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A lot of philosophical questions surrounding AI become clearer if we draw an analogy with human slaves. Instead of asking "what if I got Claude to do it?", ask "what if I got my slave to do it?".
"Hard work" has always been a middle class virtue, not an aristocratic virtue. Within certain limits, "work" was for the commoners, not the nobles. The rich and powerful have always had secretaries and servants to take care of the drudgery. Your status was (and still is, frankly) proportional to the number of underlings who you could compel to do your bidding. Kings used to have their servants dress them; apparently it was beneath them to expend the effort to put their own clothes on. In that sense, AI is just the democratization of slavery, bringing to the masses what used to be the exclusive domain of the few.
Now, the flip side of that bargain is that aristocrats (in a properly healthy aristocracy, anyway) were expected to be willing to fight, sacrifice, and die. "A good day's work" is a plebeian virtue, but "death before dishonor" is a properly noble virtue. (Hegel: The master is the master because the master fears death less than the slave.) A life of pure indolence has never been considered laudatory in any culture hitherto. Claude, of course, makes no such demands on its users. This is not of course to say that there has never been corruption among the nobility, or that there has never been a decadent ruling class who didn't deserve their privileges; only that, because we are living in the world's first culture where mainlining porn and Harry Potter movies 24/7 is considered to be authentically virtuous, we're now entering uncharted waters.
The viruses, probably. Worse is better and always has been, at least in Darwinian evolutionary terms. The universe is optimized not for good, and not even for evil (oh how we wish it rewarded evil!), but for sheer, brute, efficient, unthinking stupidity. Regression to the lowest common denominator is the rule everywhere, because that's what wins. Anything good or beautiful that happens to arise for a time is an accident that can only flourish under very precise and precarious conditions, like a rare tropical flower that can only grow in one country during the rainy season, and it should be cherished until it is inevitably extinguished.
Yes this is a great point, and why I find the hatred of AI art from a particular class of consumers who never produce art themselves but who consume it really irritating. They want the luxury to demand that the art they consume is hand drawn or hand painted or hand sketched or hand CGI'd or hand photoshopped but never ever hand prompted. They would never demand that their checking account be artisanally hand crafted on papyrus spreadsheets and totaled by sheer brainpower but cringe at any art that wasn't toiled over by hand. They want creatives chained to their workspaces dammit! Never mind that the fundamental problem is that they lack the creativity or motivation to produce artwork themselves, and even now when the barrier to entry is as low as prompting an LLM, which makes them look even worse to anyone who actually creates things.
To your other points, noblesse oblige has died out long ago in the modern west, which is why it's so degrading to participate in society broadly. And it died off so quickly- my grandparents' generation were clean, elegant, sane people- my parents' generation, not at all.
This is starting to become evident to me. It's too bad but you put it nicely.
I'm not sure this perspective makes much sense. It is the creatives themselves that want to be chained to their workplaces; support for generative AI amongst both Eastern and Western creatives is about as rock bottom as public opinion can get, no greater than the Lizardman's Constant. It's not as if the dynamic is that creatives really really want to be using AI to produce but the unsophistication of the proles won't allow them to do so; to the contrary, you would get dogpiled by creatives in pretty much every online or offline space for artists if you announced your vociferous support for AI art.
In the closest corollary, software engineering, where there actually is strong grassroots support for wanting to use coding agents, there is pretty much no consumer demand for chaining engineers to their desks and making them hand-write the code, apart from the free software or degrowth crowds who dislike LLMs themselves for ideological reasons.
This is not my experience at all, it is mostly the bad artists and creatives who publicly dislike AI art. Kazuma Kaneko for example who is an extremely talented genius illustrator (his Persona 1/2 designs are some of the best video game related art ever IMO) has produced a video game with a bunch of AI art trained on his style, he's obviously fine with it but the reaction from the public has been hysterical. Nick Knight is a very talented photographer and embraces AI, that's only two examples off the top of my head but I can think of more if you need me to. No artist or creative who I genuinely respect has come out openly against AI. Most of the creatives vocally against it are pretty mediocre at best or just terrible deviantart level hacks
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