This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Another social experiment regarding AI art: A Twitter user posts a real Monet painting and says it's AI. The results are about what you'd expect. A few people say they can't tell the difference, but a lot of people arrogantly claim the "AI-generated" image is complete trash. Lots of very confident-sounding nonsense about "composition", color theory, brushstrokes, random little details about the plants, etc. Reddit discussions are here and here. The response afterwards seems to mostly center around a motte-and-bailey that pretends nobody made any claims about how AI does on the formal qualities of artwork, but that human art is still vastly better due to vague notions of "artistic intent".
The Left's antipathy towards AI art is well-known by this point. I did a small experiment to see if the Right was as susceptible and can report that at least some users are. It seems like the Right is split with some users being open to AI art on pragmatic grounds, some liking it simply due to the Left hating it, and some are just as opposed as the Left and let it cloud their judgement. I posted some modded AI artwork for Slay the Spire 2 on /v/ and had a decent chunk of users saying the usual "ugh this looks terrible". Then I started including official card art from the game for comparison while still implying it was all AI-generated, and the response got even worse. The card art for Abrasive, Squash, and Secret Technique attracted particular scorn. Again, this is human-made art that revealed preferences show nobody really has a problem with, yet the responses they got when people thought they were AI included the following:
To just repeat myself:
Why yes, if you lie to people, you can trick them into thinking that AI art was made by humans, or that human art is made by AI. It's a complicated world and that's possible. But you shouldn't be surprised when people respond to that with extreme hostility.
People are frequently bad at understanding the reasons for their convictions. In this case, the conviction that it's important for art to be made by humans, or that the social context of art matters to how it's received, is being muddled up with the idea of abstract quality.
However, underneath that, I think people do value knowing that such-and-such picture is the result of a real human being exercising skill. Effort and creativity are things that we can and do value. It's acceptable to care about these things in themselves, for their own sake.
On a last note, in my experience there hasn't been any particular valence to opposition to AI art? I don't think it's that 'the Left' with a capital L hates AI art. I think everyone hates AI art. There are very, very few people who like this technology. Consider, briefly, that the people who like this technology are themselves the unrepresentative freaks.
Art has a functional component of looking nice or representing something, and the social component of representing the author or a time period. The vast majority of art in the world is aiming to do well at the former, while only a tiny percentage of high art is for the latter and ends up as museum pieces or in private collections. Oh, and there's the "my friend/child/GF made this".
If there could be a clean split in the conversation between one component and the other, then I think things would be mostly fine. But anti-AI advocates really really want to try to convince you that AI is utterly inferior at the functional component when this is just demonstrably not true. Then when another round of evidence comes up that, no really, most people can't tell the difference, the conversation shifts motte-and-bailey style to "oh the problem is AI art doesn't have the social meaning", which is true in a small sense, but then they again try to imply that means all AI art is garbage. So there's a nugget of truth in that argument, but it's almost always presented in a bad-faith way.
You're living in a bubble if you think even close to "everyone" hates AI art. What I've seen is that most of the political spectrum has people who DGAF along with many loud complainers that AI art is evil. So you can find people opposed to AI art basically anywhere, although it's clearly not universal. But on the far-left specifically (mostly the woke Bluesky types) the opposition to AI art is monolithic.
I have heard this a lot, but I would hold, I think, that even though you can find edge case exceptions if you stack the deck a bit, most AI 'art' has a very noticeable, identifiable style? And that style tends to be both repetitive and cheap? Maybe you can avoid that if you can spend hours slaving away over prompts, but that is quite rare.
At least part of the conversation is about status, right? AI art is perceived as cheap and nasty. Like the microwave, it might be useful, but it's also fundamentally low-class, because using it signifies that you could not afford a real human artist.
Obviously 'everyone' is hyperbole and I do not mean every single person, since there are people here who like it. There are a handful of people like Scott Alexander who defend it. Still, as far as I can tell it's genuinely unpopular? Searching for polls, well, I'll spare you all the results from artists themselves or from art galleries (both those groups passionately, overwhelmingly, hate AI art), but as far as I can tell, ordinary people feel less positive toward AI in art that they do in other fields. This seems consistent with the generally skeptical if not outright negative view of AI most people have (and the Pew poll is just Americans, who are one of the most pro-AI national groupings). Here there is apparently widespread opposition to AI music.
In general, I think my hot take on AI is that this is the most hated major technological innovation in my lifetime, and I don't think I can really overstate it. There are very enthusiastic AI boosters on the internet, but as far as I can tell in the real world, people are mostly either ignorant of AI, or they dislike it to various degrees of intensity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link