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?

  • Preston Maness ☭
    3•1 year ago

    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.

    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 :)