As an artist, I think it is a net negative for us. Disregarding the copyright issue, I think it’s also consolidating power into large corporations, going to kill learning fundamental skills (rip next generation of artists), and turn the profession into a low skill minimum wage job. Artists that spent years learning and perfecting their skills will be worth nothing and I think it’s a pretty depressing future for us. Anways thoughts?
Failing to understand the difference between Adobe Photoshop – a swiss army knife tool used by artists to create art – and Stable Diffusion – a deep learning model that uses, as input, the labor of millions of artists in order to produce remixes – is abysmally reductive.
These questions aren’t really directed at you and I’m not saying this to be provocative but because I can’t quite figure out what’s going on through this whole page: isn’t every technology the crystallised labour of workers who came before? I’ll have to double check myself, but isn’t that the definition of capital (I’m tempted to say ‘constant capital’)?
Why is the labour of Photoshop programmers, engineers, etc, and all the people whose work went into feeding those workers, lighting the rooms they worked in, powering the buildings, mining the energy for the power, and so on, any different to the labour of artists that gets fed into an AI machine?
Is art a uniquely different human activity? And if so, why? What sets it apart?
That’s a difficult question to answer :) I’ll leave that one to those more involved in the art world than I am.
You’re correct that labour is always involved in producing value. But labour is not always compensated for the full value they produce. The photoshop programmers, and all the people whose work went into feeding them, lighting the rooms they worked in, powering the buildings they worked in, mining the energy for the power, and so on… were all compensated for their work.
Obviously they weren’t fairly compensated. This is capitalism we’re talking about after all. And yes, there are limits to compensation, arrived upon by collective decisions made by society and spelled out in legal agreements (and yes of course, under capitalism, only a small subset of society makes those decisions). E.g., the photoshop programmers are not entitled to a piece of the sale of every artwork that an artist creates when using photoshop. Incidentally, this is part of why photoshop is so phenomenally expensive.
But as communists, we believe that labour is entitled to all value it produces. And in this scenario, the value that was created by these artists through their labour hasn’t been compensated at all, much less the full value. Stable Diffusion is absolutely worthless without a massive training dataset, and that dataset is produced by the labour of combined millions of artists and their works, none of whom granted permission to these tech companies to use their work.
Good points!
And I think you’re right to avoid the philosophical question. Given the debate after the OP asked their question, I was brave to even hint at mine.
Although… People pay for Photoshop? I’m kidding, of course; shaky text you wouldn’t steal a bike…shaky text
Unless you were an AI company and it was a picture of a bike, apparently.
That’s a shitty move by the tech companies. They’ve got very sure of their right to information, especially since they started mass harvesting our data and we, generally, agreed to hand it over willingly for cheap shots of dopamine. I guess that famous saying is right: information wants to be free. Particularly if the person who wants it is willing just to take it.)
The whole point of analogy is to convey idea, not to be a dissertation detailing down to the vein and artery.
Artists are defending their interests and with it the whole copyright industry, and if you think this would have never happened, now you know that reality cannot be defied and delayed, and capitalism is simply accelerating things that we would have encountered as problems a lot later.
Artists were thinking they were going to become Picassos one day and rule among capitalist class. They would never be able to do that. They were and are a part of working class, and this is the boulder that has hit their heads now.
I’m pretty sure that literally nobody these days expects that they are going to “rule among the capitalist class” by becoming an artist. You have got to be kidding me. It’s ironic because most of the users on this site are programmers/involved in developing computer science and you know that they are more well off and have more status than anybody who has ever claimed to be an artist here that is an artist first and foremost, not a programmer and then an art hobbyist as a second.
Literally anybody can be an artist or do anything if they want to do the work. Itisn’t reserved to a special class or something. Like what the heck.
Your assumption that everybody here is a neckbeard programmer is not just wrong, but goes a little beyond being wrong. It is like those lib brains stereotyping everything with no depth in their takes. You are all over in this thread, like probably 1/5th comments, peddling this same thing, how everybody who counters OP is a programmer with no soul and empathy. Big WTF
The two posts you made in this post were just dunking on artists as just wanting to go into it to just be among capitalists and be the next Piccaso. Which is honestly ridiculous. Nobody wants to be an artist to get rich. On the flip side, everyone wants to get into tech to get rich, unless you are planning to go into academia or research with the aim of helping people and that isn’t often. Just look at AI developers. They aren’t creating the technology out of goodwill. It isn’t beyond reality to assume that most of the people defending AI aren’t artists. I’m going to call it for what it is: people who hate artists are jealous and they hate anybody who puts in the mental and physical labor to doing something that requires effort. Literally anybody is allowed to do what they want and deserves to feel good about building their skills in something. Being an armchair political theorist on Lemmy and online circles takes literally zero effort but it takes effort to do anything creative. Prompting AI game assets and furry boobs and overly rendered space porn doesn’t count.
Since all you care about is just programmers at this point, let’s go to your side of the story.
Artistry is also a job, like how programming is a job. With Artistry, you claim that everyone is an artist to “emphasise their creativity”. That they don’t care about money or getting rich. The mentality you put on the Artist, does not align with the capitalist society whatsoever. Most artists are proletarian, forced to design art based on the need of the company. If they were ever to design art that they truly enjoy, then they wouldn’t have a stable income unless if the bourgeois class enjoys your particular work. I mean, designing art utilising your own means of production, it’s the standard definition of petit bourgeois. Meaning that the artist that you set in your mind is petit bourgeois. You emphasise individualism above everything else, especially above the needs of the collective.
What about a programmer? It is true that a programmer can be petit bourgeois, working for themselves to design a product. However, very few programmers do this, and instead they rather work for the bourgeoisie directly, relying on a wage and instead following orders. You simply direct every programmer as proletarian, and meanwhile you direct every artist as petit bourgeois. This is why I posted that image from earlier. You’re just utilising a petit bourgeois mentality, specifically individualism.
One last question since you seem hellbent on AI taking over work: what do you expect people are going to do when everything is automated by AI? Sit and decay and rot?
Speaking as a western (former) programmer, I believe it would be a mistake to classify most of us western programmers as proletariat. I’d argue we fall squarely into either the labour aristocracy or the petite bourgeoisie (whether we run our own companies, or receive financial instruments like RSUs as part of our overall compensation package).
And I strongly suspect that’s part of the defensiveness on display here from the tech world for their latest labour-stealing project (deep learning models that are entirely dependent upon vast repositories of human labour, aka “training datasets,” in order for them to have any utility).
edit: -1 already? It seems I’ve struck a nerve :)
That makes no sense. People who go into the arts (specifically the entertainment industry) do things that are in demand and for the “bourgeoisie”. Everyone needs entertainment and novel ideas, or else they literally go crazy. There’s a reason that sensory deprivation in prisons is torture.
I feel like you’re doing a bunch of mental gymnastics to defend AI and dump on people in general who want to devote their time to doing something that is in line with developing their own skills and contributing to the well being of themselves and others.
You haven’t made any good arguments in support of AI if that is what your goal is to change my mind here.
The fact that you have deviated from your original statement, and put bourgeoisie in quotes, shows me how little you actually know about Marxism.
Who cares? Are you really going to go as far as flaunt a your cultural capitol, gatekeep, and shame me for trying to have an honest conversation about what people should be expected to do if AI takes over everything? I’m here to learn, not to get dogpiled for having real concerns about this subject and the OP. I don’t like AI, as I understand the basis of socialism it is to allievate the burdens of capitalism. And it goes beyond production. You have done nothing but insult me and honestly make no sense in any of your arguments. I don’t feel any more inspired to hear more about your idea of Marxism and I’m not the only one.
I know about art and that is the topic at hand.