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To which tribe shall the gift of AI fall?
In a not particularly surprising move, FurAffinity has banned AI content from their website. Ostensible justification is the presence of copied artist signatures in AI artpieces, indicating a lack of authenticity. Ilforte has skinned the «soul-of-the-artist» argument enough and I do not wish to dwell on it.
What's more important, in my view, is what this rejection means for the political future of AI. Previous discussions on TheMotte have demonstrated the polarizing effects of AI generated content — some are deathly afraid of it, others are practically AI-supremacists. Extrapolating outwards from this admittedly-selective community, I expect the use of AI-tools to become a hotly debated culture war topic within the next 5 years.
If you agree on this much, then I have one question: which party ends up as the Party of AI?
My kneejerk answer to this was, "The Left, of course." Left-wingers dominate the technological sector. AI development is getting pushed forward by a mix of grey/blue tribers, and the null hypothesis is that things keep going this way. But the artists and the musicians and the writers and so on are all vaguely left-aligned as well, and they are currently the main reactionary force against AI.
I think AI will be weaponized by blue tribe against red tribe. But I think it will be with all the usual prohibitions and carve outs that attempt to protect blue tribes patrons from the effects of their own policies as they run rampant among red tribe.
Which is to say, AI for all the typical red tribe blue collar jobs. AI prohibition for all the PMC, liberal arts degree jobs. And red tribe will have no institutions or capacity to turn the state of affairs around. Unions are their only hope, and most unionization efforts I've seen have been failing because they push DEI talking points more than job protection. So clearly that's not going to work in red tribes favor.
Moravec's paradox suggests that white-collar jobs will get automated first. What blue-collar job will be most impacted by AI? Maybe truck driving? Now, there have been advances on that front, but this is still tentative and much less significant than the amount of AI art that's already been created.
Interestingly, the fact that autonomous vehicle companies need government approval before deploying their products shows that the regulatory environment already favors blue-collar workers (at least in this case). By contrast, "creative" work like art etc. is pretty much unregulated.
I've long believed that computer programming would be the last human job to be automated, because once that happens we've basically hit the Singularity already and the new post-human age will dawn the next day. This may be true at the highest levels, but we've already seen over the past few years that the sort of grunt-level work with which most programmers are occupied (hooking up one API to another, getting CSS layouts to look right, etc.) are easy to automate and yet far from eschatological.
This may be true, but I'm a strong believer in "Where there is a will, there is a way". AI will not be allowed to harm blue tribe patrons. Period. If it creates an extra 10 year period where AI isn't taking jobs yet, because PMC jobs are easiest to automate, that is what will happen. But the moment AI, via drones or whatever, can handle transportation, constructing houses, etc, it will be unabashedly unleashed on red tribe. Whatever red tribers haven't already ODed on fentanyl out of despair that is.
I truthfully see no other way it can go. Blue tribe maintains a firm grip on the institutions that service their patrons. The institutions that service red tribe also appear to be in the grip of the blue tribe, and service them minimally and with disdain.
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