His argument was literally that

  • artists, writers, and programmers are "labor aristocracy" and deserve no respect because they're sitting around making art and writing code while other people are toiling and laboring,
  • genAI is a "free resource" ("it's free for me to use at work") that "helps everyone make things" instead of having to rely on skill and expertise and therefore makes everything equal,
  • it's hypocritical of people to be worried about the environmental and societal impact of genAI because "only white people are worried about it now that their hobbies are being threatened and everyone else is catching up".

Pointing out there there are artists and programmers from every race and economic class, as well as perfectly ordinary people in every walk of life who are all actively being harmed both by the theft of ideas and labor and by the physical effects of gigantic data centers ruining communities, was met with much hand-waving and incredibly impenetrable philosophical jargon.

I'm particularly incensed because I'm as leftist and anticapitalist as they come and this felt like the fuckery some conservative cockwomble would try to come up with to parody socialism, except this guy was completely serious.

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[–] 1 point 11 hours ago

Your dismissal of the value of "soulless" art is kinda f'd IMO. Visual design is an entire profession. Technical writing is a skill that's important. Just because they aren't creative for their own sake doesn't make them worthy of dismissal as "soulless".

As with most things in the world, the truth is much more nuanced than it may seem at first glance. Most art humans create doesn't belong in a museum. That doesn't make it worthless. And making the creation of "average" artwork more accessible to non-artists isn't inherently a bad thing.

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