unprecedented as forms of automation, but automation as a whole is nothing new. So the favored response to it for us is also nothing particularly new; it’s a technology that, if it is going to exist, needs to be in the hands of the organized proletariat and the organized liberation forces of imperialized and colonized peoples, not in the hands of a capitalist class or other like exploitative classes.
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Ah it’s written in radlib.
“Artists” being an inherently superior masterrace that the “oligarchs” can never ever become: Harry Potter’s wizards/muggles divide.
“soulless” = bot, “oligarch” = putin -> “All AI users are putin bots.”
“AI art” being soulless, depthless, and uncritical is a feature… not a bug
The vibes-based conclusion of someone who has never been near AI research and is ignoring business interests on top of it. It absolutely is a “bug” how much of it has become associated with “slop”. You think people who put billions of dollars into AI research want it to have a reputation for being “soulless”? That makes it harder for them to make money off of it. You think people who put their career into doing AI research want it to have that reputation either? Who would intentionally spend their life’s work trying to work on something “soulless” that is normally thought of as having meaning to it?
Fascists aren’t villains in saturday morning cartoons who talk about how much they love being evil. With the exception of the rare sadistic psychopath, or the opportunistic grifters who gravitate to any power structure they can feed off of, they’re mostly going to be people who sincerely believe in what they’re doing, in spite of how fucked it is.
Furthermore, not every entity in AI is fascist just because it funds it or wants to profit off of it. If that was the meaning of fascism, it would be watered down as to be meaningless. Nor do actual fascists have control over all of the R&D of AI.
It’s the closest that oligarchs can get to artists’ power to create universes out of thin air
George Bush took up painting after he did his part for the empire in helping to ravage another foreign country alongside Dick Cheney and others. And no, it wasn’t “AI” painting. Oligarchs, capitalists, imperialists, colonizers, fascists… none of them are incapable inherently of working on an artistic craft. And, in fact, art is used heavily to reinforce the status quo. There’s nothing that makes the craft immune to such.
Artists also don’t “create universes”. What artists do is tap into the imaginations that people have. When you look at a cutely drawn electrical outlet and are able to see a face, it’s not because electrical outlets are anything resembling human in actual characteristics. It’s because the human mind can do associating, anthropomorphizing pattern recognition quickly and easily. When an artist draws a flat image that somehow looks three dimensional, that’s also tapping into the human imagination and the way it perceives shapes and colors in space.
Artists work with the human mind’s existing functionality in order to get it to temporarily perceive something that isn’t real as plausibly close enough to real that a reaction can be evoked, for better or worse. If you see it this way, it’s not far off from that to see how it can be used for deceptive propaganda at times; yes, even fascist propaganda.
They see art as a threat because it questions and deciphers the myths, dogmas, lies, and illusions that fascism is built upon.
*Only in the hands of anti-fascists is art used this way.
Don’t underestimate fascism and related awful isms. Not all of their “art” is rightist chuds oozing grotesque racism in a meme format.
Propaganda can be more subtle. Like The Hunt for Red October movie and its anti-communist, “pro US side of the cold war” undertones.
Colonialism hasn’t ravaged the world for hundreds of years by being as obvious as Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Take what we’re up against seriously.
Lmao “soulless” okay you got something else besides that?
I don’t think I like the framing of oligarchs being incapable of what artists do, which is ‘create universes out of thin air.’ Creativity is something any human can do, and while it’s not lost on me that ruling elites are ghoulish and barely human themselves, the whole thing gives me ‘artists are the cultural elite’ vibes.
I think this folds into why ‘pro-AI’ sides of the debate get the most normies. If you’re not hyper online or theory brained you’re going to see artists dunking on a tool that personally really appeals to you, and not understand. You’ll interpret it as jealousy. You’ll engage in the debates further and when anti-AI advocates enshrine the act of creation as sacred and, importantly, unattainable to non-artists, you’ll rightfully see that as bunk and go further into the slop echochamber.
would’ve been more appropriate in the shit reactionaries say community if you ask me
I considered deleting the post but that would also delete the comments. I don’t agree with all of the comments–e.g., I’d argue that art can be used to “speak” truth to power in a way that shouldn’t be discounted. But I can now see that the post sounds like AI is bad and human art is good by necessity. Not at all what I took the comic maker to be saying, but I can understand the criticism.
AI art can be cooped so easily by fascists because the art that feeds the models is overwhelmingly cooptable by fascists. The vast majority of artistic output by volume is absolute slop, and AI art is simply a reflection of that reality.
