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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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EDIT: Unfortunately, this dropped the day after I wrote my post, so I didn't get a chance to comment on it originally. Based on continually accumulating evidence, I may have to retract my original prediction that opposition to AI art was going to be a more right-coded position. Perhaps there are not as many aesthetes in the dissident right as I thought.

I suspect that pro-/anti-AI art won't cleave neatly along existing ideological lines, but I do think for now, there's good reason to believe that pro-/anti- will be right/left respectively. The 2 dominant factors that would drive this are (1) most pre-existing artists are on the left and (2) AI art makes censorship tougher. Why (1) would lead those on the left to be against AI art has been expounded upon plenty in this very thread. For (2), when it comes to the most mainstream instantiations of art, i.e. pop culture, the dominant narrative for the past decade+ from the left has been that art that doesn't fit neatly within certain boundaries can cause literal harm to real humans and thus must be censored or at least censured in some meaningful way, for the prevention of harm to innocents. AI art - or more specifically easy access to AI art tools - would open up the floodgates to everyone being able to create art that is deemed harmful, in a way that our current censorship technology just couldn't keep up with.

I wonder if this will hold in the long run. There are plenty of leftist reasons to support AI art (e.g. more access to sophisticated art creation by people who otherwise would be unable to do so) and rightist reasons to be against it (e.g. traditional and/or religious reasons of being against degeneracy which AI art would enable like nothing before). It's just basically impossible to predict the way things will go when it comes to which subgroups within each tribe will win out.