Flippanarchy

Arts have some of the lowest barriers of entry imaginable. Anyone can pick up a pencil and do "art"

Your comment tells me you are not interested in art. you are interested in finished products. Your idea of Generative tools giving children a voice is grotesque. Any child can grab a pencil and make a drawing. It is easier than ever for a child to learn visual art as a language or writing as a voice or music as a passion.

But you prefer your child to write a prompt in a vending machine thus negating any humanity that your child could bring to the world of art. The children of the next generations could be holding the next Shakespeare or the next Miyazaki or the next Steven Spielberg. The children that hobble themselves with machine induced Dunning-krueger have been stolen of that opportunity.

A world without capitalism, would not be obsessed with monetizing everything and the lowering deadlines to mass produce garbage. I imagine there would be time for slowness, and introspection. To make less more meaningful art. To propose alternative aesthetics. To judge art as a human act. You are telling me that a free society will choose creativity as automated corporate sponsored vending machines? Well talk about a lack introspection.

There are so many living Artists out there and I love to see hear and read their aesthetic obsessions. I love the musician that mastered the violin as much as I love the urban noise artist that rubs his balls to a contact microphone. I love the novelist that took care to research for his novel by moving and living to the little town they are writing about as much as I love The crude horror short story writer that wanted to exorcise a visceral feeling by adding automatic writing to their new story. I love Tarkovsky and Neil Breen. I love The Russian Arc and saving Captain Alex, especially when watched together in a 2 movie marathon. There was a wide array of outside art that incorporated people with diverse abilities. People who paint without limbs, people whose styles are wildly different from the mainstream. The disabled and incarcerated. You won't see this art being sold in capitalism because neoliberal capitalism is inherently ableist. so instead capitalist logic suggests that they should wear someone else's mask. Thus erasing their voices.

A love for art means that you can love and respect what someone else makes. It acknowledges that we are different, that our voices are different and that there are a myriad of forms of communication. Capitalist logic wants to make things uniform and standardized, centralized and dependent of large platforms. Current AI products follow this logic and being critical of it is as valid as criticizing the logic of every good and service that has been coopted and perverted by capitalism

It is hilarious watching people yearn for a communist utopia while trying to silence critics of current production methods. I feel it is only a rhetoric strategy adopted by AI apologists.

My issue with AI in creative fields is that the people that use it seem to hold a contempt towards art as a language. To them creative media that doesn't follow a certain specification doesn't exist and holds no value. So they want to jump immediately to the production line notion of a finished product. They don't believe in the human action of creating a personal language or aesthetic by exploring the limits of language. Language is bypassed by the vending machine. you mix and match a few reductive options and you get your product. AI vending machines are very depending on this mechanistic labeling of art as well. millions of works ranked and scaled through a centralized reductive criteria.

Yes I think it is the AI defenders who are usually reductive in comments.

They reduce the logic of artistic production to capitalist logic: Hence AI art is better because it is "faster" to make and because it looks to a standard or specification to be sold.

They reduce living artists to materials for these vending machines. Always denigrating their work while at the meantime always hungry for the new lora or the virgin territory in training data. Artists are both valuable in bulk but dehumanized, imitated and anonymized.

They don't believe in human voice or their own voices even. They have infinite hopes for the AI. A big chunk of AI defenders are doomers in a way. Their idea of progress is turning themselves into machines instead of making the system more humane. They always talk about efficiency and judge everything in value scales. Mathematical thinking has no place in art. Especially art made beyond capitalism. The beauty of art is that it transcends value. That it connects us to people with different viewpoints. It expands cultural horizons and subjectivity. Art is useless in the best sense of the word. It is potential beauty looking for a beholder. But that is also a trait that Ai defenders seem eager to bypass. Because art made by centralized models has the tendency to IMPOSE values and solidify subjectivity.

In this respect the generative products we have are a self defeating practice for it's enthusiasts because it also has the potential to anonymize those who use it. I feel that is the end goal of the consolidation of generative AI models. This is the reason why CEO's are so obsessed with alignment, censorship and control. It's not "Skynet as a threat" but rather "Who gets to be Skynet?" Who floods the media with dribble? What AI model creates and sings and speaks for everyone? It's part of the pitch for large investors.

You could have picked up a pencil a music instrument or a quill, but you choose someone else's hype cycle. And I feel sorry for the voice we lost.