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Witnessed someone argue that genAI is socialist because it's a "free resource" and that "art is imperialist" and I'm just gobsmacked (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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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 10 hours ago*

Then film must be only emulation and never art, for every artist in a film production has been brought with capital and toils for capital's sake. Yet the capitalist's latest film is hailed as a groundbreaking art piece. Is it not only a prerecorded shadow of artists compelled to create under duress? Is it not just emulation? Every record held in high-esteem is a life-less recording that's only ever brought to an emulated life via machines. Machines can not create art but art can be propagated to the proletariat by machines and rendered alive by way of emulation. Your record player will for a brief amount of time emulate Beethoven's symphonies, but when it's denied electricity it is nothing.

If art is intrinsically human and machine-art is nothing but hollow emulation can we not take these shadows and resemble them with that uniquely human quality: art. To create new art from the corpses of emulation.

A new breed of artist arises that specializes in machine ensembles. The pure artist can continue what they've always been doing. No one has told him to stop. His work will continue to be encouraged and all that is his legacy will subsumed into the collective whole that the proletariat can manipulate at will with generative AI.

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