this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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AI art is real and good from a socialist viewpoint. AI in general is great tech and I love it, I want more of that and less of the corpos and the bourgeoise "b-b-but my IP!" artbros
I can see where you're coming from, but I think there's also an anti-socialist angle to the way it's being used right now. It further alienates the artist form the art, enabling the extraction of their labor by the owners of the algorithms.
If the source code and data sets of the AI were in the public domain, or as easy to access and modify as the art they take advantage of, it would be more compatible with socialism. As it stands AI is being leveraged as another tool of capitalist exploitation to funnel even more money into big tech stock valuations.
I mean, Stable Diffusion is open weight, the code is there too, so is the paper, and it is free as in free beer and incredibly easy to use thanks to the open source community. In the same vein, Mistral is a good fairly libre LLM.
I think the problem is that when people hear AI they think DALL-E and ChatGPT whereas to me that's just weird corporate alternatives.
The way people interact with technology has been so commercialised and basically repackaged into less tech and more something akin to products for the average person and it's a damn shame. Crypto to them means something something NFT hot potato, to me it has always been about buying drugs and circumventing laws. To them - internet is ads, to me the internet is how I avoid ads that I see way more of IRL. Algorithmic content in my internet browsing experience is basically non-existent.
As a result there's a cultural divide there where us slightly more tech-savvy folks live in a completely different world where for us it quite literally really isn't the case. I'm happy to reach across that divide and educate so we can actually modernize the left because no matter what - this isn't going away.
But I think a lot of artbros don't really want to learn or discuss this, and when you have irrational, baseless reasons for hating AI art like blatant falsehoods i.e. "it's all just theft look at this totally not img2img example of my art!!!" or cultish nonsense about "souls" or "culture" or "spirit" or "human spark" or whatever other spook du jour, it's impossible to argue.
This is made even worse by the fact that at least from what I've seen, currently proposed regulations will only lock in corporate control on the models by ensuring that only those with the capital can meet those regulations or pay fines for not meeting them, and the artbros pushing for them without understanding anything about tech play right into the corpos hands.
It's ironic, the same types in my xp will often will joke about some unhinged code monkey on the orange website thinking he knows everything about politics just because he is the smarterest programmer in all of JS bootcamp, yet they fail to see that by repeating the silly theft and appeals to nature etc. arguments they are playing into the same trap of ignorance in that they don't fully understand the tech they're drawing conclusions about.
I see AI art as mostly a toy. As in, you can easily create nice looking pictures, but it falls flat when you want something specific. The thing with intellectual property is that currently, its necessary so that artists can be paid for their work, but it last way too long. I'd be in favor of limiting to twenty years since publication. This would allow artists to monetize their work, even handsomely, if they produce something outstanding, but it would stop cultural landlords like Disney from arising.
Although if you personally can't draw, and therefore can't actually put your idea on the canvas exactly as you think of it, it isn't that far off from commissioned art once you learn how to use inpainting.
You iterate each part until you end up with the results you are happy with.
I'm not a graphical artist personally but I'd imagine that even those who can draw don't always have the skill to lay it out exactly as in their head either.
I mess around with music a bit as a hobby and I feel like it took me years to learn how to actually carry an idea from my head all the way to a track without it changing simply because I lacked the skill to express what I wanted, and even still it sometimes isn't quite right.