I can’t speak for them, but I didn’t take that from darkernations’ post at all. As far as I can tell, the general point here is that when arguments in defense of the status quo of what is considered “art” and “artist” start getting into elitist territory (e.g. “x is ‘real’ art, but y is not”, “people are fine with consuming shit and can’t appreciate ‘real art’”, “art has to pass a ‘je ne sais quoi’ vague bar of quality to be considered ‘good’”), it starts breaking from solidarity with working class interests and becomes this thing like “I don’t care if most artists never ‘make it’ as long as me the special artist who is a talented one and uplifted for it can be recognized for my contributions.”
That might sound like a lot to extrapolate from it and it’s not necessarily all explicitly voiced stuff in this particular thread, but it’s the kind of stuff anti-AI gets up to. People have a status quo which they depend on for their livelihood and so they want to defend it. That’s understandable. Some unions have already been fighting in this sphere to ensure they don’t get sidelined by shitty AI. Unions, for all their limitations they can have under capitalism, do tend to understand one thing, which is how to negotiate with circumstances. What internet anti-AI tends to do is more like trying to shame the genie back into the bottle and going for whatever argument is convenient to do so, without proper consideration of the implications of the argument.
For example, one of the common internet arguments against generative AI is that it “looks bad”. But what happens if the technology has a breakthrough that allows models to do fine details more accurately? And what about humans who make mistakes in their art? Here you get the people who say stuff like “oh well, their art is charming in spite of the mistakes because a human made it.” Well were they going and seeking out and buying that person’s “charming” art? Or were they spending their time liking video essays on how some piece of media has massive quality issues? Giving “sucky artists” a pat on the head for their effort doesn’t pay their rent. A limited number of artists can actually “make it” pre-AI and institutions justify their positions as them being “talented” or “working super hard”, whereas the ones who didn’t “make it” must be missing some special quality that would allow them to get through (the “X Factor”). Post-AI, that is still true. The main difference is even the “talented” ones are feeling threatened now. When people push vaguely-defined “bad art” further down the ladder, in order to try to protect the position of the “talented”, that only further splinters and confuses the issue and potential solidarity.
So it’s not that artists don’t matter or are not workers. It’s more that common anti-AI positions don’t even tend to support artists or artisanship as a whole. They instead tend to fall in line with the status quo, which is an elitist ladder of exclusivity, nepotism, and the movements of capital, and one that is largely controlled by major conglomerates, not individual artists or artist unions.
I can’t speak for them, but I didn’t take that from darkernations’ post at all. As far as I can tell, the general point here is that when arguments in defense of the status quo of what is considered “art” and “artist” start getting into elitist territory (e.g. “x is ‘real’ art, but y is not”, “people are fine with consuming shit and can’t appreciate ‘real art’”, “art has to pass a ‘je ne sais quoi’ vague bar of quality to be considered ‘good’”), it starts breaking from solidarity with working class interests and becomes this thing like “I don’t care if most artists never ‘make it’ as long as me the special artist who is a talented one and uplifted for it can be recognized for my contributions.”
That might sound like a lot to extrapolate from it and it’s not necessarily all explicitly voiced stuff in this particular thread, but it’s the kind of stuff anti-AI gets up to. People have a status quo which they depend on for their livelihood and so they want to defend it. That’s understandable. Some unions have already been fighting in this sphere to ensure they don’t get sidelined by shitty AI. Unions, for all their limitations they can have under capitalism, do tend to understand one thing, which is how to negotiate with circumstances. What internet anti-AI tends to do is more like trying to shame the genie back into the bottle and going for whatever argument is convenient to do so, without proper consideration of the implications of the argument.
For example, one of the common internet arguments against generative AI is that it “looks bad”. But what happens if the technology has a breakthrough that allows models to do fine details more accurately? And what about humans who make mistakes in their art? Here you get the people who say stuff like “oh well, their art is charming in spite of the mistakes because a human made it.” Well were they going and seeking out and buying that person’s “charming” art? Or were they spending their time liking video essays on how some piece of media has massive quality issues? Giving “sucky artists” a pat on the head for their effort doesn’t pay their rent. A limited number of artists can actually “make it” pre-AI and institutions justify their positions as them being “talented” or “working super hard”, whereas the ones who didn’t “make it” must be missing some special quality that would allow them to get through (the “X Factor”). Post-AI, that is still true. The main difference is even the “talented” ones are feeling threatened now. When people push vaguely-defined “bad art” further down the ladder, in order to try to protect the position of the “talented”, that only further splinters and confuses the issue and potential solidarity.
So it’s not that artists don’t matter or are not workers. It’s more that common anti-AI positions don’t even tend to support artists or artisanship as a whole. They instead tend to fall in line with the status quo, which is an elitist ladder of exclusivity, nepotism, and the movements of capital, and one that is largely controlled by major conglomerates, not individual artists or artist unions.