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submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by BennyTheExplorer@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture. Generative AI is (in most cases) just a fancy way for cooperations to steal art on a scale, that hasn't been possible before. And then they use AI to fill the internet with slop and misinformation and actual artists are getting fired from their jobs, because the company replaces them with an AI, that was trained on their original art. Because of these reasons and some others, it just feels wrong to me, to be using AI in such a manner, when this community should be about inclusion and kindness. Wouldn't it be much cooler, if we commissioned an actual artist for the banner or find a nice existing artwork (where the licence fits, of course)? I would love to hear your thoughts!

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[-] Asswardbackaddict@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

You should definitely support artists! You know how good it feels to support someone you know? I'm personally going to give my music away for free. I think intellectual property is meant to be shared, but I do recognize that we gotta eat in this parasitic system, yo. How about this? We support artists with our commonwealth? It's fucking important, man. Culture matters. No need to shift the blame to the individual when it's the system that's rotten. Two more ideas, then I'll fuck off. Guaranteed dignity in death, and defensive, non-coercive, no entanglements protection of holy sites. I'm a deterministic atheist through and through, but man, we gotta heal our fucking souls.

[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 13 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

We know this is the very famous "starry night", right? Is OP asking to troll, or maybe is there a joke or detail I'm missing, or OP just hasn't yet seen the Van Gogh and marveled at what was encoded into the painting?

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[-] pineapple@lemmy.ml 13 points 6 days ago

I'm not sure weather it is AI or not. It's much easier to tell when the images are ment to look realistic.

I very much agree. Text generation has many valid use cases and I use it on a day to day basis, but image generation as much fewer valid use cases and much more malicious ones.

[-] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 7 points 5 days ago

Text generation has many valid use cases and I use it on a day to day basis, but image generation as much fewer valid use cases and much more malicious ones.

Do you not extend the same sympathy to writers as you do visual artists?

[-] pineapple@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 days ago

Yes I do. Although I don't use text generation for writing creative pieces I use it for coding and help in the Linux terminal. It's not like I was going to pay anyone to do that for me.

[-] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 days ago

Fair enough

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[-] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Right now, anti-AI rhetoric is taking the same unprincipled rhetoric that the Luddites pushed forward in attacking machinery. They identified a technology linked to their proletarianization and thus a huge source of their new misery, but the technology was not at fault. Capitalism was.

What generative AI is doing is making art less artisinal. The independent artists are under attack, and are being proletarianized. However, that does not mean AI itself is bad. Copyright, for example, is bad as well, but artists depend on it. The same reaction against AI was had against the camera for making things like portraits and still-lifes more accessible, but nowadays we would not think photography to be anything more than another tool.

The real problems with AI are its massive energy consumption, its over-application in areas where it actively harms production and usefulness, and its application under capitalism where artists are being punished while corporations are flourishing.

In this case, there's no profit to be had. People do not need to hire artists to make a banner for a niche online community. Hell, this could have been made using green energy. These are not the same instances that make AI harmful in capitalist society.

Correct analysis of how technologies are used, how they can be used in our interests vs the interests of capital, and correct identification of legitimate vs illegitimate use-cases are where we can succeed and learn from the mistakes our predecessors made. Correct identification of something linked to deteriorating conditions combined with misanalyzing the nature of how they are related means we come to incorrect conclusions, like when the Luddites initially started attacking machinery, rather than organizing against the capitalists.

Hand-created art as a medium of human expression will not go away. AI can't replace that. What it can do is make it easier to create images that don't necessarily need to have that purpose, as an expression of the human experience, like niche online forum banners or conveying a concept visually. Not all images need to be created in artisinal fashion, just like we don't need to hand-draw images of real life when a photo would do. Neither photos nor AI can replace art. Not to mention, but there is an art to photography as well, each human use of any given medium to express the human experience can be artisinal.

[-] yogthos@lemmy.ml 4 points 4 days ago

It's worth noting that the argument regarding massive energy consumption is no longer true. Models perform better than ones that required a data centre to run just a year ago can already be run on a laptop today. Meanwhile, people are still finding lots of new ways to optimize them. There is little reason to think they're not going to continue getting more efficient for the foreseeable future.

[-] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 4 points 4 days ago

Fair point, but I do think that until we see more widespread adoption of renewables in the US and other heavy-polluters, energy use in general is a hot topic we are already beyond capacity for. There needs to be a real qualitative leap to green energy some point soon, and we can't just rely on the PRC to electrify the world if the US is intent on delaying that shift as much as possible.

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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
287 points (85.6% liked)

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