“Hey look, I found another option. We can read tweets of a politician vacillating between doing vacuous insults toward an openly fascist politician at home and then condemning anti-fascist groups abroad. Welcome to the resistance, fellow fighter. I mean, wait. Hold on a second…”

Good points, lot to think about.

everyone wants to make it out of capitalism alive in any way possible.

This part resonates with me in particular. I’ve had aspirations before to “make it out alive” via one artistic craft or another and it’s possible I still could “make it” well enough to live off of that (primarily if I got lucky), but generative AI may make it harder to do so. But I also understand that capitalism is unsustainable, as is much of the western internet landscape even pre-generative-AI, so it’s sorta like… yeah, some of my potential opportunities may be evaporating, but so is the stability of capitalism as a whole. And living in the US, the stability of the governance as a whole is in question with the stuff being done to the federal workforce, the seeming efforts to consolidate power behind a single neo-fascist(? for lack of a better term) faction, and so on. It comes out very individualist for me to be fretting about whether I can personally succeed in making a living out of some craft, while “the world burns”, so to speak.

So yeah, I suspect some of the ire surrounding generative AI is due to individualism; people thinking about it like “I was supposed to get [or had already gotten] mine and now I can’t get it [or it is going to be taken away.” Rather than thinking of it like, “This is a progression of automation that has long been happening and much like in the past, the working class needs to organize because it’s never going to get fundamentally better until they have the levers of power.”

I think one contradiction people against AI have is they say it’s both replacing your brain while also not being that good. It’s a complete contradiction because it can only be one or the other (is it better than human cognition or is it not?), and until one addresses the contradiction and resolves it, they will live ‘in utter chaos under heaven’ as Mao said (paraphrased lol), and it leads to problematic conclusions such as “people who use AI are lesser people because AI is not very good, so clearly if they use it, their brain must be worse than AI, that’s why they think they gain something from it”.

Yeah, I think there’s a fair bit of elitist tropes wrapped up in thinking about AI as well. Human beings still don’t even understand our own consciousness all that well, much less the entire brain and its functioning, so it’s easy to fill in the gaps with nonsense like “people are stupid”. Arising out of that (it seems, I can’t demonstrate the connection cleanly) you get stuff like the people who hype “AGI” as something that will replace “human intelligence.” But what I never see in that realm, is any taking into account the fact that human capability derives out of the human form, not out of the ether (unless I suppose one believes in something metaphysical about it). So in order to believe a computer can reach the same capability, you have to believe it will be granted something metaphysical too. Otherwise I’d think the only way for “AI” to get anywhere close to humanity is for some kind of bio-engineering to be able to create artificial human life. And at that point, we’re basically just talking about making babies without a woman needing to go through pregnancy.

But I do think when like, China, is getting into robotics, they are at least closer to understanding that particular problem. That for an AI to do certain of human tasks, it needs to have a human-like form. Still though, none of that brings us fundamentally closer to a self-aware artificially-created lifeform (partly because we still don’t entirely know what that form develops out of in the first place, in our own case; what cluster of factors crosses over into what we call sapience). It just brings us closer to tools that require less direction and maintenance than previous forms of tools. Which could eventually be used to replace us at certain kinds of tasks and thus change the labor landscape somewhat, but isn’t replacing us fundamentally.

I can understand that, I have definitely had some back and forth on it myself. I think like with anything, we have to keep firmly in view that it’s a tool distorted by the societal model it exists under and that most of what it’s doing in the bad way is intensifying issues that were already there. For example, when someone uses chatgpt as a source, is that bad because AI is bad or is it bad because it highlights the problems with people individually turning to the internet for answers to questions (which has long been a problem with web searching and wikipedia and so on, just wasn’t as bad before). Or when a publishing platform gets flooded with AI genned low effort crap, is that bad because AI is bad or is it bad because it highlights the unsustainable nature of internet platforms that have little to no gatekeeping and the inability to manage the volume of “content” that gets uploaded on a regular basis.

I do think it’s contributing to the acceleration of some problems. But it’s not as anomalous as it’s made out to be, if that makes sense. If it didn’t exist, similar problems would still exist because (I would argue) AI in its current form is an accelerated stage of automation rather than a wholly new form of development. There are aspects of it which are unprecedented as forms of automation, but automation as a whole is nothing new. So the favored response to it for us is also nothing particularly new; it’s a technology that, if it is going to exist, needs to be in the hands of the organized proletariat and the organized liberation forces of imperialized and colonized peoples, not in the hands of a capitalist class or other like exploitative classes.

But I guess this (AI topic) discussion needs more back and forth and probably q&a style answers to get anywhere long term. Otherwise increasingly scared left reactionaries will scream at increasingly frustrated ai proponents.

I think a few critical parts of the conversation surrounding AI to keep things grounded in perspective is:

1. Recognizing that how art is perceived culturally is not a static, universal thing across cultures and time periods. (A good example of this is how Hula dance in Hawaiian culture is a means of telling stories and passing down history. It’s not merely some tool of “self expression” and commodity that western capitalist art tends to be.)

2. The western investor class are not the only ones working on AI research. (Socialist China is playing an important part in its development too.)

3. Generative AI (text, image, audio, etc.) is only a portion of AI research. Automation that could be called AI has been around for decades. The difference is that its level of capability is now being seriously compared to humans in some skillsets in limited contexts; anyone who tells you generative AI is overall nearing levels of capability comparative to humans is selling you a bridge. What people tend to hate in a reactionary way is generative AI, but they talk about it like it’s AI as a whole, which confuses the issue.

I find there’s also just a lot of basic things about it that people don’t know and this ignorance probably makes it harder for them to approach it in a grounded way. For example, even among people who use generative AI, it’s not uncommon for people to think a model has a “database” of information. As if it saved everything it was trained on intact and calls on it to make new things. When it’s closer to something vaguely like the model has a Katamari Damacy ball of concepts glommed together by association and it makes probablistic guesses on what should come next, depending on where in the glom of “things like what it was trained on” you have ended up in.

People also tend to associate text gen AI with ChatGPT, but the underlying architecture of those models is just a continuation model; it tries to guess what “token” (which may be a whole word “go” or a component of a word such as “-ly”) comes next. The chat format AI are just designed with special UI and other tweaks to make sure that it stops before writing your part of the conversation. If you removed that component, what you would observe is the model seemingly having a conversation with itself. That’s what it’s always doing because it doesn’t know there’s a you and and it, truly, but with the right presentation, it can appear as if it’s waiting for you to say your part.

The point of all this info dumping is like… if someone is bent on hating it, at least understand what it is, ya know? And when you do understand, you might realize it’s a bit more complicated than you thought. Some people might hate it anyway, even if they understand fully what it is because of it threatening their livelihood, but I’d still rather them know than not know.

Oooh, that’s neat, bookmarking to look at later. I remember hearing in passing about his interest in cinema on one of the Blowback Podcast episodes on Korea, but I didn’t know that much detail about it.

That’s a good article. I think I had seen it before but not read through it in full.

Like at face value it comes off as incredibly elitist to say that artists have a power to create universes out of thin air, and non-artists don’t. And I couldn’t even say that they’re saying “everyone can be an artist and create universes out of thin air” because they’re clearly drawing a line between artists and non-artists (in which they consider, at the very least, oligarchs to be).

Yeah, it’s interesting how the motives and narrative shift in response to the changing conditions. And I think it is aligned with communist goals and views to insist that art does not arise from “special talent only reserved for a select group” but from a mixture of predispositions and applied process like any other capability (an example of predispositions and their impact being how most people can learn to sing, but a limited number have perfect pitch… this doesn’t mean only those with perfect pitch are “real musicians”, it just means they will have an easier time becoming a skilled musician, all other things being equal, than those who don’t). It reminds me of the idea of bridging the developed gap between “intellectual” and “worker”. The gap between “artist” and “worker” appears to have a similar kind of line drawing going on that will need to be overcome. But artists who are stuck seeing themselves as transcendent beings tapping into something mystical will have a harder time relating to the factory worker whose labor is also being exploited in various ways.

The soulless would. Everyone who works on “ai”, for instance.

Look, I don’t take “no investigation, no right to speak” as some kind of literal doctrine to follow, but Mao did have a point about the value of investigating rather than pure “brain cudgeling”. And it’s evident because I have investigated that anyone making a statement like this has not done shit to investigate the situation with generative AI.

“AI art” being soulless, depthless, and uncritical is a feature… not a bug

The vibes-based conclusion of someone who has never been near AI research and is ignoring business interests on top of it. It absolutely is a “bug” how much of it has become associated with “slop”. You think people who put billions of dollars into AI research want it to have a reputation for being “soulless”? That makes it harder for them to make money off of it. You think people who put their career into doing AI research want it to have that reputation either? Who would intentionally spend their life’s work trying to work on something “soulless” that is normally thought of as having meaning to it?

Fascists aren’t villains in saturday morning cartoons who talk about how much they love being evil. With the exception of the rare sadistic psychopath, or the opportunistic grifters who gravitate to any power structure they can feed off of, they’re mostly going to be people who sincerely believe in what they’re doing, in spite of how fucked it is.

Furthermore, not every entity in AI is fascist just because it funds it or wants to profit off of it. If that was the meaning of fascism, it would be watered down as to be meaningless. Nor do actual fascists have control over all of the R&D of AI.

It’s the closest that oligarchs can get to artists’ power to create universes out of thin air

George Bush took up painting after he did his part for the empire in helping to ravage another foreign country alongside Dick Cheney and others. And no, it wasn’t “AI” painting. Oligarchs, capitalists, imperialists, colonizers, fascists… none of them are incapable inherently of working on an artistic craft. And, in fact, art is used heavily to reinforce the status quo. There’s nothing that makes the craft immune to such.

Artists also don’t “create universes”. What artists do is tap into the imaginations that people have. When you look at a cutely drawn electrical outlet and are able to see a face, it’s not because electrical outlets are anything resembling human in actual characteristics. It’s because the human mind can do associating, anthropomorphizing pattern recognition quickly and easily. When an artist draws a flat image that somehow looks three dimensional, that’s also tapping into the human imagination and the way it perceives shapes and colors in space.

Artists work with the human mind’s existing functionality in order to get it to temporarily perceive something that isn’t real as plausibly close enough to real that a reaction can be evoked, for better or worse. If you see it this way, it’s not far off from that to see how it can be used for deceptive propaganda at times; yes, even fascist propaganda.

They see art as a threat because it questions and deciphers the myths, dogmas, lies, and illusions that fascism is built upon.

*Only in the hands of anti-fascists is art used this way.

Don’t underestimate fascism and related awful isms. Not all of their “art” is rightist chuds oozing grotesque racism in a meme format.

Propaganda can be more subtle. Like The Hunt for Red October movie and its anti-communist, “pro US side of the cold war” undertones.

Colonialism hasn’t ravaged the world for hundreds of years by being as obvious as Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Take what we’re up against seriously.

Even worse than that (mainly thinking of US context, but there may be aspects of this that are similar elsewhere):

• Make abortion less safe, or even illegal, depending on where in it you are (which means pregnancy as a whole is less safe)

• Socialize men to range from emotionally stunted to controlling predator, all of whom are socialized to view women as lesser and objects*

• Destroy community, so that people barely trust each other and have few ways to meet each other

• Shift much of meeting to online and then monetize the hell out of it, such that it’s more about making money off people than helping them meet

• Divide people so thoroughly on beliefs that it’s hard for them to see eye to eye at all

*Which is why “why aren’t women having more babies” is even a talking point in the first place, as if there’s some quota they’re supposed to fulfill. We could instead be asking “how do we improve society for the people who are living in it?”