the_dunk_tank
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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While, from a disabilities perspective and from a general perspective, it could make sense that AI art would be "harmless" in the absence of capitalism, and i get where people are coming from... I don't think that's actually true, really.
Well, it would probably be more precise to say that AI art IS harmless... But that the general attitude and how it is currently being used and could be used, even under a communist system of production, is absolutely terrifying. I'm probably falling into whatever the fuck argument the article is making, but I don't care, because it's meaningless to me. Anyways, AI art does have a fundamental problem, but that's not because generative language models are the issue, but because current language models and any theoretical communist offshoots of it are entirely socially-reproductive; They do not reflect social attitudes through the filter of a human being's actual experiences, all of their suffering and joy and whatever the fuck ooeygooey stuff, but are basically designed to straight up mainline cultural attitudes directly into your skull.
If you type "beautiful woman" into a model like this, I'm willing to bet actual money that it's always going to return a thin woman. "Successful businessman" is probably going to return some random white dude. And this isn't just a case of fixing this by adding exceptions and SJW-ifying the language model, because that is just a never-ending torrent of whack-a-mole that has to be constantly reexamined. You'd be expecting all of the work that artists normally do for EVERY SINGLE PIECE they make to be done just once for EVERY SINGLE ARTIST, and the end result of that would be that all art made with it would have only one perception of reality. Basically the full centralization of art.
The solution to this would be to turn AI art into an actual art tool instead of a gimmick item, giving every user knobs and tools and making it unintuitive in all the ways art creation software are on purpose because they're necessary for being an actual creation tool. Yes, this makes it somewhat less accessible, but (and I know I'm not really able to speak on it) not really in the sense that it fucks over disabled people, just... makes it an actual art tool instead of a cultural regurgitation gimmick. Like visual synths, artistic sampling.
Ultimately the fear within capitalism RIGHT NOW is that capitalism does not have the tools to incentivize something like that. The only kind of AI art tool that has to exist under capitalism is the culturally regurgitative kind, because every aspect of it is easy to sell.
So communism doesn't SAVE us from AI art, but it gives us the ability to have an actual solution for it.
remove the intent, and you have the current state of open source AI
Indeed, but that isn’t something that someone can just download and use, it is being actively marketed as an instant art button and not the visual sampler it is and all of the support is being given towards the instant art button philosophy
Depends on where you look, really. Most of the interesting new developments (and the bulk of what's available only for open source models and not commercial ones because commercial models can't possibly adapt these things and make them user friendly fast enough) have been a bunch of conditioning models, whose only purpose is adding another layer of human input. And they're usually extremely useful, because there's far more that can be expressed spatially that you can't express with text.
Yeah, the instant art button is what gets the most attention (usually in the form of anime girls with anatomically impossible proportions since straight people are boring), but you can also definitely make things more complicated and gain far more control in the process, and I see plenty of people who came for the instant art ending up doing this down the line. Plenty even going as far as picking up a pen tablet and developing conventional drawing skills to use alongside it. At some point along that process, I think it's clear that it starts being used as a tool.
I mean, you can say what you want, but I think there's going to be a devaluation of "real" art and I think that's sad
Regardless of how many knobs we put on the thing in open source communities, corporations will push and likely exclusively use the "instant art button", because that's what employers want and what appeals the most to the general public. It's what sells, something that's purposely "worse"/more complicated is always going to sell less except as niche stuff redditors do.
Even the art done with "complicated" AI with knobs will be devalued as the general public sees the labor put into it as worthless. Most of the arguments I have seen against this fact are basically just cope. The "anti-AI" art movement isn't just Luddism, it's a movement for the continued perception of labor-intensive art as valuable. It is a movement against the algorithimification of visual art, against the full commodification of art as a concept. Dismissing or being against the movement as a whole is... disgusting, given this, honestly. The only reason to is to encourage the algorithimification of art... something only random executives want. I understand critical support but outright opposition is absurd. It would be like "opposing" the Luddites: You can point out that they're wrong with their goals and strategies, but outright opposing the ENTIRE movement is just a basic anti-labor attitude.
That sounds like a very bad faith reading.
I am sure that there are plenty of people in the movement who are only looking for that, and I support things like the Writers Guild wanting protections in their contracts. That is not the dominant theme in the anti-AI movement. By far the most prominent voices are large corporations and a handful of fairly successful independent artists who are interested in strengthening copyright, which will be of little benefit to anyone who is not already wealthy enough to pursue a copyright infringement case. There's also plenty of people who do actually want to ban the technology outright or who fantasize about sabotaging it somehow, I don't know how anyone could follow anti-AI discourse and not see any of that. The likely outcome of strengthening copyright as part of this, though, is that large media companies will then continue to displace workers using AI tools while also making a larger share of money from the development from either selling access to datasets built from their internal libraries or by leveraging their exclusive access to said data, none of which actually benefits artists. IP law is not there to protect small artists, it is only capable of protecting those who can afford to go to court over it, everyone else will get fucked over as usual. But I'm sure that the Copyright Alliance and the handful of independent artists that they want to present as a human face will be pretty happy about it.
The one thing that this could restrict is open-source development of said models, which will make them harder to access for any independent artist who wishes to use them (if we assume that use of AI tools becomes a prevailing standard this will be necessary, if we assume that independent artists will be fine without them then presumably it follows that we don't need to do anything at all) by making sure that they are reliably behind a paywall and generating profits for either an AI company or a media company. At best, this leaves independent artists slightly worse off when accounting for the effort spent on putting this plan into action, at worst it would make it far more profitable for tech companies and media companies alike.
If a movement is claiming to do something in the name of labor, but material analysis shows that the plan is very obviously DOA and if anything will make the issue worse, I'm going to oppose that, and I am going to have heavy disagreements with the anti-AI movement as long as its dominant messaging is clinging to IP law in the hopes that it will somehow magically transform into something that benefits workers without comparable effort to what it would take to overthrow capitalism outright.
Clinging to IP law is of course stupid and I agree with opposing that
However, I never really think of those people when I think of the "anti-AI" art movement- I think of random furries online who just dislike AI art or artists who are pissed about having their labor exploited specifically to exploit them more efficiently.
A few people I know are actually getting harassment, up to and including death threats from this group. Unfortunately those are also part of that movement and tend to be some of the ones freshest in my mind at any given time.
Ok, well, who are these people you know? That sounds like it's missing context.
Someone back me up here.