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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.
The left sees the artistic class as fundamentally theirs, and AI disenfranchising them is a loss of social capital. That's all there is to it, and the appropriate response is to not care.
Did you actually watch the video?
I don’t see how you can walk away from it thinking that Vaush doesn’t deeply care about this issue on a personal level. And I went in skeptical, assuming that he didn’t care about it on a personal level.
He is a grifter without core principles. Whatever he has to say about anything is worthless. He is Unironicaly Evil
Regardless of Vaush's principles, I think he is getting at something core to leftists here. Like, if he doesn't believe AI art is fundamentally unnerving, this grift of this video would be him representing what he thinks his fellow travelers and audience believe.
Remember when NFTs were at their peak and pretty much everyone who wasn't buying or selling them thought they were idiotic? Their general dismissal was just that they were dumb and looked terrible. But the criticism from leftists was much more severe and in some regards deranged. They wheeled out the climate arguments, started talking about stuff they didn't understand and massively overclaimed the argument. It was approaching levels of the Keffals/KF debacle where the facts didn't matter, only achieving their result and I think would have gotten worse if the public hadn't rejected the Apes.
I am not sure where this core distaste is coming from but I am sure it exists. My best theory at the moment would be Minotaur's, that they believe they "own" art and cringey libertarians with doofus monkeys and robots can't be allowed to have it.
Probably this. As creative types in entrenched industries lean left it makes the illusion that Art and its expression is left aligned. It's just a temper tantrum and this "controversy" will go the same as Photography. The more concerning development on this space is that they are modifying the algos to introduce Black people and assorted terms to the images when the prompt isn't specific enough.
As for the Vaush issue, I'm sure this issue is better and more honestly expressed elsewhere. I would prefer to give views and hear the arguments of principled individuals trying to define the issue, rather than making the mudrakers's platforms bigger, especially of someone that has expressed a distaste to debate channels smaller than his just because he would be expanding their audiences.
EDIT (Regarding Art & Leftism).- This is probably why there was so much blowback when Terese Nielsen liked tweets that weren't kosher with the party line, despite being a married lesbian living in Utah, and the vitriol when she defended herself comparing that situation to when she was in the closet still. The mob couldn't conceive that they were even superficially similar to those Conservative Bigotstm.
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