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In support of mistake theorists and against outgroup reification
There's even more drama in the AI art sphere than before. Actually multiple dramas, all around Stable Diffusion, as is customary now. Artists on Twitter are threatening class action, half-seriously rallying around Greg "by greg rutkowsky, trending on artstation, 8K" Rutkowsky, Palmers and others; Danbooru is being slowly purged of content on takedown requests, in the wake of NovelAI SD-based image generator release (drastically superior to earlier stuff, and allegedly tracing over whole pictures); StabilityAI Discord has banned Automatic111, a hero and pillar of the community, the developer of the leading UI, due to him
being an asocial Russian assholeimplementing means to handle the recently leaked (by a third party) NovelAI models and allegedly stealing like 20 lines from their proprietary code, apparently to placate NAI and send a message to future pirates and business partners about Emad's priorities; Voldy denies the theft and counter-accuses NAI of copying his prompt-weights code without license; Stability staff/mods, it is claimed, have taken over a community subreddit by guile, to no comment from higher-ups (update: Emad magnanimously agreed to concessions); Emad keeps postponing the release of an improved 1.5 citing great responsibility and «tweaks to handle extreme cases» which is taken to mean «castration on dataset level». It looks like another Open-for-profit company has been revealed as an embrace-extend-extinguish scheme, and we will have to learn, after all, to pool resources on our own. Or maybe it's all catastrophizing by excitable FOSS fanatics. The situation develops rapidly.…But I'd rather leave the drama discussion to @Porean, seeing as he's posted it first, and talk about something less spicy. After interactions with Hlynka here, I want to share an observation about conflict theoretic lens and unhelpful labeling of the outgroup – such as artists on 4chan /ic board calling AI users «pajeet».
This has to do with Emad's origins and the racism-tinged contempt for «soulless tech bro nerds» pervasive among the 4chan creative intelligentsia, of course (the Twitterati attack soulless tech bro nerds as such, without racial qualifiers). No equivalent prejudice against South Asians exists in Russia. So, there AI users and people arguing in favor of this tech are labeled «neuroschizo». I wonder about other sectors of the Internet.
Yes, singular «pajeet», singular «schizo». It's not just a meme. They (well, many of them) report it to mods as such, they whine about a sleep-deprived obsessive fanatic who keeps pestering them in their strongholds (a not-so-implausible scenario, but clearly wrong in this case). And I posit that this is Indicative Of A General Failure-Prone Tendency Of Conflict Theorists, who have a powerful presence here. I have ridiculed Scott's Conflict-Mistake framing myself. But the core objection – namely that the Conflict model is evidently true, as well as people's willingness to lie in service of their terminal goals – may be a cognitive poison pill.
Anonymous imageboards have been a mighty forge of internet culture. What is often underappreciated is how strong they are pound for pound, in terms of active user or post count – even the biggest 4chan boards are like a middling subreddit or Discord/Telegram chat. Why is that? Freedom of expression, lack of reputation and all that jazz, you know it. But I think that they're a bit similar to latent diffusion models: they are more efficient, due to compressing the trappings of a social network into a lower-dimensionality space. By stripping identification and the complexity it can carry, they allow – nay, force – individual voices to be associated instead with archetypes of groups, in every individual interaction. You cannot be a token, like on Facebook or what have you: everyone is a type, but which type, depends on the mood and the topic. This inflates the effective population size to parity with a big society where full connectedness is impossible and knowledge about others must spread by rumors and vague stereotypes. It makes boards a self-running, accelerated social experiment. (admittedly this theory needs more polish)
Anons know, of course, that they are few in number (although a Legion). And they can see that people are pretty stable in their quirks. And they are aware that people can lie when it serves them. So they overcorrect into reifying recognizable opinions as marks of an individual or at most a small coherent group. Someone sneering at «Chuds» comes, in /pol/ mythology, from some specific discord – and needs to be reminded that he «will never be a woman». On /ic/, someone explaining how latent diffusion works is… «cool story pajeet».
It's an experiment that represents, at small scale, the superstitious nature of network age paranoia. In larger communities, the same assumptions are applied on group level. Everyone who disagrees with me is a Russian bot! Except if I'm a Putin loyalist, then it's gotta be ЦІПСО, Ukrainian propaganda division (that's what I am these days, according to many of my compatriots). If you're an American Right-Winger, it's some sort of GloboHomo WEF talking head. If you're a good progressive, it's probably a Fascist representing a unified anti-Lib front.
This is psychologically comforting for a few simple reasons.
First, such a problem is very legible and simple. There's no structural reason for the thing that oppresses you to exist and be the way it is, no grandiose system of incentives, just malign will of a finite set of human actors, fallible flesh and blood with a self-serving narrative.
Second, it's surmountable. Calling the enemy out is half the battle; getting him banned is another one fourth, after that you just gather up the boys and attack his turf. The hostile group is not representing the majority of the population (usually is puny), is easily identifiable and kinda ridiculous. Maybe just one weirdo, a «pajeet» or «chud» at that.
Third, and most importantly, it excuses ignorance. You can plug bananas in your ears because conflict theory predicts that the enemy will lie, or try to deceive you while not technically lying, to demoralize you. And why would he keep investing effort into that, coming up with arguments tailor-made for you? Of course because his onslaught isn't really going according to plan, in part, precisely because people are not falling for it! That's what those artists think too. AI proponents are lying collectively to break their spirit; they just need to wait it out while the pajeet runs out of steam; they don't need to adapt.
They're wrong.
It's unhelpful to have a dead wrong model of the conflict they really are in. One big and obvious reason: because it precludes communication with people who are different but not the enemy and are trying to help – or at least negotiate. In trying to not be a 0HPLovecraft-style quokka, such a conflict theorist ends up being simply a myopic rat, destined for being made marginal and obsolete. The great discovery that counteragents might lie is a point of a wholly unreasonable pride of a certain brand of reactionaries. It's also a source of a delusion as damaging as the inability to conceive of bad faith.
Tl;DR: Conflict theories have a failure mode or reifying the opposition, that can lead to cognitive closure and lack of response to arguments. The very assumption of bad faith, without extra precaution, bootstraps the development of theories on how bad faith propaganda is being delivered to you, for what reason and by whom. From then on, truth is ever harder to find. People should remember that, when assuming they can see through the opponent and dismissing opponents out of hand.
I very likely wrote some of the posts on /ic/ you’re referring to.
My mental model of the developers/proponents of AI art (and AI in general) is that they believe that they’re genuinely making the world a better place, at least by the measure of their own terminal values. I just happen to sharply disagree with them.
Obviously, posts written on 4chan to blow off steam and commiserate with people in your own camp do not always reflect the nuance and complexity of one’s actual views.
EDIT: Well, since I just brought up the subject of having nuanced views, I should acknowledge that I don’t think the motives of AI developers are entirely pure-hearted in all cases. If you read the /sdg/ and /hdg/ threads, hardly a thread goes by without someone saying “fuck artists” or “it’s over for artcels”. There’s clearly some amount of resentment there for people who possessed a skill that they wanted, but were not able to obtain for whatever reason. As for a broader UN/WEF conspiracy to reduce the global population by replacing workers with automation - obviously I don’t have any concrete evidence of an intentional conspiracy, but I do fear that a future like that is possible, even if no one is consciously intending to bring it about.
I am one to make passing comments of this sort. I am also a "techbro" (their words not mine).
Not because I resent the fact I lack artistic ability or whatever, but because you can only read so many comments calling you a nerd, a virgin, telling you to leave your basement, saying you have no creativity, saying you are responsible for making society worse in every aesthetic way possible, etc. And being portrayed as all those things in movies and other media before you kind of go like,"well fuck them".
The fact that programmers practically automated away artists is the most "schadenfreude" inducing thing to happen in a long time. It's borderline cartoonish. Programmers get mad at artists shitting on them, so they just automate their jobs away.
Ultimately its immature/juvenile culture warring, a lot of people are getting their kicks in while the enemy is down.
So you’re acknowledging that you like this technology because you see it as a way to inflict harm on people you perceive to have wronged you. I say “perceive” because, as far as I can tell as a card-carrying nerd myself, picking on “nerds” hasn’t been a thing in the US for at least a decade, if not more. Working in tech is considered to be relatively high status. There’s also some irony here because commercial artists, who stand to be impacted the most by AI, are also frequently loners and weirdos themselves who spend a lot of time surrounded by video games and comic books, and thus know full well what it’s like to be a “nerd”.
I don’t know why you thought this was supposed to make you appear sympathetic.
No, because the term has been diluted beyond usefulness by "Hollywood nerds" and the like. The people who used to be just picked on for being nerds are now "the wrong sort of nerds" and beating on them is still exactly as much fun for exactly the same kind of people it always was -- they're just pretending to be the "true" nerds, now, too, as a final insult.
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Not at all. At least not enough to bias my judgement in any significant way. Or so I'd say.
I was just offering you a counter to the notion that people are showing their disdain towards artists because of some inherent jealously. That instead in some cases, people are just punching back.
Ofcourse its not that the "stemcels" never fling shit at the "creatives". "I'd like my big mac without pickles" is a classic. But one party making fun of the other is gauche and considered punching down and the inverse of that can range from an ice breaker to a status symbol. Seriously go spend some time in /r/redscarepod you will come away with the impression that knowing what an equation is is equivalent to living in the sewers to a certain type of people.
And for all I care, those people can eat shit. Ofcourse as always @DaseindustriesLtd says it better than I can.
I am sympathetic to those losing their jobs. If they had the intellectual honesty to say "its sucks that we can't pay rent anymore" I would feel for them. Instead they are doubling down at the face of almost literal science fiction as to how much of special snowflakes they actually are (despite being shown otherwise) and further doubling down at berating the people who hold the keys to their livelihoods. They are not exactly acting in a way that invokes a feeling of mercy.
There is no attempt to even retreat to the motte of "we just don't want to starve" they are fighting from their bailey of "artists have a touch of the divine, anyone who suggests otherwise is the devil and should be treated as such".
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Higher or lower status than art? The latter is usually associated with self-sacrifice, of pursuing beauty even at expense of earning potential. So I would say that there is no obvious winner: the engineer can afford to attend to attend an exhibition, but it is the artists work that will be viewed.
Being a tech bro is vastly higher status than "digital artist on Twitter". These people don't have art in galleries like the few high status artists.
Being a tech bro is also vastly higher status than most people working in tech. Most people working in tech aren't doing cutting edge innovation, they're debugging old code for some obscure system or programming some website that gets 2 hits a day or even just tech support. This whole thread is mostly just the apex fallacy, either comparing high status tech workers to average-status artists or high status artists to average-status tech workers in order to get the comparison that's favorable to one's particular narrative.
You will run afoul of that fallacy if you try to compare what I would call "socioeconomic status".
As @aquota mentioned, a lot of people are talking about a different kind of 'social' status. The kind of status that is associated with better social skills, taste, knowledge, more cultured, "more SOUL". As opposed to the kind of status that engineers and programmers have which is entirely a result of their income.
Those two statuses are correlated but not the same.
Journalists, Academics (humanities), artists, etc have more of that kind social status than engineers. They are perceived to be more well read, intellectual, "interesting", exciting, etc. As opposed to the engineers who lack social grace and are just cogs in a machine making their money because capitalism.
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being a successful artist is high status, which most artists are not
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I think it depends on how you define these things.
Almost all the status engineers have comes from their earnings, and if you take an engineer making $150k and a lawyer, artist, writer, etc making $150k, the latter will be viewed as higher status.
So, this all runs into a definitional question. Is tech high status? Or is being rich high status and tech is low status? idk - there's no "answer"
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Like @EfficientSyllabus says, in «the real world» artists aren't doing too hot, whereas techies are in great demand. But in their own frame of reference, artists are the master race. Moreover, it's not mundane conceit, like low-grade techies' own boasts of having high IQs or earning a lot while creatives flip burgers. It's more similar to Russian ressantiment-powered invectives directed at the West: artists have unusual, rich SOVLS, and their entire trade is about conveying their inner depths to the thankful audience (which is near-universally despised and considered to be scum with trash taste, however – especially in light of their interest in AI content), Techies are the complete opposite of artists: ignorant of SOUL, of beauty and love and other lofty categories, mere bugmen churning out code to make the corrupt machine of capitalism run smoothly, crushing the fragile wonder of the human heart etc. etc.
This is insulting on its face and, what's more, it's laughable chutzpah. There is of course art in STEM and specifically in coding, and it's not lost on developers who wander into artists' dens that there's astounding cynicism, small-mindedness and mercenary attitude among artists. It's a crab bucket where every crab gatekeeps his secrets of drawing some perverted fetish (often a sort of furry or dickgirl) to cater to a niche audience of degenerates.
Thus their scorn.
Why do you capitalize SOUL? Because of that Indy PRG?
Magical Girl Celesphonia?
no, i thought about the one making a big fuss on 'determination'. Undertale
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It’s a meme.
please, could you be more specific?
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meme? Could you please be more specific?
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So much of the hatred directed at AI art I see just makes me think of this old Futurama joke.
Relevant lines:
Of course, duplicating a physical object is a different endeavor, but the fundamental phenomenon is the same.
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In the real world, normal guys who study art and hope to support themselves off it are ridiculed as lazy unserious dreamers who have no willpower to study something difficult or work hard. In Hungarian they are nicknamed canteen-cloakroom degree programs, implying they don't have to go to lectures. I get the impression that it's similar in Western Europe too, not sure about the US. If a normal middle class parent hears that their kid wants to "become an artist" the reaction is "what the fuck, you want to flip burgers at McDonald's?". Art as in Michelangelo, Leonardo, etc. is in high esteem but not "art grads". It's a rockstar profession where a tiny minority gain high status with it.
I think artist is being use as a stand in for an much larger social clan that see the works of "Techies" or STEM people as at best lacking soul and more often just evil. I don't have a great word for it but it intuitively feels like there are two very different hierarchies in at least the united states. There is the "Physical" Hierarchy where people get status because of the things they make. There is also the "Social" hierarchy where one gets status by who holds them in high regard, who they are in particular. One interesting way these two hierarchies interact is in debates around things like socialism/communism, a system that totally collapses the way that the "Physical" hierarchy gets status and purports to level the playing field, but many people on the "physical" side correctly intuit that when you go to only one hierarchy there will still be rich people but they'll be the people rich in "social" status. Artists, journalists, politicians and many other professions are coded as "social" and techies intuit a strike against them as a win against the entire "social" hierarchy that increasingly seems to disdain them and call for their status to be revoked.
In all actual communist countries it was the physicals who controlled things like heavy industries or the military who had power. Artists were kept on a tight leash and only allowed to do things in a style that would uplift the status of the leaders of the physical hierarchy. It was the USA where the CIA pushed abstract expressionism as a way to undermine the Soviets.
To these types communist doesn't refer to historical communist regimes but idealized ones.
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Isn't the relevant split just humanities vs STEM? As an aside, it's strange that there was no standard way to say STEM until the clunky acronym was invented. In Hungary it's common knowledge that there are "humán" and "reál" subjects and kids get categorized by parents and teachers into one or the other quite early. I don't think this is very good by the way (historically science and math was very connected to philosophy and humanities).
I also wonder where a pure math prof would fall in the dichotomy. They are certainly "reál" but not a "physical" maker. And a lot of artists are hands on makers, craftsmen, sculptors and painters (digital or not), they don't just talk. Maybe your split is just bullshitters/talkers vs doers/makers.
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Among some circles, it's high status. Among some circles, tech is high status, but the actual people in tech are low status.
Perhaps. But this is not an issue that’s unique to tech. It’s something that people in many fields have to deal with.
Do you think patreon furry porn artists are eager to share their job title at cocktail parties?
It is. It's rare that the status of the field doesn't match the status of the people in it. In your furry example, they're both high status (among themselves) or both low status (at the party). Nobody's going to say "we need to get more of group X to be furry porn artists" while still holding existing furry porn artists in contempt.
I’m sorry, but I feel like everyone here is just inventing this persecution of tech workers out of thin air. It doesn’t match my experience at all.
I work in tech. I have never felt any qualms at all about telling people that I work in tech. It’s perfectly respectable. It doesn’t make people kiss my feet, but it’s not low status either. It’s just, fine. Normal. It’s absolutely higher status than telling people that you work in service or retail, which is the sort of answer that the majority of people have to give.
I think you are confused because you are confusing socioeconomic status with social status. The former is what you would be proud/ashamed of to tell your parents about. The latter is what would get you more/less matches in a dating profile.
Service workers and tech workers are not an apple-apples comparison. Compare with the economic factor adjusted.
Artists, singers, historians, bartenders are sexy DESPITE being poor. Tech workers are tolerable BECAUSE they're not poor. Is the cultural inertia not extremely self evident?
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Have you seen many articles recently about how the practices in the service industry are sexist and racist and that the existing service workers are keeping women and minorities out of the service industry?
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Depends what kind of cock tail party it is, really
Cock tail party eh.
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