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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:
I'm fascinated that you've labeled this as a left/right thing. Is that true? Have there been studies? Am I the only one that was unaware of this dynamic?
Anyway, the whole thing I think requires two components that we see with AI content discourse: (1) a deep distrust in the systems involved and (2) a belief that you have seen behind the curtain and can discern what's actually true. It's not just art, people are very quick to call out writing as AI when it's not. It turns out that actually most people are really not good at telling the difference unless it's particularly egregious. There are many who are alarmed by this state of affairs and are overcompensating by declaring everything AI.
But the thing is, we are right to distrust the systems! As AI imagery and content gets better and better, there will be no reliable way to tell real from fake. Whether it's marketers hyping a product, trolls being troll-y, or political actors spreading messaging and propaganda for whatever reason, it's happening at a scale that's never been seen before due to how easy it is to churn out content. The news publishers and aggregators are no longer gatekeepers and haven't been for a long time. Someone says something is or is not fake and you have no way to verify it or to know whether you can trust this internet rando (if they even are a real person). Eventually what you will probably see is just more motivated reasoning where everything that supports your side is true and everything that goes against it is clearly shitty AI slop from propaganda machines, and the "two screens" phenomenon is just going to accelerate.
So there are some skills that you need to practice heavily while producing mid content before you can get really good. Fine arts, music.
People doing that tend to lean auth left because they think that in a communist system they'd be able to focus on their art full time.
AI is a real threat to them because it kills their dream of working for an ad agency for a decade to hone their skills before breaking out as real artists.
Note that the dream wasn't as crazy as it sounds. Banksy was a successful commercial illustrator before his big switch.
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There are a lot of leftist spaces where you would get a better response saying, “I think the West takes in too many immigrants,” than you would saying, “I think AI art is good.”
Some leftists think the technology itself is intrinsically evil, but almost all of them think that the people building the tech are evil oligarchs who can’t wait to banish 99% of the population to the permanent underclass (or worse).
Tax AI -> UBI
Easy. As long as you wait until if/when this massive and perpetual unemployment actually happens. People have adapted to massive job replacements before by finding new productive things to do and raising standards of living. But if they don't then UBI decreasing the number off people seeking employment is a win win. And massive unemployment would make this politically trivial to gather support for as well.
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I just had people get mad at me for saying that a shower curtain having intentionally generic flower pattern made by AI should be a complete non-issue because it’s a fucking shower curtain, not anything that even pretends to be art.
Another data point I discovered today: There are multiple videos of university commencement speakers getting booed every time they bring up AI.
https://x.com/LuizaJarovsky/status/2054654622367977967
https://x.com/ProudSocialist/status/2055773442549407938
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Only vibes for now. If I had to guess it's something like 55% of people don't care as long the end-product is high quality, 30% are anti AI with some being very loud, and 15% are explicitly pro AI. This is pretty uniform across the political spectrum from the far right to the center left, and then there's a discontinuity at the far left where it's closer to 30% don't care, 65% anti AI, and maybe 5% pro AI.
I also get the feeling that there is a cloud of issues that get mushed together because the internet promotes having sharp delineations and lines. AI has many uses, chat and companionship, solving homework, replacing the search engine, automating desk jobs, automating some parts of software dev, generating image art, doing image editing, generating music etc. Each of these have quite different aspects but they are collapsed in the discourse as pro- or anti-AI. Not to mention the more technical applications that the average user isn't exposed to, like math theorem proving, protein folding, industrial applications like steel cracking prediction and factory quality control or whatnot.
It seems to me that the only ones who like it are gray tribe nerds, "shape rotators" who don't see art in a high regard and consider it as too high-prestige in society, undeservedly, compared to tech which is more meritocratic and measurable and has real effects and practical usefulness. This is somewhat moderated by the fact that AI is getting too good at writing software so middling software devs feel danger, and also see the dollar signs pop up in the eyes of their bosses who push for more and more AI adoption, tech debt be damned.
But actual right wing conservatives or far right people also don't like art being relegated to this role, and would talk about the human spirit, the soul of the work, the effort, the sacrifice etc. The same people typically also don't like mega capitalism and skyscrapers as opposed to cathedrals and so on. The American-style right, which is quite different from the original pro-aristocratic meaning of the term may like it as a form of economic line-go-up thing, but that's quite different. The far-right also doesn't like the power concentration aspect, but they'd frame it less about capitalism and more about Jews.
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The only place I see the left right distinction is in online spaces where right adjacent ai enthusiasts claim the distinction is there.
In real life every conservative I know is very AI skeptical and the people least skeptical are your tech savvy blue tribers (like programmers) and those folks seem split between enthusiastic or doomers
Blue tribe conservatives seem to love AI. Red tribe conservatives seem to see it as an interesting new technology that has future applications, but which isn't ready for prime time.
Again, I don’t see this anywhere except people on the internet saying this is so.
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People are quick to call out writing as AI when the writer won't admit it is AI. This isn't apophenia — it's distrust.
Are you doing a bit here?
I'm suggesting that the most likely reason someone is calling out writing as AI "when it's not" is that the person saying it is not is not telling the truth. How many times has one particular poster here been accused of using AI, denying it, and then sheepishly admitting that he "polished" it with AI? And yes, I'm making a little joke by doing it with one of the most obvious AI patterns.
On the off-chance that you're referring to me, I'd appreciate evidence that I've ever denied using AI when asked (when I've actually used it, which isn't most of the time). Au contraire, I make it a point to admit that I have, if asked, including being painfully specific with proof-of-work when I have it.
Here is a specific example:
https://www.themotte.org/post/3690/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/434542?context=8#context
I can't think of who else you might be referring to, barring perhaps our dear friend @BurdensomeCount, and even he had the grace to admit to it when specifically challenged. By me. With my mod hat on. I suppose we have had our share of bad-actors who try to get away with AI spam, but that's the kind of thing that gets caught by the moderation filter or explicitly warned/banned.
If you mean someone else entirely, then please disregard, though preferably not before you clarify things.
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There's AI-adversity on both sides of the political debate but I'd say the Left Wing tends to be more vocal since it hits on more of their chosen political angles outside of the tackiness/non-tackiness of AI content itself.
Environmentalism with the 'data centers using water' thing, wealth inequality, the vast majority of compensated creative roles in society tend to lean left-wing and it's a direct pressure on that as a line of work.
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