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Finally something that explicitly ties AI into the culture war: Why I HATE A.I. Art - by Vaush
I endorse pretty much all of the points he makes in this video. I do recommend watching the whole thing all the way through, if you have time.
I went into this curious to see exactly what types of arguments he would make, as I've been interested in the relationship between AI progress and the left/right divide. His arguments fall into roughly two groups.
First is the "material impact" arguments - that this will be bad for artists, that you're using their copyrighted work without their permission, that it's not fair to have a machine steal someone's personal style that they worked for years to develop, etc. I certainly feel the force of these arguments, but it's also easy for AI advocates to dismiss them with a simple "cry about it". Jobs getting displaced by technology is nothing new. We can't expect society to defend artists' jobs forever, if they are indeed capable of being easily automated. Critics of AI art need to provide more substantial arguments about why AI art is bad in itself, rather than simply pointing out that it's bad for artists' incomes. Which Vaush does make an attempt at.
The second group of arguments could perhaps be called "deontological arguments" as they go beyond the first-person experiential states of producers and consumers of AI art, and the direct material harm or benefit caused by AI. The main concern here is that we're headed for a future where all media and all human interaction is generated by AI simulations, which would be a hellish dystopia. We don't want things to just feel good - we want to know that there's another conscious entity on the other end of the line.
It's interesting to me how strongly attuned Vaush is to the "spiritual" dimension of this issue, which I would not have expected from an avowed leftist. It's clearly something that bothers him on an emotional level. He goes so far as to say:
and, what was the real money shot for me:
Now, on the one hand, "leftism" and "Marxism" are absolutely massive intellectual traditions with a lot of nuance and disagreement, and I certainly don't expect all leftists to hold the same views on everything. On the other hand, I really do think that what we're seeing now with AI content generation is a natural consequence of the leftist impulse, which has always been focused on the ceaseless improvement and elevation of man in his ascent towards godhood. What do you think "fully automated luxury gay space communism" is supposed to mean? It really does mean fully automated. If everyone is to be a god unto themselves, untrammeled by external constraints, then that also means they have the right to shirk human relationships and form relationships with their AI buddies instead (and also flood the universe with petabytes of AI-generated art). At some point, there seems to be a tension between progress on the one hand and traditional authenticity on the other.
It was especially amusing when he said:
I guess everyone becomes a reactionary at some point - the only thing that differs is how far you have to push them.
Sadly, Vaush seems to be repeating a lot of arguments I've seen around Tumblr and Twitter about AI art.
He brings up the tired talking point of there being some sort of labor rights issue with feeding a bunch of artists' works into an AI and "stealing" their art in the process. No such labor rights issue exists. If someone is saying this, they fundamentally do not understand what the AI algorithms are doing. Don't get me wrong, there could be other issues with AI art, and we could decide as a society that putting human-generated content into an AI is corrosive to society for other reasons and pass laws limiting that if we wanted to - that's certainly a conversation we could have as a society, but I don't know why people are starting out with a wrong-headed argument right off the bat.
He is also in the "art is a form of communication" camp, which I think tends to be the biggest divide I see in a lot of these debates. Unfortunately, the intellectual groundwork has already been laid for "death of the author" analysis, where the question asked is not "what was the author trying to communicate?", but "what meaning can I as a reader/listener/viewer of an art piece craft from it?"
Borges wrote the short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" in 1939, which played with the idea of someone authoring a word-for-word identical rendition of Don Quixote today. In some of the most amusing passages, the exact same paragraph is quoted but given a different analysis based on whether Pierre Menard or Miguel de Cervantes was the author.
I've long been enchanted by the idea of taking a bunch of random books, pretending that they were all written by the same author and then trying to figure out what we can guess about the life of the author based on their literary output. What kind of author would write Winnie the Pooh, Starship Troopers, Call of Cthulhu, Foucault's Pendulum and the Acts of the Apostles? This is an endlessly fun literary exercise that will probably remain fun even after most of the content on our feed is AI generated.
(We've already seen joking stabs at this idea, with people claiming that Hatsune Miku wrote Harry Potter or programmed Minecraft, because they take issue with the original creator.)
I do like art, and I agree it often has communicative value. But "communication" might not even be that far off. AI text generation is also advancing at a considerable rate, even if it might be a while before we see a successor to GPT 3 that can write a whole novel from scratch. Maybe modern AI art is a babbling mishmash of parroted human communication, but in the future we might be able to make pieces that have genuine intentionality behind them even without full AGI. (This also ignores the current arguments about human prompt-makers and curators adding an element of intentionality to AI art.)
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