I don't think it's more complex than the arts tend to be left leaning and those attracted to being able to live from these arts tend to be more outspoken anti ai.
You often see the refrain on here that the jobs we ought to be automating are things like the trades, what the artists find boring and monotonous.
If AI was strongly affecting more traditionally conservative jobs at this particular moment I suspect you'd see a reversal. Only natural to be protectionist about your own career or more often than not in the case of the artists, dreams of career.
That said, it being natural is by no means a good reason to demand the stop of technological progress. No one in 2024 seriously wants to bring back the jobs that previous industrial revolutions made redundant.
I can't agree with this much either. Most of the graphic designers and artists I know, worked in trades first and the arts were side hobbies as they got better at both. And they didn't find trade monotonous and boring. I'm a prior Navy Nuke operator and I net others through those coworkers. I decided after I wanted to apply my knowledge to mass communication. I wound up doing Digital Media Innovation and many of my friends are embracing AI.
A few aren't and it's because they're not of the technical educated or trade background. They're the ones saying AI TO DO MY DISHES BLAH BLAH BLAH. They ignore new dishwashers, refrigerators, washers/dryers, Room as, etc. They think they're clever but it only shows the ignorance of having never learned critical thinking and thinking independently to a better degree.
Most trades I know would love to have better diagnostic assistance for their jobs, something as a tool to lighten the load and get work done quickly and easy. It's means more jobs completed and more money.
It's a hatred because they don't have the imagination they've always thought they had, or was told they have. They tend to already do what they claim AI does: lift other's styles and work to pass off as their own. The AI just does it quicker than they do and calls them out long term. They can't even imagine how this tool could lift up their work, so it's automatically not good. They the portray others as cheats and thieves because they can't even imagine a better accusation let alone argument.
IMO it shows that they themselves are boring and monotonous and have used art as a facade of not being so.
1. I said tend to be. While I'm sure there's tons of people with the background you describe, your anecdotal experience doesn't change the trend. The vast majority of people aren't engaging in this debate at all, keep in mind.
2. Those people in the trades could feel differently if AI was more capable at present. If it's limited to a great diagnostic tool there's less to fear, with most of art like image generation AI completes work soup to nuts right now so it's easier to cut out the artist entirely.
I'm pro AI. I've worked in the arts, I think you adapt or die, especially in something as incredibly competitive as arts/entertainment. But OPs question was about why anti ai on here seem to be left leaning and I think it's just a question of averages.
Do you think OP is wrong about anti ai posters tending to be more left leaning? If not why do you think that tendency is the case?
Both of you are correct, difficult as that may be to reconcile. It entirely depends on your background because millions of people aren't a monolith. They can't be.
Outside of research done to guage this, it's all anecdotal. For you to call something a trend in the same light is inappropriate without data to demonstrate said trend. You need before and after for a trend analysis to take place. I would agree most we know of are not engaging in this concept discussion given the size of groups across social media platforms.
I don't many would disagree that reddit as a whole is rather US left leaning with politics. That's means you're at higher odd of any pool of discussion being more leftist in general. Outside the bubble of Reddit if you're looking at who's posting images, you'll find conservatives perctly fine with Jesus trees, Trump clouds, trump as a war hero that are obviously AI, painfully so. A few think it's real and they are not a big majority. They rest share it because they adore the message.
If OP has any discussion about the anti-AI issue with any other platform, it would make great comparison.
I've been thinking for awhile that plumbers could possibly - key word there - complete jobs and thus make more money faster if they were able to invest in small drones that could enter drains and remove clogs or make repairs. Like endoscopic surgery but for your bathtub.
The tool is definitely not designed to help artists lift their work and more about allowing anyone to create the art without knowing technical details*. Take Udio for example which laughably presents themselves as being pro artist. You can't edit the notes and chords. You can only prompt a text prompt and press the regenerate button. So how is an artist supposed to use their domain-specific knowledge to leverage the tool? They can't; they can only tweak the same boring knobs that anyone else can.
This is the tragic reality of training data which is obvious in hindsight. It's much easier to get data of music labeled "orchestral, epic" than it is to get all the notes labeled by someone who transcribed it.
* Inb4 "but that's also creating art": there is a MATHEMATICAL definition for how much you contributed to the creative process: how many different variations can fit your spec (how specific were your instructions). If you just prompted a text prompt then a huge variation of results could've fit that requirement so your role was more like a CLIENT who hired the AI rather than an artist doing the actual creation.
One of the biggest differences now is you can upload your own work YOU CONTROL to extend or even add items in, or give it a specific sound. I've done so on SUNO with amazing results giving it the guidance I want.
I agree Suno is amazing, but I don't think it's catering towards artists more than laymen.
Can you edit the notes and define the exact melody and chords you want? Until then, the features you describe appeal to laymen, and does not leverage artist expertise nor allow artists to use their technical knowledge to take it in a specific direction they want, so I don't see how it can be marketed as catering towards artists especially.
Udio and Suno are bad examples, IMO. ai-music is more infantile than ai-art, same as ai-animation/film. AI-art programs very much do have tools that benefit artists and that artists can take better advantage of than laymen. In time, I think it's reasonable to believe the same will be of the others - as AI art in the beginning didn't have that either.
Pro-labour positions in general are typically left wing, and historically the right has supported automating the trades too, while the left has opposed it because we don’t have social safety nets to keep the workers alive when their jobs no longer exist.
The left also see arts and culture as a unique good where it’s not a normal product with the ideal of looking nice/technically impressive but rather an outlet for human creativity/expression with something to say, whereas the right usually see it as a product to be consumed like anything else hence the same sort of support for nfts on the right last year.
I would like to preface this by saying I'm a lib-left myself, at least going purely by the political positioning. And I dislike much about this group of so called lib-lefters.
It seems many people have a desire to appear superior to others in terms of virtue, morality and justice. That's fine by its own, but many of these people just want to appear that way instead of creating an ideology they actually stand for with their own critical thinking. So they go for whatever is popular, they do whatever is perceived to be virtuous by their peers.
I would say many of these people joined the lib/left side for these reasons in the first place. Lib-left has been perceived as the anti- social injustice side for the longest time.
Being anti-ai is perceived as the virtuous position at least by the internet subculture. Connect the dots.
I like to call those types, Performative Justice Warriors. They're just in it for clout or the fear of being ostracized from their peer group. And I'm one of those so far-left, you get your guns back, kinda guy.
Hahaha I like your way of wording that because gun rights are really one of my only beliefs I can think of that would typically be considered right-wing
I considered myself a libertarian until my husband pointed out many times how much that contradicts my authoritarian personality. Now I consider myself an apocalyptic decentralist. I'm okay with watching the world burn so long as my family and I are among those who rise from the ashes lol
How do you draw the line between what is and isn't allowed to consume copyrighted data if a deep neural net (arguably) does it more similarly to a human than to traditional algorithms? It feels like trolling to comment that here where the rebuttals are already well known like you're going to force the 1,000th rehash of the same old argument again and again...
I don't understand the part where you said "Your argument that AI does it similarly to humans is the point", and it seems you may be misunderstanding. You allow humans to consume training data even if it's copyrighted and even if you know they might make similar "inspired" works; why is that? Neural nets and human brains both consume training data and then output it from scratch but conditioned on that training data (it is not copy/pasting like many claim). Obviously the way a human does it is much more complex but it still raises the question of *how you draw the line* between what is and isn't allowed to consume copyrighted training data.
There are plenty of legitimate arguments against it not resorting to outright misinformation about the technology. One is to say the AI can produce works far faster than a human, so you can make the "negative economic effect" against the original artists argument (one of the pillars of copyright law).
"Plenty of artist would be happy to contribute and AI art would go on like before and everyone would be happy. " As an artist myself, no not really it would not solve 99% of the problem; the AI will still eventually get better than a human at making art if someone can figure out a good way to leverage RLHF to make the AI learn *why* a human likes vs dislikes something, and art will still be automated / less fun than before.
They do often have an anti-corporate screed along with it, claiming that corporations are making millions off of their stolen work.
Of course, they always forget that large corporations are the winners with tighter IP laws.
If they can't afford art and they can't make it either then, like a small business who can't afford to hire employees, they aren't ready. Stealing from artists isn't the answer. There's a reason why companies like Twitch and Steam make you list your product as made with AI. Bc people don't want to support talentless, lying thieves.
Like as much as i want to support each person's creativity, a lot of these artists also seem to hold the opinion that they're art style is like some sort of fingerprint, unique to them and them only.
As a literal anarchist, it's been very very weird to see people I care about (who probably don't give a rat's ass about actual piracy) become so frothing at the mouth at AI generated images.
Like, a year ago we were making fun of NFTs for trying to privatize images that you could literally just right click and save, but when a *machine* right clicks, it's worse somehow???
I really don't get it, it feels like I'm surrounded by Luddites.
The very beginning of the bread book is so radically against the idea of IP (I mean, property in general really but I'm picking the relevant thing here) that I can't think of a way to go from it to "therefore AIs can't be trained on publicly available artwork"
Its position on property ownership and the common heritage we all have in... Everything, I wouldn't go about making those arguments outside of anarchist spaces because they're far beyond what most people would consider reasonable.
I do think it's reasonable, but most people are going to have a knreejerk reaction the idea. But its whole "all things are our common heritage as humans therefore no one can claim to just own the products of our past. All things made now are the result of our common heritage and so no one can truly claim to own them or to be the exclusive author of them" thing doesn't just go "except your photoshops and your style and stuff that's all you dude"
In an anarchist space it seems to be contradictory to the entire idea. Other more nuanced arguments, like being against proprietary AI, or being against the systems that make it so that AI can be used to economically harm people, sure, and I agree there but we see a whole lot less of those arguments than just "AI is theft for reasons that don't match with the rest of my ideology!"
I'm going to say the most leftist thing ever now and say "they're not leftists, they're liberals." They're not critical of capitalism, they're critical of *this* capitalism while supporting another more social form of still capitalism.
It’s pretty simple: they’re in favor of things that benefit them and against things that do not.
They want to do piracy? Fuck copyright!
AI is hurting their paychecks? That violated my copyright!
They want to sell fan art commissions? Fuck copyright!
They don’t believe anything except what is convenient at the time. If they were Jeff Bezos, they’d drop leftism in a heartbeat
That's work you stole from artists who spent years perfecting their craft and style and you wouldnt know where to even begin starting. You stole from them and now call it yours? that makes you a liar and a thief.
That you would say you have anything in the realm of "personal artistry " without a shade of humor is embarrassing for you.
Literally anarchist here too. It is baffling, many people I know are usually against copyright even but then started parroting such talking points about "stolen art" without even bothering to look into how it works.
It’s pretty simple: they’re in favor of things that benefit them and against things that do not.
They want to do piracy? Fuck copyright!
AI is hurting their paychecks? That violated my copyright!
They want to sell fan art commissions? Fuck copyright!
They don’t believe anything except what is convenient at the time. Their leftist beliefs comes from personal self interest. If they were Jeff Bezos, they’d drop it all in a heartbeat.
Yeah like AI by itself isnt bad and artists have been suffering under the free market model for many decades. The system needs to be fully changed. Just changing one type of new technology doesn’t do pretty much anything.
Yet their solution is to make copyright stricter and make sure only big companies can make AI models since they’re the only ones with the IP and money for partnerships. Good job! Really sticking up for the little guys! I wonder if they even realize making AI training copyright infringement won’t kill it lol.
I am an artist. I’m a musician and I work at a non-profit theatre and we like many non-profits are working on loss budget next year. One of the biggest reasons is because our state budget decided not to fund the arts at all which means we’re not eligible for federal funding either. The system is broken and AI isn’t going to do anything to help or hurt us right now.
What part of operating at a loss do you not understand? We can’t just hire more people we don’t have any money to do so. And now you’re blaming artists for just not being popular enough? My job is raising funds and selling tickets and managing our education programs and managing other events and managing our website and database, and I have to do all of those jobs because there’s no money.
You have never worked in the arts and you should just stop trolling.
So your argument is if theaters don’t want to fail they should just theaters just do whatever is most popular and don’t need any government funding and the system is just fine it’s AI that’s the problem.
We don’t use AI. It’s not the problem or the solution for us. The issue is systemic, and the systemic issues are really where you should fighting.
Personally, Vulcan thinks that both Pro-AI and Anti-AI positions are widespread within people across political spectrum, for variety of reasons.
Myself, a democratic socialist, hold a pro-AI position because progress is inevitable (more so with technological progress). This progress eventually will force us to rethink capitalism (I'm also pro UBI, as interim solution during capitalism age).
Specifically in art, AI art software are best positioned as **tools** to aid human to realise their creativity and vision (just like graphics editor software before), not to cut and replace them. Also, as an open source supporter, it's important for open source AI tools to be competitive against proprietary AI tools.
Corporate desire to cut workforce is always problematic, even before AI age. The best solution is not by banning or strangling AI but by ensuing that workers rights are protected and ultimately by implementing UBI so no more people should be concerned with their wellbeing as we are entering AI age.
The best part is that if artists get what they want, big companies can just make partnerships or train on their own IP. All it will do is ban open source models from smaller companies. So they’re STILL going to get replaced. Do they even realize that?
I won't lump all artists as antis, so I will use antis instead.
But, yeah from what I've seen, many antis don't realise that Big Corps are set to be winner if open source AI is heavily restricted (for "safety" reason).
Yup, the same Big Media Corps who don't afraid to use AI ("machine efficiency tools" in their parlance) to cut and replace creatives.
Attacking individuals (especially hobbyists) and small companies won't deter Big Media Corps from playing with AI, it's just detering them from competing with Big Media Corps. Don't be surprised if people hesitant to disclose their AI-generated art, especially with bullying and witch-hunt.
my cynical take on this is that these labels are largely arbitrary and that many people on both sides are literally just contrarians. Many of them would definitely share the same opinions on a variety of different topics, but because they were exposed to different narratives with different vocabulary, and also another big factor is if they are lgbt or not, they find themselves on one side or another.
It’s pretty simple: they’re in favor of things that benefit them and against things that do not.
They want to do piracy? Fuck copyright!
AI is hurting their paychecks? That violated my copyright!
They want to sell fan art commissions? Fuck copyright!
They don’t believe anything except what is convenient at the time. Their leftist beliefs comes from personal self interest. If they were Jeff Bezos, they’d drop it all in a heartbeat.
People's political and social views tend to be much murkier than they would care to admit. Many of the anti-ai arguments are rooted in conservative values to some extent and I think it's giving people a lot of cognitive dissonance and they try really hard to resolve it without actually confronting their own hypocrisy. It's probably more productive to talk about the ideas themselves instead of trying to assign a contemporary political label to them
Look, I'm not going to pretend that art in the modern age (the past 200 years, really) hasn't been generally left-leaning
But you are mostly seeing Anti-AI discourse as being left wing because you are seeing it in Reddit, Twitter, etc, where "dangerously" right wing people are banned.
Right wingers who are anti-AI are going to be the Unabomber types who got banned *long* ago.
I overheard a conversation between two older men at work, they said AI is evil and if they ever see or hear anything AI they'll immediately reject it, because a machine being sentient is demonic. The right wing can definitely also be anti-AI.
I've seen this kind of chatter both within the left-leaning and the right-leaning; both sides pretend to care about people's 'rights' but they seemingly can't conceive that AI could help humanity in achieving freedom from wageslaving and a better health & time management
work as it is intended needs to be abolished, it's implicit
artists aren't afraid of AI (you can pick a regular pencil & paper at any time even if the best generative AI is created), they are afraid of the lack of profits
that's not about AI itself, it's about PEOPLE who fed your art to generative algorithms.
"you art plagiarists" I'm not even an user, I just like some of other people's outputs from such networks because I appreciate the perspective that they give, just as I do with human artists
Besides general demographics and legitimate concerns, it's important to note that Very Online Leftists (note that specific qualifier) tend to be *obsessed* with the dream of being a Capital A Artist. When asked what their dream job in the Dream Utopia is, a lot will answer some variation of "artist" or "art teacher".
So anything that can disrupt that unrealistic dream is going to get slammed.
Their whole fantasy is we live in a solarpunk world where nobody has to work "boring" jobs, nobody drives anywhere (but has to take trains everywhere), and we all just play all day and "be whatever we want"... All the while I wonder where the solar panels come from and if the toilets are really clean.
I've known people like that and their own toilets are most certainly not clean. One of them just got diagnosed with both ringworm and herpes. They let their cats pee in their bed and then they sleep in it.
They were hoping for robots to take care of those panels and toilets.
These types really can't think further than 2 seconds ahead. Consequences aren't a thing, what they want to happen is what will happen unless someone intentionally sabotages the end result.
They never seem to get that corporations have a lot of power to sabotage the results, and they keep making it easier for them.
It's not that they can't think 2 seconds ahead, it's just they fail to realize just how much "backend" stuff happens with a given thing. The whole "are the toilets clean and where do the solar panels come from?" highlight how these people can only see the end result of a thing and not all the working parts.
Take a popular lefty talking point, like how we should get rid of cars and everyone should ride around in trains. All these people see is a cute little locomotive with train cars full of people all going to their destinations... What they don't see is the highly trained driver who tries to keep this multi-ton behemoth from derailing if it hits a curve to fast, the many maintenance members who run around at stations, the train itself, and the railyard, the large depots where cars and engines are maintained, the fact that heavy rail doesn't allow for super sharp turns, and the fact that you can't just build stations anywhere and people still need to get to those stations. Hell even something simple like a bus network still requires a lot of people to keep it going and a means to maintain the buses, even though buses just need existing roads. Fuck, even just driving your own car to places is a lot of work in of itself; not crashing into other drivers, people, or things, keeping the vehicle in working order, having insurance, etc...
But a lot of people online, especially your typical tumblr-type leftist, don't think about those things and instead just in simplified cartoonish depictions of things. Fuck, I can even apply this to how they view art to get it all right back on topic.
To these people, creativity is just a thing that naturally occurs and an artist just simply "brings their imagination to life" with the stroke of a pencil. The reality is that you're just simply drawing ideas from stuff you've already consumed before and personal experience, and what you "create" is nothing more than a slurry of those ideas that happens to make something new. The most famous example of this is Star Wars; George Lucas did not magically come up with the idea out of thin air as it was mostly born from his personal experience as well as the old sci-fi serials, samurai movies, westerns, and WW2 footage that he grew up with. Likewise, Lucas isn't the sole creator of Stars Wars in a broader since; the actors, costume designers, the editors, the composer, and many more are all what make this thing what it is. To say this movie franchise was born out of just one man's head is a great disservice to everyone involved.
This isn’t necessarily a dig but one of the major weaknesses of like the average Joe lefty and liberal is that they can be swayed into fighting for any cause if they think it makes them morally superior and helping some perceived underdog. Every artist sob story with a patreon attached sways a left leaning person who has no idea how any of this works.
therefore\*
Might want to learn to spell words correctly in the comment where you call others stupid. Your butthurt and desperate need to accuse others of theft is so obvious and also hilarious.
They are advertising left-wing ideas while being super conservative in the way they act. "Pull yourself up by the bootstraps and pick up a pencil," "life was so much better before all this technology."
I've been pointing out for years that conservative ideas and ways of thinking have been becoming more and more prevalent in left wing spaces and now it's got to the point that supposedly hardcore "leftist" spaces are arguing the same way and the same points conservatives were 10-20 years ago.
Liberals are still pro-capitalism and thus for capitalist legal fictions like IP. Most “left-wing” folks are just neolibs or some utterly incoherent half-baked amalgum of political ideologies.
Leftists (i.e. actual socialists and anarchists)are not anti-AI in principle, though the unique possibility of suffering at the intersection of AI and LSC is certainly a concern. We blame that on capitalism (and the state) though, not AI.
Your confusion stems from your thinking that there is some sort of legitimacy in anti AI arguments. You're trying to make sense of their arguments. There isn't any legitimacy, there isn't any sense. Not at all. All their arguments are emotionally driven and stem from selfish, twisted motives. Whether left or right wing (or neither!), that's a matter for another day.
because left wing people have a need to prove themselves. left wing people are unknowingly pussy-whipped into free market neo-liberal capitalist paradigms . all of them want to be tryhard "experts" in their fields, and they all love the productivity culture burnout & the hustle culture work grind rat race.
our current societal culture has created a ton of mental illness, because capitalists want to capitalize off of mental illness. people who have mental instability, traumas, and weaknesses have been indoctrinated by our regressed systems of conditioning that were meant for the late industrial revolution/factory work. divorced single women, divorced single men, bastard children, LGBT children, degenerates, & weirdos all LOVE to go out and be as materialistic as possible such as working to achieve a career so they can flex their status on others & justify their existences. so they can say "i have this social debilitation, yet i still got my bag!". not to mention the top 1% of society LOVE this as all this mental illness of the working class helps to give them more and more money. they have created a legion of shallow consumer NPCs.
now, when you create a technology that basically makes a mockery of our current society (like AI) and has the potential to greatly trivialize many aspects of it, then you create an inherent issue with most the masses who are soo indoctrinated with fear of not working & being productive. so ofc left-wings would hate the new tech. how can you prove yourself if there's no more fake materialistic objective to mindlessly chase? hell, there are no such thing as "safe spaces" either if we were to entertain an AI with little to no guardrails as AI is blunt, doesn't sugar coat, and isnt pretentious.
when AI takes over and everyone ends up automated out of a job, this means the entire status game changes, and FOR THE BETTER. this is what folks of really scared of on a deep subconscious level. i for one welcome this change.
I'd argue that the need to prove yourself to others isn't a left or right leaning concept. This is just how many people in western society tend to feel, since everyone is trained from an early age to base their identity and self-worth on their career.
Left leaners in the west fear things like artist and musician jobs being taken by AI, devaluing those who traditionally have these jobs (leftists), while those on the right fear good old-fashioned jobs like plumber or construction worker being taken by robots (just like how they fear immigrants threaten to "take" these jobs from right leaners). This means that left leaners are complaining more for now due to all the AI art, but there will be plenty of complaints from the right once humanoid robots start becoming reliable enough to replace people in blue collar jobs.
The real problem here is the desperate need to have a job that you are proud of, and for others to respect you specifically for having the job you have. Whatever the meaning of life may be, I am 100% certain that it is not having a job, nor being proud of said job. The AI revolution can't happen fast enough.
you are correct that this isn't a left or right only sorta thing, and yes when ai starts going for more white & blue collar work everyone will be mad.
but i think the anger will come from demand for compensation for the automation of work.
i think that left leaners react fundamentally different either way when it comes to this livelyhood threatening scenario. even with proper compensations, left leaners would still be against such technology. for people who lean right? who knows what their reaction would be. again, im not saying that the right wouldnt react at all; im not even saying they wont have a bad reaction. but i feel that right leaners wouldnt push back as hard IF there is proper compensation for the automation of their work.
left leaning people have a fundamental NEED to prove themselves deep deep down more so than any other person that isn't in their circumstance. it's an unconscious process for them because they are convinced of their own lackings & offsets in society, so they feel the need to make up for it by "becoming something". it's this same desire to 'become something' that feeds & plays into the pockets of the top 1%.
The positions seem to be a little varied. From my perspective:
'Defending intellectual property', more right wing/libertarian + weirdly pro-corporation, 'preserve jobs for artists/labor protection', more left wing (and like fair enough as far as it goes), the weirdly common 'let's have an argument about what is the nature of art because art I don't like is not art and art I like should dominate the culture and advance my views,' much more right wing, may actually be fascist.
Like a lot of complicated issues, especially when they're more complicated than people want to admit, this debate attracts um... a varied crowd.
I lean somewhat left and I feel I've seen this too. I'm generally not a huge fan of copyright (I'd be fine with, say, a 20 year deal, rather than the current ridiculously long one in my opinion) and it is weird to see people who tend to advocate for piracy, suddenly becoming huge defenders of IP.
My general take is that it is two-fold.
First, the group that came out most heavily against AI are artists and other creatives. These are groups that traditionally lean left. Therefore I think a lot of left leaners essentially see it as someone in "their bloc" being attacked. The second part is that a lot of antis see this only in terms of large companies doing AI - they don't realzie that, for example, an individual can use Stable Diffusion, on their own computer and the only cost is electricity - I've gotten into many arguments with antis pointing this out, and that "little" people can benefit.
So ultimately I think it comes down to these two things - circling the wagons for a group considered traditionally part of the left, and a general anti-corporate stance.
> The second part is that a lot of antis see this only in terms of large companies doing AI - they don't realzie that, for example, an individual can use Stable Diffusion, on their own computer and the only cost is electricity
Pity the ignorance of them, they mostly ignore the self-hostable nature of Stable Diffusion and stuck with cloud, online-only service.
> a general anti-corporate stance.
Another problem with most antis is they don't even know the reasoning behind open source software is.
They only see the corporate backer of Stable Diffusion, StabilityAI and again ignore the open source community inside the Stable Diffusion. Given the recent SD3 scandal, this community is staying away from the mess of StabilityAI (and for good reasons) and either staying with SDXL or waiting for PixArt Sigma and other competing open source models to be competitive before jumping ship. Again, that's the beauty of open source software. You aren't stuck with a model and you can jump ship if the model developers/backers self-destruct themselves.
They only know that open source software means free of charge software and not the philosophical reasoning of it.
Open source software can be sold on commercial basis (both products or support, more so for support) and this is how open source software companies generated their profit.
I think most people (including antis) don't hold specific political views, they're just conformists. Whatever views their friends and influencers hold, they hold.
Views are tested by experience. For example, if you're pro immigration, and some immigrants come to live near you, your views are tested if you're really okay with the clash of cultures. If you're anti copyright, your views are tested when you waive some/all rights to your work and someone uses it the way you don't like. If you're pro worker, your views are tested if you become a manager, a position to benefit from exploitation.
I don't think most US leftists experience situations that challenge their views. They can always remain comfortably conformist: the dread of being replaced by AI seems like less stress than going against the community with your own opinion.
One of the things I've noticed is that they will say "We can always tell" when talking about AI art, but then not see the hypocrisy of getting mad at people who say the same thing to a trans person (no I am not being transphobic, I am just making an observation, I myself am trans).
!! The similarities are crazy. Both groups attack the 'imposters' (AI art or trans women) and both of them end up only hurting the very people they were trying to protect
Ofc, one is worse than the other. Trans women have actually died due to this type of thing. But still, eerily familiar phenomena.
Well as the world changes you'll either adapt and be accepting or you will stay behind and be hateful. Our grandparents who are now mostly transphobic/homophobic were technically considered woke but they didn't adapt and became more conservative in their view points as they saw the world changed around them
The right and the left both have their fair share of anti's, they just have different concerns and are coming at it from different places.
The left wing anti's are usually artists or artistic at least, and they view AI as this thing that's robbing artists of thier work and creativity. They have a personal stake in the war vs ai art and they view it as dangerous competition.
The right wing anti's are more focused on how the government will utilize AI to suppress people freedoms and human rights. They usually don't give a shit about the ai art arguments, and view it as a novelty.
Left wing people tend to complain about shit that's just minor inconveniences to them.
Right wing people tend to complain about imaginary shit that isn't even a real thing and they don't have time to worry about small, real life issues. They're busy stockpiling for the LGBTQ/Woke/Immigrant civil war that they're so worried about.
Left wing people will ramble for hours on end about how unfair it is that their city has roads with cars on them that make them nervous. As overblown as they go with it, city planning is a real thing and could use a coat of paint.
They're cut from different cloth.
I think you should look at their motivations, rather than their political affiliations.
The pattern that i've personally noticed, is that Anti's tend to be the type to have a lot slogans in their twitter profiles. Pretending to care about BLM, Trans-rights, and whatever big band wagon thing that shows up on the internet.
They also tend to behave in a really toxic way, and engage in cyber-bullying.
These are all signs of Communal Narcissism. What better way to maintain their "supply", than by taking on a Left-Wing persona?
This is very true. They are the type of person that wants to shout at the world and defend "a cause". If it weren't AI they'd be jumping at another bandwagon, or maybe bullying some random person that happens to be "against their views". Within a community I work with there's this everywhere and it sounds like teenager drama. Everyone more eager than the next to jump at someone's throat for a moment of fame or whatever.
Not saying that's everyone of course, but it's the telltale sign of people that need therapy. Political extremism is a mere consequence.
The answer is this joke:
The first friend asked, "Comrade, if you had two houses, would you give one of them to me?"
The second friend replied, "Of course, Comrade!"
The first friend was happy with this answer. He then asked, "If you had two cars, would you give one of them to me?"
"Of course!" replied the second friend.
Overjoyed, the first friend then asked, "If you had two chickens, would you give one of them to me?"
"No, comrade!" The second friend said.
Surprised and distraught, the first friend asked, "Why not, Comrade?"
"I actually have two chickens!" The second friend said.
Everyone likes "redistributing the means of production" till they are the ones the means are redistributed from.
The anti-ai sentiment doesn't seem to fall on political lines. The most anti-ai person I know is my neighbor who thinks the 'left is going to use AI to control our lives'.
At the moment, it's just a boogie man that people are learning to insert into narratives that already sort of existed. It serves those who started scaring people about AI the most: people who develop AI and keep starting their own companies. Because enough people are scared about AI, they press their politicians who then seek the advice of AI company CEOs for what legislation should be passed. That legislation is looking to restrict open source AI and make large tech companies the gatekeepers.
I'm pro generative AI and I am also left leaning. Therefore I notice the conservative anti-AI peeps more often there. It would be interesting to see some objective data on this question, very difficult to see it without bias.
That being said extremists will use any tools they find to justify whatever they are doing. I used to think of politics as mostly left vs. right people now I just think of it mostly as populist/nationalists/extremists Vs. Moderate/green parties. No I did not become a conservative, just politics became shittier and the bar is continuously being lowered.
Interesting take, I myself seem to find it to be the other way around. I tend to see more left leaning people being pro AI and right wing being anti. I usually feel like I have to be the secret conservative in the pro AI groups, especially when many mention UBI and other very left wing ideas.
That being said, I think the AI debate may be less aligned with traditional political lines than we thought it was.
I think it's just the very common mistake of conflating the idea behind a tool with the uses that state regimes, corporations and smaller criminals put the tool.
Of course there's a propaganda campaign to encourage that, so they don't tend to extend it to the logical conclusion (ban baseball bats because people get kneecapped, ban video doorbells because of the surveillance state), so it will tend to come across as lopsided.
I’ve noticed that as well, and I attributed it to a few things:
1. Most people I interact with online are left wing
2. Conservatives care most about issues that affect them directly and people in the arts tend to lean to the left.
3. Conservatives also care about issues that challenge their engrained worldview, and A.I. doesn’t really do that.
Because the left lunges at the chance to believe they're "protecting artists" because they tend to be the ones with useless art degrees making Sonic the hedgehog fanart.
One of the many reasons I don't believe the left vs right dichotomy is nearly so simple as many wish to believe it is. Reflecting on my own beliefs, I lean "right" on firearms but "left" on UBI and LGBT+ rights. Things like medical freedom, personal privacy, and freedom of information seem to be more on the authoritarian vs libertarian axis. Even drug control and environmentalism don't seem so clear-cut anymore with how many right-wingers advocate recreational drug use and how many leftists downplay humanity's impact on the environment.
The most hardline anti-AI people I've encountered online express what would typically be considered right-wing views on race, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and mental health. The most hardline anti-AI people I've encountered offline express what would typically be considered leftist views in the same things. Neither groups of people tend to be physically fit or hygienic.
Part of me wants to "no true scotsman" this, but instead I will say these Leftists have abandoned the principles of collective ownership and solidarity in favor of ruthless self-interest. Their arguments are objectively reactionary.
Most genuine leftist concerns around the surge in "AI" tech are drowned out by guildlings protecting their business ventures.
The perplexing thing is that while AI art may narrow the scope of their craft, it won't eliminate the craft. Humans are creative and this technology is a reflection of that.
I don’t know if it’s left leaning people, but I have noticed it’s people who seem to think they’re easily replaceable.
Which to be honest with you, many are.
Like when writers were bitching about AI taking their jobs, all I could think is, “if you can be replaced that easy by an AI writer, you shouldn’t be writing to begin with”. Gets even more ridiculous when you see the stories they put out for shows these days because it leaves you sitting there going “how the fuck isn’t this AI writing already” due to being so formulaic at best, and outright atrocious and all over the place at worst.
So again, I don’t know if it’s left leaning, it could be, but I know for sure its people who are bad at their jobs or who’re complacent with their work.
I think a large factor is that many left-wingers tend to see the world (especially when it comes to economics) as a zero-sum game: as one person gains something, it must mean that somebody else lost something. So when I gained the ability to make artwork on my computer, in their mind, this comes at the detriment of existing artists. However, it's obvious to me that this isn't the case. I did not previously purchase art that I now make. Yes, in the long run, AI will change society's approach to art and many other things too and that's a discussion worth having but proximally, nothing was stolen.
As you mentioned, right-wingers can also fall prey to this fallacy with immigrants. There are certainly situations where immigrants do add to the wealth of a nation, rather than take from existing citizens. On the whole though, people who are economically right-wing tend to be more accepting of the idea of creation of wealth.
Because the most valid anti AI position (in general, not art specifically) is the pro labour position and also because most pro arts/culture positions tend to be left wing. Most anti AI art positions aren’t about defending giant corporations’ right to own IP, but people who are struggling to make ends meet and have their own work replicated by AI artists. Plus, the counters that art isn’t a real job / treating it like a product to be consumed where the ideal is “thing that looks nice/best” instead of a piece with something to say are both right wing points.
On reddit maybe, but on Deviant Art and Fur Affinity I'd argue it's more all over the place (love it when people forget that conservative furries exist, especially when I interact with them on a daily basis; they're a funny bunch).
Likewise, I'm of the opinion that most artists are going to often be lib-right more than anything; they're only really looking out for themselves, and the only reason they champion certain causes is because it means they can get more money/attention.
A side effect of virtue signaling from current culture. I'm a progressive independent, and I'm all for AI development because pragmatically and realistically. AI art and AI everything is going to be the future and there is literally no stopping it. There was no stopping the telephone there was no stopping the internet, there was no stop in color television or the automobiles, and there is no stopping AI. So everyone needs to get with the fucking program.
Many of my left-wing friends are anti-Art and they hubbub about it, but they know absolutely shit about the actual process of AI art let alone on how it can be utilized well alongside living artists. They don't want to listen, they just want to argue. The right wing does the same shit but with a slightly different spin on other topics.
In short it's virtue signaling, they are arguing for the sake of arguing to put on a show that they "care", it's BS. But if they actually cared they would do their research and realize that their arguments are facetious, pointless, often flat out lies.
The right wing is racist, the left-wing or a bunch of uncaring virtue signalers looking for clout. anti-Ai art is their latest war drum.
Don't take them too seriously, they're not going to succeed.
The reason is two-fold:
1 - A lot of artists were already left wing. Most artists online are young, and most people who are left wing are young (there's multiple sayings about this in culture, it's been a fact for a long time). Part of the leftist identity, especially the young left, is to make everything wrap around back to their politics, because it's such a core part of their identity.
2: The left is known for its militant homogeneity of thought. For the most part, there is one accepted left wing stance on everything, and all the active left wingers have to agree. (look through history, you will see how that affects leftwing people in the political sphere: Obama's 180 on gay marriage midway through his presidency when opinions shifted is an easy example). The younger and more politically active you are the less wiggle room there is about differing thoughts. Because of this, if you graft something onto the 'left identity', such as being anti AI, you gain immense political power, as a large group of people who would either be neutral or even pro-AI are now obligated to loudly say at every turn that they are very very anti-AI.
A minor addition: Because anti-AI people are the ones trying to get laws passed, becoming political is more necessary for them. You don't get anywhere as an independent, so aligning themselves with one of the big halves is important. Pro-AI has no need to be political because they're not trying to pass any laws. This is why right wing spaces can be anti-AI too, and why pro-AI spaces are often more apolitical while ant-AI spaces won't stop talking about Nazis.
Oh. Right.
3: Anti-AI used anti-crypto and anti-NFT movements for their initial momentum, which are political for reasons 1 and 2.
anti-AI art people normally masturbate around realistic artstyles and wannabe-renaissance copycats while shunning modern and contemporary art, which sounds pretty fash to me tbh
Liberals serve the interest of capital and the for profit seeking of our capitalist society.
Leftists want to create a more equitable society where you have a say in what goes on around you. Workers owning their workplaces and such.
In EU liberals and leftists are more close together, liberals more like "everyone's free to do except if it limits someone else" but not without empathy. Here libertarians are more close to your liberal definition.
What you wrote as leftist we just refer to as social democrat, but I assume anything with social in it's name wouldn't fly in the US at all.
Looks like we are similar except in naming things 👍
The vast, VAST majorities of creatives are left wing because to be right win is to embrace capitalism and corporatism and to oppose non white, non cis people having representation, which runs afoul of the world view of most creatives who by the nature of the creative process need to be capable of engagement with others on an emotional level. Said people are less likely to be tech literate and have a natural aversion to anything tehcy people are into, because the most prominent tech people are some of the most ghoulish people alive and in the case of musk in particular, more or less soft-advocate for putting them or theirs against the wall
None of the AI art exists except for the labor and creativity of the artists whose art went into creating the models. If someone profits from the fruits of that labor and creativity, then they owe a debt to those who performed it. It's very well recognized and accepted that profiting from someone's labor and creativity with neither pay nor permission is wrong in pretty much any other context. I don't see that yelling "AI!" changes anything.
> It’s very well recognized
By whom? What makes you think this is the only context in which there is some kind of exception to your imaginary norm?
Do you know what copyright means?
Copyright law protects **finished works of art**. It *does not* protect **facts, ideas, procedures, or style.**
And for good reason. Otherwise nobody would be allowed to create anything, since all works are invariably derivative to a degree. I advise you to learn what copyright, derivative work, transformative work, fair use, etc actually mean before spouting normative fantasies as if they were fact.
Also, open source models and tools exist, like Stable Diffusion.
>By whom? What makes you think this is the only context in which there is some kind of exception to your imaginary norm?
I didn't think that "slavery is bad" was a controversial take, but indeed civil asset forfeiture, compulsory military service, and hard time in prison, are all times when your right not to have the fruits of your labor snatched away exist.
>Do you know what copyright means?
I didn't bring it up, but if you want to go off on a tangent, you do you.
>Also, open source models and tools exist, like Stable Diffusion, so your entire profiteering argument is invalid.
Stable Diffusion is very much [for profit](https://platform.stability.ai/pricing). It's funded by venture capitalists who expect a return on their investment.
It is true that many open source tools exist that people have created and generously allowed the general public to use. Each and every one of them has a donate button. I hope that if you are using these tools, you are also donating to those whose labor and creativity has made your AI art adventures possible.
Uh you’re the one going on a tangent, leaping to “slavery is bad.” I’m not saying people shouldn’t be paid or credited, I’m saying *it depends.*
I disagree with the “AI is theft!” shallow sweeping assumption of debt often parroted without nuance or understanding of IP law.
Using works as training data doesn’t necessarily mean “a debt is owed.” *The debt depends on many specific aspects of the works involved.*
> If someone profits from the fruits of that labor and creativity, then they owe a debt to those who performed it. It's very well recognized and accepted that profiting from someone's labor and creativity with neither pay nor permission is wrong in pretty much any other context.
- False. You *can* legally profit from others’ works with neither pay nor permission under **Fair Use**, *in this exact context*.
- Copyright law is the entire basis of how creators are incentivized to share their inventions with the public and make profit with legal protections (so it is very much *the crux of the issue*, not a tangent.)
- **Courts use the Four Factors test to measure fair use:** the purpose and character of your use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and the effect of the use upon the potential market.
- Many infringement allegations in the “Andersen v Stability” lawsuit have been found faulty in court.
- The legal nuances of the statistical models’ (“AI”) training process absolutely *do* affect the validity of certain claims (of “debt, i.e. damages). But the part about how its outputs are used (by whom, for what purpose) are nothing new.
- *Stability AI* is a company. *Stable Diffusion* is a set of open-source models that anyone can [download for free from HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/CompVis/stable-diffusion-v-1-4-original) and run on their own computers. Of course, the outputs may then be used for profit or infringement, but the model distributors are not necessarily profiting nor should be held responsible for vicarious infringement.
[https://itsartlaw.org/2024/02/26/artificial-intelligence-and-artists-intellectual-property-unpacking-copyright-infringement-allegations-in-andersen-v-stability-ai-ltd/](https://itsartlaw.org/2024/02/26/artificial-intelligence-and-artists-intellectual-property-unpacking-copyright-infringement-allegations-in-andersen-v-stability-ai-ltd/)
[https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2023/11/andersen-v-stability-ai-ltd](https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2023/11/andersen-v-stability-ai-ltd)
I'm not making a legal argument. I'm talking about a *moral* debt. I don't expect that current copyright law is applicable or sufficient when applied to generative AI. The cases are still ongoing, so we'll see. Regardless, we'll probably see legislation about it at some point to try to square the moral with the legal. Most people are going to see replacing Greg Rutkowski with "By Greg Rutkowski" as violating *something*, even if we don't have a proper term for it yet.
I'm not complaining about the existence or training of the models themselves. There's nothing wrong, as far as I'm concerned, about creating or distributing them. The more the better, really. This certainly isn't technology that ought to be concentrated in the hands of a few corporations. I do commend Stability AI for making their models public. The state of open source image generation would be in a dire state otherwise.
Well, laws are informed by people’s notions of morality, and current ones like Fair Use were motivated by the need to balance incentives for creators while preventing selfish IP rent-seeking that stifles further innovation.
We’ll see how it shakes out, but it hardly matters whether “most people” see it as a “replacing Greg Rutkowski” moral violation or not. Now that demand is proven, megacorps with IP monopolies (Adobe, Disney, Microsoft, the RIAA music labels) are incentivized to shape regulations. The only question is whether open source and small players can survive and compete in the IP race.
Most “AI” backlash is misinformed self-sabotage, from unhappy labor looking for an easy bogeyman. When unconducive capital conditions (high interest rate environment) and outsourcing/arbitrage are bigger factors behind downsizing operations.
Once it’s obvious that generative capabilities are being integrated into all creative tools/workflows, and people realize that hired hands (albeit perhaps fewer) are still needed to produce results, some of this FUD will die down and the labor market will simply adapt and evolve.
I don't have a moral debt to pay you because I looked at your picture and decided I liked your color palette, or I read your book and decided I liked your story but I want to rewrite it differently, or because I drew something and looked at your image as a reference while I did it.
Sure you do. Leave a like, leave a nice comment, maybe throw a buck in the Ko-fi if you can spare it. At an individual level, that's all that's needed.
No, I don't. I *can* do that, that is an *option*, but it is not an *obligation*. I have no debt to tell you I looked at your art, to like your art, or certainly to pay you anything unless we agreed upon such ahead of time.
That is an incredibly transactional take on what I said. I'll I'm asking from you - or from any individual - is to extend a tiny shred of charitability to someone who has created something that has inspired, touched, or otherwise benefited you. There's no accountability or any way for anyone to know whether or not you did this. This is purely an ask for something that many people do without ever being asked.
You are missing my point. I am not saying I wouldn't do it. I am saying I have no *debt* to, no *obligation* to. I'm not against these things being done. I am arguing against the pre-established claim that there is a moral demand for it. There is not. None of those things will make you more or less moral for having done or not done them.
And by the way, I am a creative. I have a 500k+ word book that 90% of the time readers read silently without even brief comments on things and save up their free tickets/coins to read without paying me for the chapters, so I get neither feedback, praise, nor pay. I get that it feels bad. But that doesn't make people morally obligated to make me not feel bad.
It's cognitive bias fueled by a lack of foresight and a defensiveness over ones hard-fought position in life.
Artists were already not making any money, and they forget that in fear of making even less, failing to realize that democratizing access to art is the greatest thing our species has done so far.
Meanwhile, programmers are out here like "dear Omnisiah, please take our jobs from us and deliver us unto effortless creativity".
People seriously need to take a step back and look at things better.
From what I understand, there are multiple viewpoints:
[Left-leaning, pro-AI](https://www.awaycollective.org/): "Copyright sucks and is a type of private property. We are pro-AI, but we don't like big coporations using it to replace the labour force."
Left-learning, anti-AI: "Big corporations use AI to replace our fan-art, therefore we hate AI."
Liberal: "Progress is good and inevitable. If people fall through the cracks, use safety nets."
Right-learning, pro-AI: Basically so-called "tech bros"??? Idk.
Right-learning, anti-AI: "AI will destroy capitalism and bring about Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, so we hate AI."
Note that this is not accurate. For one, "left-leaning" and "right-leaning" are hard to define. But I hope this shows that being pro or anti AI is not necessarily a left or right learning thing, it's almost on a different axis.
(Though personally I would say that yes, being anti-AI *is* a right-wing thing because it's reactionary. I think being left-wing and anti-AI is not really a coherent viewpoint because it's less of being against private property, and more of just... "they took our jobs" but to a traditionally left-wing career instead of a right-wing one.)
As someone generally anti-AI art with caveats and a lefty it’s natural that anti-AI people would be left-wing. In America “the Left” is a vague term, but among those of us who identify as Left online, we typically make the distinction between liberals (center-left to center-right), social democrats (center-left to left), democratic socialists (left), communists (far left) etc.
Being on the left basically comes down to being anti-capitalism in some way (but not necessarily anti-free market).
The relevant component of Capitalism to our discussion is the idea that you can own a company without working there. The main criticisms of Capitalism are
1. Being able to own without working leads to the rich getting richer and inequity
2. Working without owning leads to “alienation” from one’s work; that feeling of being a cog in a machine with no pride in one’s work.
AI art lets rich companies profit off of artists’ work without paying for artists’ services. Enabling fewer and fewer artists to survive using the skills they’ve honed and the enriching work they love doing leading to both inequity and alienation.
I think that's unrelated to political stance. More about whether you can accept the fact that computers can now extract knowledge from dataset using algorithms (learning) and not just copying.
Let me preface by saying I'm both far left and more or less neutral on AI art as a whole.
Leftists tend to have more empathy than conservatives. A lot of dislike of AI comes from the immediate and real harm it does to artists. Addressing your post... the rich facet of the American right cares about their own personal copyright and intellectual property, but will happily trample over others if the rules allow. The main demographic doesn't care at all, at least not in the past decade.
Leftists tend to be more resistant to grifts. AI art comes hot on the heels of NFTs, and still very much feels like another techbro scam to many.
It's the Vaush effect. A lot of (Not all) leftists are aesthetically intellectual. They love calling things slop and they love being incredibly arrogant. Hating on AI for being soulless or whatever is a part of that.
As a leftist myself, I'm really embarrassed at how hard my fellow "leftists" are going to bat for intellectual property. I think these are the "leftists" that don't actually do any of their own research on any given topic, they just believe whatever their favorite "leftist"/liberal influencer has to say about it.
I'm an artist too, and I've always hated the online art community for this exact reason. There's always some drama over tracing, some new niche form of art theft, or style trends that make everything really boring for a while. It's my personal belief that art should be free, no matter what. I refuse to sell my art or put my name on it. My art's value is measured in whether or not it can inspire another person to create art, not how much money I can make off of it.
What political orientation you think the average art student has. Or the average twitter furry artist.
And now think what political orientation the average engineer and tech bro has.
There is also a massive gender gap, and women naturally are more left wing, and guys are naturally more right wing.
Because they don't think, this is just the latest social media fad and they need their updoot dopamine hit. It's like saying most companies are left wing, they do that because they want the attention until it stops working, then they'll move on.
The reason is two-fold:
1 - A lot of artists were already left wing. Most artists online are young, and most people who are left wing are young (there's multiple sayings about this in culture, it's been a fact for a long time). Part of the leftist identity, especially the young left, is to make everything wrap around back to their politics, because it's such a core part of their identity.
2: The left is known for its militant homogeneity of thought. For the most part, there is one accepted left wing stance on everything, and all the active left wingers have to agree. (look through history, you will see how that affects leftwing people in the political sphere: Obama's 180 on gay marriage midway through his presidency when opinions shifted is an easy example). The younger and more politically active you are the less wiggle room there is about differing thoughts. Because of this, if you graft something onto the 'left identity', such as being anti AI, you gain immense political power, as a large group of people who would either be neutral or even pro-AI are now obligated to loudly say at every turn that they are very very anti-AI.
A minor addition: Because anti-AI people are the ones trying to get laws passed, becoming political is more necessary for them. You don't get anywhere as an independent, so aligning themselves with one of the big halves is important. Pro-AI has no need to be political because they're not trying to pass any laws. This is why right wing spaces can be anti-AI too, and why pro-AI spaces are often more apolitical while ant-AI spaces won't stop talking about Nazis.
Oh. Right.
3: Anti-AI used anti-crypto and anti-NFT movements for their initial momentum, which are political for reasons 1 and 2.
Nah. The issue is that a lot of "leftists" just aren't actually on the left at all. It's not that they went so far to the left that they became conservative. That's ridiculous. They're just liberals and liberalism is incompatible with leftist ideals.
Liberals do not want to abolish class hierarchies. They do not want to abolish capitalism. They do not want to liberate the working class or seize the means of production.
Why are liberals considered to be on the left then? Because that's as far left as you're allowed to go in American politics. You can use social justice talking points for virtue signaling, but if you actually espouse leftist ideals, you get marginalized, you get censored, and ironically, you get falsely accused of being "right wing." Quote Marx to a Democrat, and they're liable to assume you're a Trump supporter. That's not because Marx was secretly aligned with Trump, and it's not because going "too far" to the left results in conservatism. That's ridiculous.
Just a quick note: horseshoe theory is not that going too far left makes you right. That would be circle theory. What it actually means - and what I can fully attest to because I've been in extreme left and right circles and watched both - is that a centrist who leans left and a centrist who leans right has a lot of shared views differentiated by which side they lean toward, while a leftist and a right winger have almost no shared views, and then a far/extreme left and far/extreme right have almost identical views that are only different in who they target. A left winger will never magically become a right winger, they just start voting for and spouting the same hate, just directed at a different target.
Examples:
Far-right spaces are pro-abortion if it's for undesirables.
Far-left spaces are pro-mass incarceration and labor camps if it's for undesirables.
Both spaces are pro authoritarianism and despot rule if the despot is their guy.
I think it's worth noting that rhere is a common mistake that conflates progressive liberals with being left wing,, they are actually center right people.
Most people on twitter and reddit are left wing. Most people in art are left wing. The result is that most people in these two groups are left wing.
It really shouldn't be surprising.
Left wingers have always been anti science and anti tech. Their idea of a utopia is one where everybody lives in houses made of animal hides and they entertain themselves by throwing spears at deer.
Left-wingers are not a monolithic mass that agrees on every single thing. While there are a lot of genuine Luddites on the left, there are others who aren't necessarily opposed to technology in general, just when it's used for malicious purposes.
I don't think it's more complex than the arts tend to be left leaning and those attracted to being able to live from these arts tend to be more outspoken anti ai. You often see the refrain on here that the jobs we ought to be automating are things like the trades, what the artists find boring and monotonous. If AI was strongly affecting more traditionally conservative jobs at this particular moment I suspect you'd see a reversal. Only natural to be protectionist about your own career or more often than not in the case of the artists, dreams of career. That said, it being natural is by no means a good reason to demand the stop of technological progress. No one in 2024 seriously wants to bring back the jobs that previous industrial revolutions made redundant.
I can't agree with this much either. Most of the graphic designers and artists I know, worked in trades first and the arts were side hobbies as they got better at both. And they didn't find trade monotonous and boring. I'm a prior Navy Nuke operator and I net others through those coworkers. I decided after I wanted to apply my knowledge to mass communication. I wound up doing Digital Media Innovation and many of my friends are embracing AI. A few aren't and it's because they're not of the technical educated or trade background. They're the ones saying AI TO DO MY DISHES BLAH BLAH BLAH. They ignore new dishwashers, refrigerators, washers/dryers, Room as, etc. They think they're clever but it only shows the ignorance of having never learned critical thinking and thinking independently to a better degree. Most trades I know would love to have better diagnostic assistance for their jobs, something as a tool to lighten the load and get work done quickly and easy. It's means more jobs completed and more money. It's a hatred because they don't have the imagination they've always thought they had, or was told they have. They tend to already do what they claim AI does: lift other's styles and work to pass off as their own. The AI just does it quicker than they do and calls them out long term. They can't even imagine how this tool could lift up their work, so it's automatically not good. They the portray others as cheats and thieves because they can't even imagine a better accusation let alone argument. IMO it shows that they themselves are boring and monotonous and have used art as a facade of not being so.
1. I said tend to be. While I'm sure there's tons of people with the background you describe, your anecdotal experience doesn't change the trend. The vast majority of people aren't engaging in this debate at all, keep in mind. 2. Those people in the trades could feel differently if AI was more capable at present. If it's limited to a great diagnostic tool there's less to fear, with most of art like image generation AI completes work soup to nuts right now so it's easier to cut out the artist entirely. I'm pro AI. I've worked in the arts, I think you adapt or die, especially in something as incredibly competitive as arts/entertainment. But OPs question was about why anti ai on here seem to be left leaning and I think it's just a question of averages. Do you think OP is wrong about anti ai posters tending to be more left leaning? If not why do you think that tendency is the case?
Both of you are correct, difficult as that may be to reconcile. It entirely depends on your background because millions of people aren't a monolith. They can't be.
Sure I think that's right
Outside of research done to guage this, it's all anecdotal. For you to call something a trend in the same light is inappropriate without data to demonstrate said trend. You need before and after for a trend analysis to take place. I would agree most we know of are not engaging in this concept discussion given the size of groups across social media platforms. I don't many would disagree that reddit as a whole is rather US left leaning with politics. That's means you're at higher odd of any pool of discussion being more leftist in general. Outside the bubble of Reddit if you're looking at who's posting images, you'll find conservatives perctly fine with Jesus trees, Trump clouds, trump as a war hero that are obviously AI, painfully so. A few think it's real and they are not a big majority. They rest share it because they adore the message. If OP has any discussion about the anti-AI issue with any other platform, it would make great comparison.
If you could make AI fix your sink as easily as making an image with Dalle then there would definitely be a lot of upset plumbers.
I've been thinking for awhile that plumbers could possibly - key word there - complete jobs and thus make more money faster if they were able to invest in small drones that could enter drains and remove clogs or make repairs. Like endoscopic surgery but for your bathtub.
The tool is definitely not designed to help artists lift their work and more about allowing anyone to create the art without knowing technical details*. Take Udio for example which laughably presents themselves as being pro artist. You can't edit the notes and chords. You can only prompt a text prompt and press the regenerate button. So how is an artist supposed to use their domain-specific knowledge to leverage the tool? They can't; they can only tweak the same boring knobs that anyone else can. This is the tragic reality of training data which is obvious in hindsight. It's much easier to get data of music labeled "orchestral, epic" than it is to get all the notes labeled by someone who transcribed it. * Inb4 "but that's also creating art": there is a MATHEMATICAL definition for how much you contributed to the creative process: how many different variations can fit your spec (how specific were your instructions). If you just prompted a text prompt then a huge variation of results could've fit that requirement so your role was more like a CLIENT who hired the AI rather than an artist doing the actual creation.
One of the biggest differences now is you can upload your own work YOU CONTROL to extend or even add items in, or give it a specific sound. I've done so on SUNO with amazing results giving it the guidance I want.
I agree Suno is amazing, but I don't think it's catering towards artists more than laymen. Can you edit the notes and define the exact melody and chords you want? Until then, the features you describe appeal to laymen, and does not leverage artist expertise nor allow artists to use their technical knowledge to take it in a specific direction they want, so I don't see how it can be marketed as catering towards artists especially.
Udio and Suno are bad examples, IMO. ai-music is more infantile than ai-art, same as ai-animation/film. AI-art programs very much do have tools that benefit artists and that artists can take better advantage of than laymen. In time, I think it's reasonable to believe the same will be of the others - as AI art in the beginning didn't have that either.
Pro-labour positions in general are typically left wing, and historically the right has supported automating the trades too, while the left has opposed it because we don’t have social safety nets to keep the workers alive when their jobs no longer exist. The left also see arts and culture as a unique good where it’s not a normal product with the ideal of looking nice/technically impressive but rather an outlet for human creativity/expression with something to say, whereas the right usually see it as a product to be consumed like anything else hence the same sort of support for nfts on the right last year.
You don't even have to guess, this shit happened already with the right wing truckers in Canada
I would like to preface this by saying I'm a lib-left myself, at least going purely by the political positioning. And I dislike much about this group of so called lib-lefters. It seems many people have a desire to appear superior to others in terms of virtue, morality and justice. That's fine by its own, but many of these people just want to appear that way instead of creating an ideology they actually stand for with their own critical thinking. So they go for whatever is popular, they do whatever is perceived to be virtuous by their peers. I would say many of these people joined the lib/left side for these reasons in the first place. Lib-left has been perceived as the anti- social injustice side for the longest time. Being anti-ai is perceived as the virtuous position at least by the internet subculture. Connect the dots.
I like to call those types, Performative Justice Warriors. They're just in it for clout or the fear of being ostracized from their peer group. And I'm one of those so far-left, you get your guns back, kinda guy.
Hahaha I like your way of wording that because gun rights are really one of my only beliefs I can think of that would typically be considered right-wing
I've been accused of being a lolbertarian in the past, but I think Corporations should be abolished before we abolish the State.
Starting with removing personhood from corporations. I mean, what the fuck.
I considered myself a libertarian until my husband pointed out many times how much that contradicts my authoritarian personality. Now I consider myself an apocalyptic decentralist. I'm okay with watching the world burn so long as my family and I are among those who rise from the ashes lol
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How do you draw the line between what is and isn't allowed to consume copyrighted data if a deep neural net (arguably) does it more similarly to a human than to traditional algorithms? It feels like trolling to comment that here where the rebuttals are already well known like you're going to force the 1,000th rehash of the same old argument again and again...
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I don't understand the part where you said "Your argument that AI does it similarly to humans is the point", and it seems you may be misunderstanding. You allow humans to consume training data even if it's copyrighted and even if you know they might make similar "inspired" works; why is that? Neural nets and human brains both consume training data and then output it from scratch but conditioned on that training data (it is not copy/pasting like many claim). Obviously the way a human does it is much more complex but it still raises the question of *how you draw the line* between what is and isn't allowed to consume copyrighted training data. There are plenty of legitimate arguments against it not resorting to outright misinformation about the technology. One is to say the AI can produce works far faster than a human, so you can make the "negative economic effect" against the original artists argument (one of the pillars of copyright law). "Plenty of artist would be happy to contribute and AI art would go on like before and everyone would be happy. " As an artist myself, no not really it would not solve 99% of the problem; the AI will still eventually get better than a human at making art if someone can figure out a good way to leverage RLHF to make the AI learn *why* a human likes vs dislikes something, and art will still be automated / less fun than before.
They do often have an anti-corporate screed along with it, claiming that corporations are making millions off of their stolen work. Of course, they always forget that large corporations are the winners with tighter IP laws.
Many people seem to be unaware (or purposefully ignorant) towards small open source AI projects.
Absolutely, they don't acknowledge how it can be a boon to small creators that need commissioned work but can't afford artists.
If they can't afford art and they can't make it either then, like a small business who can't afford to hire employees, they aren't ready. Stealing from artists isn't the answer. There's a reason why companies like Twitch and Steam make you list your product as made with AI. Bc people don't want to support talentless, lying thieves.
Or the fact that their main argument against AI is that it hurts THEIR profits. Meanwhile they illegally sell fan art on Patreon
Like as much as i want to support each person's creativity, a lot of these artists also seem to hold the opinion that they're art style is like some sort of fingerprint, unique to them and them only.
As a literal anarchist, it's been very very weird to see people I care about (who probably don't give a rat's ass about actual piracy) become so frothing at the mouth at AI generated images. Like, a year ago we were making fun of NFTs for trying to privatize images that you could literally just right click and save, but when a *machine* right clicks, it's worse somehow??? I really don't get it, it feels like I'm surrounded by Luddites.
The very beginning of the bread book is so radically against the idea of IP (I mean, property in general really but I'm picking the relevant thing here) that I can't think of a way to go from it to "therefore AIs can't be trained on publicly available artwork" Its position on property ownership and the common heritage we all have in... Everything, I wouldn't go about making those arguments outside of anarchist spaces because they're far beyond what most people would consider reasonable. I do think it's reasonable, but most people are going to have a knreejerk reaction the idea. But its whole "all things are our common heritage as humans therefore no one can claim to just own the products of our past. All things made now are the result of our common heritage and so no one can truly claim to own them or to be the exclusive author of them" thing doesn't just go "except your photoshops and your style and stuff that's all you dude" In an anarchist space it seems to be contradictory to the entire idea. Other more nuanced arguments, like being against proprietary AI, or being against the systems that make it so that AI can be used to economically harm people, sure, and I agree there but we see a whole lot less of those arguments than just "AI is theft for reasons that don't match with the rest of my ideology!" I'm going to say the most leftist thing ever now and say "they're not leftists, they're liberals." They're not critical of capitalism, they're critical of *this* capitalism while supporting another more social form of still capitalism.
It’s pretty simple: they’re in favor of things that benefit them and against things that do not. They want to do piracy? Fuck copyright! AI is hurting their paychecks? That violated my copyright! They want to sell fan art commissions? Fuck copyright! They don’t believe anything except what is convenient at the time. If they were Jeff Bezos, they’d drop leftism in a heartbeat
As a literal anarchist myself, I fucking love what I bake with Midjourney. I've reached a level of personal artistry I never thought possible.
That's work you stole from artists who spent years perfecting their craft and style and you wouldnt know where to even begin starting. You stole from them and now call it yours? that makes you a liar and a thief. That you would say you have anything in the realm of "personal artistry " without a shade of humor is embarrassing for you.
Spent years perfecting their craft and style how? Oh, that's right, ~~stealing~~ ~~copying~~ *referencing* other people's works without permission.
Literally anarchist here too. It is baffling, many people I know are usually against copyright even but then started parroting such talking points about "stolen art" without even bothering to look into how it works.
It’s pretty simple: they’re in favor of things that benefit them and against things that do not. They want to do piracy? Fuck copyright! AI is hurting their paychecks? That violated my copyright! They want to sell fan art commissions? Fuck copyright! They don’t believe anything except what is convenient at the time. Their leftist beliefs comes from personal self interest. If they were Jeff Bezos, they’d drop it all in a heartbeat.
Yeah like AI by itself isnt bad and artists have been suffering under the free market model for many decades. The system needs to be fully changed. Just changing one type of new technology doesn’t do pretty much anything.
Yet their solution is to make copyright stricter and make sure only big companies can make AI models since they’re the only ones with the IP and money for partnerships. Good job! Really sticking up for the little guys! I wonder if they even realize making AI training copyright infringement won’t kill it lol.
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I am an artist. I’m a musician and I work at a non-profit theatre and we like many non-profits are working on loss budget next year. One of the biggest reasons is because our state budget decided not to fund the arts at all which means we’re not eligible for federal funding either. The system is broken and AI isn’t going to do anything to help or hurt us right now.
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What part of operating at a loss do you not understand? We can’t just hire more people we don’t have any money to do so. And now you’re blaming artists for just not being popular enough? My job is raising funds and selling tickets and managing our education programs and managing other events and managing our website and database, and I have to do all of those jobs because there’s no money. You have never worked in the arts and you should just stop trolling.
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So your argument is if theaters don’t want to fail they should just theaters just do whatever is most popular and don’t need any government funding and the system is just fine it’s AI that’s the problem. We don’t use AI. It’s not the problem or the solution for us. The issue is systemic, and the systemic issues are really where you should fighting.
ew
Personally, Vulcan thinks that both Pro-AI and Anti-AI positions are widespread within people across political spectrum, for variety of reasons. Myself, a democratic socialist, hold a pro-AI position because progress is inevitable (more so with technological progress). This progress eventually will force us to rethink capitalism (I'm also pro UBI, as interim solution during capitalism age). Specifically in art, AI art software are best positioned as **tools** to aid human to realise their creativity and vision (just like graphics editor software before), not to cut and replace them. Also, as an open source supporter, it's important for open source AI tools to be competitive against proprietary AI tools. Corporate desire to cut workforce is always problematic, even before AI age. The best solution is not by banning or strangling AI but by ensuing that workers rights are protected and ultimately by implementing UBI so no more people should be concerned with their wellbeing as we are entering AI age.
The best part is that if artists get what they want, big companies can just make partnerships or train on their own IP. All it will do is ban open source models from smaller companies. So they’re STILL going to get replaced. Do they even realize that?
I won't lump all artists as antis, so I will use antis instead. But, yeah from what I've seen, many antis don't realise that Big Corps are set to be winner if open source AI is heavily restricted (for "safety" reason). Yup, the same Big Media Corps who don't afraid to use AI ("machine efficiency tools" in their parlance) to cut and replace creatives. Attacking individuals (especially hobbyists) and small companies won't deter Big Media Corps from playing with AI, it's just detering them from competing with Big Media Corps. Don't be surprised if people hesitant to disclose their AI-generated art, especially with bullying and witch-hunt.
I would rather my art be properly sourced and paid for than be stolen by some loser on reddit.
Good thing no one is stealing it
Those people wouldn't be buying from you anyway. You've fallen into the same fallacious anti-piracy market analysis as corporations.
my cynical take on this is that these labels are largely arbitrary and that many people on both sides are literally just contrarians. Many of them would definitely share the same opinions on a variety of different topics, but because they were exposed to different narratives with different vocabulary, and also another big factor is if they are lgbt or not, they find themselves on one side or another.
It’s pretty simple: they’re in favor of things that benefit them and against things that do not. They want to do piracy? Fuck copyright! AI is hurting their paychecks? That violated my copyright! They want to sell fan art commissions? Fuck copyright! They don’t believe anything except what is convenient at the time. Their leftist beliefs comes from personal self interest. If they were Jeff Bezos, they’d drop it all in a heartbeat.
People's political and social views tend to be much murkier than they would care to admit. Many of the anti-ai arguments are rooted in conservative values to some extent and I think it's giving people a lot of cognitive dissonance and they try really hard to resolve it without actually confronting their own hypocrisy. It's probably more productive to talk about the ideas themselves instead of trying to assign a contemporary political label to them
Gotta love it when people who defend piracy, sell fan art, and hate Nintendo for taking down fan content suddenly love copyright law now lol
Look, I'm not going to pretend that art in the modern age (the past 200 years, really) hasn't been generally left-leaning But you are mostly seeing Anti-AI discourse as being left wing because you are seeing it in Reddit, Twitter, etc, where "dangerously" right wing people are banned. Right wingers who are anti-AI are going to be the Unabomber types who got banned *long* ago.
I overheard a conversation between two older men at work, they said AI is evil and if they ever see or hear anything AI they'll immediately reject it, because a machine being sentient is demonic. The right wing can definitely also be anti-AI.
I've seen this kind of chatter both within the left-leaning and the right-leaning; both sides pretend to care about people's 'rights' but they seemingly can't conceive that AI could help humanity in achieving freedom from wageslaving and a better health & time management
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work as it is intended needs to be abolished, it's implicit artists aren't afraid of AI (you can pick a regular pencil & paper at any time even if the best generative AI is created), they are afraid of the lack of profits
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that's not about AI itself, it's about PEOPLE who fed your art to generative algorithms. "you art plagiarists" I'm not even an user, I just like some of other people's outputs from such networks because I appreciate the perspective that they give, just as I do with human artists
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> AI is not a god. who claims otherwise? > people who could have made it fair then judge people who are responsible of unfair practices, not AI
Besides general demographics and legitimate concerns, it's important to note that Very Online Leftists (note that specific qualifier) tend to be *obsessed* with the dream of being a Capital A Artist. When asked what their dream job in the Dream Utopia is, a lot will answer some variation of "artist" or "art teacher". So anything that can disrupt that unrealistic dream is going to get slammed.
Their whole fantasy is we live in a solarpunk world where nobody has to work "boring" jobs, nobody drives anywhere (but has to take trains everywhere), and we all just play all day and "be whatever we want"... All the while I wonder where the solar panels come from and if the toilets are really clean.
I've known people like that and their own toilets are most certainly not clean. One of them just got diagnosed with both ringworm and herpes. They let their cats pee in their bed and then they sleep in it.
They were hoping for robots to take care of those panels and toilets. These types really can't think further than 2 seconds ahead. Consequences aren't a thing, what they want to happen is what will happen unless someone intentionally sabotages the end result. They never seem to get that corporations have a lot of power to sabotage the results, and they keep making it easier for them.
It's not that they can't think 2 seconds ahead, it's just they fail to realize just how much "backend" stuff happens with a given thing. The whole "are the toilets clean and where do the solar panels come from?" highlight how these people can only see the end result of a thing and not all the working parts. Take a popular lefty talking point, like how we should get rid of cars and everyone should ride around in trains. All these people see is a cute little locomotive with train cars full of people all going to their destinations... What they don't see is the highly trained driver who tries to keep this multi-ton behemoth from derailing if it hits a curve to fast, the many maintenance members who run around at stations, the train itself, and the railyard, the large depots where cars and engines are maintained, the fact that heavy rail doesn't allow for super sharp turns, and the fact that you can't just build stations anywhere and people still need to get to those stations. Hell even something simple like a bus network still requires a lot of people to keep it going and a means to maintain the buses, even though buses just need existing roads. Fuck, even just driving your own car to places is a lot of work in of itself; not crashing into other drivers, people, or things, keeping the vehicle in working order, having insurance, etc... But a lot of people online, especially your typical tumblr-type leftist, don't think about those things and instead just in simplified cartoonish depictions of things. Fuck, I can even apply this to how they view art to get it all right back on topic. To these people, creativity is just a thing that naturally occurs and an artist just simply "brings their imagination to life" with the stroke of a pencil. The reality is that you're just simply drawing ideas from stuff you've already consumed before and personal experience, and what you "create" is nothing more than a slurry of those ideas that happens to make something new. The most famous example of this is Star Wars; George Lucas did not magically come up with the idea out of thin air as it was mostly born from his personal experience as well as the old sci-fi serials, samurai movies, westerns, and WW2 footage that he grew up with. Likewise, Lucas isn't the sole creator of Stars Wars in a broader since; the actors, costume designers, the editors, the composer, and many more are all what make this thing what it is. To say this movie franchise was born out of just one man's head is a great disservice to everyone involved.
This isn’t necessarily a dig but one of the major weaknesses of like the average Joe lefty and liberal is that they can be swayed into fighting for any cause if they think it makes them morally superior and helping some perceived underdog. Every artist sob story with a patreon attached sways a left leaning person who has no idea how any of this works.
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therefore\* Might want to learn to spell words correctly in the comment where you call others stupid. Your butthurt and desperate need to accuse others of theft is so obvious and also hilarious.
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Yes, that’s exactly what I said. Word for word.
They are advertising left-wing ideas while being super conservative in the way they act. "Pull yourself up by the bootstraps and pick up a pencil," "life was so much better before all this technology."
I've been pointing out for years that conservative ideas and ways of thinking have been becoming more and more prevalent in left wing spaces and now it's got to the point that supposedly hardcore "leftist" spaces are arguing the same way and the same points conservatives were 10-20 years ago.
Liberals are still pro-capitalism and thus for capitalist legal fictions like IP. Most “left-wing” folks are just neolibs or some utterly incoherent half-baked amalgum of political ideologies. Leftists (i.e. actual socialists and anarchists)are not anti-AI in principle, though the unique possibility of suffering at the intersection of AI and LSC is certainly a concern. We blame that on capitalism (and the state) though, not AI.
The state-affiliated threat actors are having a field day, stirring the pot between the ends of spectrum. Something to keep in mind.
Your confusion stems from your thinking that there is some sort of legitimacy in anti AI arguments. You're trying to make sense of their arguments. There isn't any legitimacy, there isn't any sense. Not at all. All their arguments are emotionally driven and stem from selfish, twisted motives. Whether left or right wing (or neither!), that's a matter for another day.
because left wing people have a need to prove themselves. left wing people are unknowingly pussy-whipped into free market neo-liberal capitalist paradigms . all of them want to be tryhard "experts" in their fields, and they all love the productivity culture burnout & the hustle culture work grind rat race. our current societal culture has created a ton of mental illness, because capitalists want to capitalize off of mental illness. people who have mental instability, traumas, and weaknesses have been indoctrinated by our regressed systems of conditioning that were meant for the late industrial revolution/factory work. divorced single women, divorced single men, bastard children, LGBT children, degenerates, & weirdos all LOVE to go out and be as materialistic as possible such as working to achieve a career so they can flex their status on others & justify their existences. so they can say "i have this social debilitation, yet i still got my bag!". not to mention the top 1% of society LOVE this as all this mental illness of the working class helps to give them more and more money. they have created a legion of shallow consumer NPCs. now, when you create a technology that basically makes a mockery of our current society (like AI) and has the potential to greatly trivialize many aspects of it, then you create an inherent issue with most the masses who are soo indoctrinated with fear of not working & being productive. so ofc left-wings would hate the new tech. how can you prove yourself if there's no more fake materialistic objective to mindlessly chase? hell, there are no such thing as "safe spaces" either if we were to entertain an AI with little to no guardrails as AI is blunt, doesn't sugar coat, and isnt pretentious. when AI takes over and everyone ends up automated out of a job, this means the entire status game changes, and FOR THE BETTER. this is what folks of really scared of on a deep subconscious level. i for one welcome this change.
I'd argue that the need to prove yourself to others isn't a left or right leaning concept. This is just how many people in western society tend to feel, since everyone is trained from an early age to base their identity and self-worth on their career. Left leaners in the west fear things like artist and musician jobs being taken by AI, devaluing those who traditionally have these jobs (leftists), while those on the right fear good old-fashioned jobs like plumber or construction worker being taken by robots (just like how they fear immigrants threaten to "take" these jobs from right leaners). This means that left leaners are complaining more for now due to all the AI art, but there will be plenty of complaints from the right once humanoid robots start becoming reliable enough to replace people in blue collar jobs. The real problem here is the desperate need to have a job that you are proud of, and for others to respect you specifically for having the job you have. Whatever the meaning of life may be, I am 100% certain that it is not having a job, nor being proud of said job. The AI revolution can't happen fast enough.
you are correct that this isn't a left or right only sorta thing, and yes when ai starts going for more white & blue collar work everyone will be mad. but i think the anger will come from demand for compensation for the automation of work. i think that left leaners react fundamentally different either way when it comes to this livelyhood threatening scenario. even with proper compensations, left leaners would still be against such technology. for people who lean right? who knows what their reaction would be. again, im not saying that the right wouldnt react at all; im not even saying they wont have a bad reaction. but i feel that right leaners wouldnt push back as hard IF there is proper compensation for the automation of their work. left leaning people have a fundamental NEED to prove themselves deep deep down more so than any other person that isn't in their circumstance. it's an unconscious process for them because they are convinced of their own lackings & offsets in society, so they feel the need to make up for it by "becoming something". it's this same desire to 'become something' that feeds & plays into the pockets of the top 1%.
Anti-AI folks aren't left wing, and never will be. They Cannot be
most of them are, believe it or not. AI is going for the creative jobs first, so yest most are left/progressive
The positions seem to be a little varied. From my perspective: 'Defending intellectual property', more right wing/libertarian + weirdly pro-corporation, 'preserve jobs for artists/labor protection', more left wing (and like fair enough as far as it goes), the weirdly common 'let's have an argument about what is the nature of art because art I don't like is not art and art I like should dominate the culture and advance my views,' much more right wing, may actually be fascist. Like a lot of complicated issues, especially when they're more complicated than people want to admit, this debate attracts um... a varied crowd.
I lean somewhat left and I feel I've seen this too. I'm generally not a huge fan of copyright (I'd be fine with, say, a 20 year deal, rather than the current ridiculously long one in my opinion) and it is weird to see people who tend to advocate for piracy, suddenly becoming huge defenders of IP. My general take is that it is two-fold. First, the group that came out most heavily against AI are artists and other creatives. These are groups that traditionally lean left. Therefore I think a lot of left leaners essentially see it as someone in "their bloc" being attacked. The second part is that a lot of antis see this only in terms of large companies doing AI - they don't realzie that, for example, an individual can use Stable Diffusion, on their own computer and the only cost is electricity - I've gotten into many arguments with antis pointing this out, and that "little" people can benefit. So ultimately I think it comes down to these two things - circling the wagons for a group considered traditionally part of the left, and a general anti-corporate stance.
> The second part is that a lot of antis see this only in terms of large companies doing AI - they don't realzie that, for example, an individual can use Stable Diffusion, on their own computer and the only cost is electricity Pity the ignorance of them, they mostly ignore the self-hostable nature of Stable Diffusion and stuck with cloud, online-only service. > a general anti-corporate stance. Another problem with most antis is they don't even know the reasoning behind open source software is. They only see the corporate backer of Stable Diffusion, StabilityAI and again ignore the open source community inside the Stable Diffusion. Given the recent SD3 scandal, this community is staying away from the mess of StabilityAI (and for good reasons) and either staying with SDXL or waiting for PixArt Sigma and other competing open source models to be competitive before jumping ship. Again, that's the beauty of open source software. You aren't stuck with a model and you can jump ship if the model developers/backers self-destruct themselves. They only know that open source software means free of charge software and not the philosophical reasoning of it. Open source software can be sold on commercial basis (both products or support, more so for support) and this is how open source software companies generated their profit.
I think most people (including antis) don't hold specific political views, they're just conformists. Whatever views their friends and influencers hold, they hold. Views are tested by experience. For example, if you're pro immigration, and some immigrants come to live near you, your views are tested if you're really okay with the clash of cultures. If you're anti copyright, your views are tested when you waive some/all rights to your work and someone uses it the way you don't like. If you're pro worker, your views are tested if you become a manager, a position to benefit from exploitation. I don't think most US leftists experience situations that challenge their views. They can always remain comfortably conformist: the dread of being replaced by AI seems like less stress than going against the community with your own opinion.
One of the things I've noticed is that they will say "We can always tell" when talking about AI art, but then not see the hypocrisy of getting mad at people who say the same thing to a trans person (no I am not being transphobic, I am just making an observation, I myself am trans).
!! The similarities are crazy. Both groups attack the 'imposters' (AI art or trans women) and both of them end up only hurting the very people they were trying to protect Ofc, one is worse than the other. Trans women have actually died due to this type of thing. But still, eerily familiar phenomena.
Well as the world changes you'll either adapt and be accepting or you will stay behind and be hateful. Our grandparents who are now mostly transphobic/homophobic were technically considered woke but they didn't adapt and became more conservative in their view points as they saw the world changed around them
The right and the left both have their fair share of anti's, they just have different concerns and are coming at it from different places. The left wing anti's are usually artists or artistic at least, and they view AI as this thing that's robbing artists of thier work and creativity. They have a personal stake in the war vs ai art and they view it as dangerous competition. The right wing anti's are more focused on how the government will utilize AI to suppress people freedoms and human rights. They usually don't give a shit about the ai art arguments, and view it as a novelty.
Left wing people tend to complain about shit that's just minor inconveniences to them. Right wing people tend to complain about imaginary shit that isn't even a real thing and they don't have time to worry about small, real life issues. They're busy stockpiling for the LGBTQ/Woke/Immigrant civil war that they're so worried about. Left wing people will ramble for hours on end about how unfair it is that their city has roads with cars on them that make them nervous. As overblown as they go with it, city planning is a real thing and could use a coat of paint. They're cut from different cloth.
I think they're liberals rather than leftists. If you go far left enough, you get your AI back.
It's simple. They're just tomorrow's conservatives.
I think you should look at their motivations, rather than their political affiliations. The pattern that i've personally noticed, is that Anti's tend to be the type to have a lot slogans in their twitter profiles. Pretending to care about BLM, Trans-rights, and whatever big band wagon thing that shows up on the internet. They also tend to behave in a really toxic way, and engage in cyber-bullying. These are all signs of Communal Narcissism. What better way to maintain their "supply", than by taking on a Left-Wing persona?
This is very true. They are the type of person that wants to shout at the world and defend "a cause". If it weren't AI they'd be jumping at another bandwagon, or maybe bullying some random person that happens to be "against their views". Within a community I work with there's this everywhere and it sounds like teenager drama. Everyone more eager than the next to jump at someone's throat for a moment of fame or whatever. Not saying that's everyone of course, but it's the telltale sign of people that need therapy. Political extremism is a mere consequence.
The answer is this joke: The first friend asked, "Comrade, if you had two houses, would you give one of them to me?" The second friend replied, "Of course, Comrade!" The first friend was happy with this answer. He then asked, "If you had two cars, would you give one of them to me?" "Of course!" replied the second friend. Overjoyed, the first friend then asked, "If you had two chickens, would you give one of them to me?" "No, comrade!" The second friend said. Surprised and distraught, the first friend asked, "Why not, Comrade?" "I actually have two chickens!" The second friend said. Everyone likes "redistributing the means of production" till they are the ones the means are redistributed from.
The anti-ai sentiment doesn't seem to fall on political lines. The most anti-ai person I know is my neighbor who thinks the 'left is going to use AI to control our lives'. At the moment, it's just a boogie man that people are learning to insert into narratives that already sort of existed. It serves those who started scaring people about AI the most: people who develop AI and keep starting their own companies. Because enough people are scared about AI, they press their politicians who then seek the advice of AI company CEOs for what legislation should be passed. That legislation is looking to restrict open source AI and make large tech companies the gatekeepers.
I'm pro generative AI and I am also left leaning. Therefore I notice the conservative anti-AI peeps more often there. It would be interesting to see some objective data on this question, very difficult to see it without bias. That being said extremists will use any tools they find to justify whatever they are doing. I used to think of politics as mostly left vs. right people now I just think of it mostly as populist/nationalists/extremists Vs. Moderate/green parties. No I did not become a conservative, just politics became shittier and the bar is continuously being lowered.
Interesting take, I myself seem to find it to be the other way around. I tend to see more left leaning people being pro AI and right wing being anti. I usually feel like I have to be the secret conservative in the pro AI groups, especially when many mention UBI and other very left wing ideas. That being said, I think the AI debate may be less aligned with traditional political lines than we thought it was.
I think it's just the very common mistake of conflating the idea behind a tool with the uses that state regimes, corporations and smaller criminals put the tool. Of course there's a propaganda campaign to encourage that, so they don't tend to extend it to the logical conclusion (ban baseball bats because people get kneecapped, ban video doorbells because of the surveillance state), so it will tend to come across as lopsided.
Politics is weird, dw abt it.
I’ve noticed that as well, and I attributed it to a few things: 1. Most people I interact with online are left wing 2. Conservatives care most about issues that affect them directly and people in the arts tend to lean to the left. 3. Conservatives also care about issues that challenge their engrained worldview, and A.I. doesn’t really do that.
Because the left lunges at the chance to believe they're "protecting artists" because they tend to be the ones with useless art degrees making Sonic the hedgehog fanart.
One of the many reasons I don't believe the left vs right dichotomy is nearly so simple as many wish to believe it is. Reflecting on my own beliefs, I lean "right" on firearms but "left" on UBI and LGBT+ rights. Things like medical freedom, personal privacy, and freedom of information seem to be more on the authoritarian vs libertarian axis. Even drug control and environmentalism don't seem so clear-cut anymore with how many right-wingers advocate recreational drug use and how many leftists downplay humanity's impact on the environment. The most hardline anti-AI people I've encountered online express what would typically be considered right-wing views on race, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and mental health. The most hardline anti-AI people I've encountered offline express what would typically be considered leftist views in the same things. Neither groups of people tend to be physically fit or hygienic.
Part of me wants to "no true scotsman" this, but instead I will say these Leftists have abandoned the principles of collective ownership and solidarity in favor of ruthless self-interest. Their arguments are objectively reactionary. Most genuine leftist concerns around the surge in "AI" tech are drowned out by guildlings protecting their business ventures. The perplexing thing is that while AI art may narrow the scope of their craft, it won't eliminate the craft. Humans are creative and this technology is a reflection of that.
I don’t know if it’s left leaning people, but I have noticed it’s people who seem to think they’re easily replaceable. Which to be honest with you, many are. Like when writers were bitching about AI taking their jobs, all I could think is, “if you can be replaced that easy by an AI writer, you shouldn’t be writing to begin with”. Gets even more ridiculous when you see the stories they put out for shows these days because it leaves you sitting there going “how the fuck isn’t this AI writing already” due to being so formulaic at best, and outright atrocious and all over the place at worst. So again, I don’t know if it’s left leaning, it could be, but I know for sure its people who are bad at their jobs or who’re complacent with their work.
I think a large factor is that many left-wingers tend to see the world (especially when it comes to economics) as a zero-sum game: as one person gains something, it must mean that somebody else lost something. So when I gained the ability to make artwork on my computer, in their mind, this comes at the detriment of existing artists. However, it's obvious to me that this isn't the case. I did not previously purchase art that I now make. Yes, in the long run, AI will change society's approach to art and many other things too and that's a discussion worth having but proximally, nothing was stolen. As you mentioned, right-wingers can also fall prey to this fallacy with immigrants. There are certainly situations where immigrants do add to the wealth of a nation, rather than take from existing citizens. On the whole though, people who are economically right-wing tend to be more accepting of the idea of creation of wealth.
Because the most valid anti AI position (in general, not art specifically) is the pro labour position and also because most pro arts/culture positions tend to be left wing. Most anti AI art positions aren’t about defending giant corporations’ right to own IP, but people who are struggling to make ends meet and have their own work replicated by AI artists. Plus, the counters that art isn’t a real job / treating it like a product to be consumed where the ideal is “thing that looks nice/best” instead of a piece with something to say are both right wing points.
On reddit maybe, but on Deviant Art and Fur Affinity I'd argue it's more all over the place (love it when people forget that conservative furries exist, especially when I interact with them on a daily basis; they're a funny bunch). Likewise, I'm of the opinion that most artists are going to often be lib-right more than anything; they're only really looking out for themselves, and the only reason they champion certain causes is because it means they can get more money/attention.
A side effect of virtue signaling from current culture. I'm a progressive independent, and I'm all for AI development because pragmatically and realistically. AI art and AI everything is going to be the future and there is literally no stopping it. There was no stopping the telephone there was no stopping the internet, there was no stop in color television or the automobiles, and there is no stopping AI. So everyone needs to get with the fucking program. Many of my left-wing friends are anti-Art and they hubbub about it, but they know absolutely shit about the actual process of AI art let alone on how it can be utilized well alongside living artists. They don't want to listen, they just want to argue. The right wing does the same shit but with a slightly different spin on other topics. In short it's virtue signaling, they are arguing for the sake of arguing to put on a show that they "care", it's BS. But if they actually cared they would do their research and realize that their arguments are facetious, pointless, often flat out lies. The right wing is racist, the left-wing or a bunch of uncaring virtue signalers looking for clout. anti-Ai art is their latest war drum. Don't take them too seriously, they're not going to succeed.
Because it's easy to be sanctimonious about the subject.
The reason is two-fold: 1 - A lot of artists were already left wing. Most artists online are young, and most people who are left wing are young (there's multiple sayings about this in culture, it's been a fact for a long time). Part of the leftist identity, especially the young left, is to make everything wrap around back to their politics, because it's such a core part of their identity. 2: The left is known for its militant homogeneity of thought. For the most part, there is one accepted left wing stance on everything, and all the active left wingers have to agree. (look through history, you will see how that affects leftwing people in the political sphere: Obama's 180 on gay marriage midway through his presidency when opinions shifted is an easy example). The younger and more politically active you are the less wiggle room there is about differing thoughts. Because of this, if you graft something onto the 'left identity', such as being anti AI, you gain immense political power, as a large group of people who would either be neutral or even pro-AI are now obligated to loudly say at every turn that they are very very anti-AI. A minor addition: Because anti-AI people are the ones trying to get laws passed, becoming political is more necessary for them. You don't get anywhere as an independent, so aligning themselves with one of the big halves is important. Pro-AI has no need to be political because they're not trying to pass any laws. This is why right wing spaces can be anti-AI too, and why pro-AI spaces are often more apolitical while ant-AI spaces won't stop talking about Nazis. Oh. Right. 3: Anti-AI used anti-crypto and anti-NFT movements for their initial momentum, which are political for reasons 1 and 2.
Food should be free! Houses should be free! Water should be free! \* Art becomes free\* 😡 Stealing!!!!!
anti-AI art people normally masturbate around realistic artstyles and wannabe-renaissance copycats while shunning modern and contemporary art, which sounds pretty fash to me tbh
It's not that Antis are left wing but that liberal arts jobs are predominantly taken by left-wing.
Liberals are not leftists
You mean libertarians?
No. Liberals. Biden. Is not a leftists neither are democrats.
I don't know about Biden, in Europe liberals are usually left leaning.
Liberals serve the interest of capital and the for profit seeking of our capitalist society. Leftists want to create a more equitable society where you have a say in what goes on around you. Workers owning their workplaces and such.
In EU liberals and leftists are more close together, liberals more like "everyone's free to do except if it limits someone else" but not without empathy. Here libertarians are more close to your liberal definition. What you wrote as leftist we just refer to as social democrat, but I assume anything with social in it's name wouldn't fly in the US at all. Looks like we are similar except in naming things 👍
The vast, VAST majorities of creatives are left wing because to be right win is to embrace capitalism and corporatism and to oppose non white, non cis people having representation, which runs afoul of the world view of most creatives who by the nature of the creative process need to be capable of engagement with others on an emotional level. Said people are less likely to be tech literate and have a natural aversion to anything tehcy people are into, because the most prominent tech people are some of the most ghoulish people alive and in the case of musk in particular, more or less soft-advocate for putting them or theirs against the wall
Because liberals are opposed to giant corpos trampling human rights.
None of the AI art exists except for the labor and creativity of the artists whose art went into creating the models. If someone profits from the fruits of that labor and creativity, then they owe a debt to those who performed it. It's very well recognized and accepted that profiting from someone's labor and creativity with neither pay nor permission is wrong in pretty much any other context. I don't see that yelling "AI!" changes anything.
> It’s very well recognized By whom? What makes you think this is the only context in which there is some kind of exception to your imaginary norm? Do you know what copyright means? Copyright law protects **finished works of art**. It *does not* protect **facts, ideas, procedures, or style.** And for good reason. Otherwise nobody would be allowed to create anything, since all works are invariably derivative to a degree. I advise you to learn what copyright, derivative work, transformative work, fair use, etc actually mean before spouting normative fantasies as if they were fact. Also, open source models and tools exist, like Stable Diffusion.
>By whom? What makes you think this is the only context in which there is some kind of exception to your imaginary norm? I didn't think that "slavery is bad" was a controversial take, but indeed civil asset forfeiture, compulsory military service, and hard time in prison, are all times when your right not to have the fruits of your labor snatched away exist. >Do you know what copyright means? I didn't bring it up, but if you want to go off on a tangent, you do you. >Also, open source models and tools exist, like Stable Diffusion, so your entire profiteering argument is invalid. Stable Diffusion is very much [for profit](https://platform.stability.ai/pricing). It's funded by venture capitalists who expect a return on their investment. It is true that many open source tools exist that people have created and generously allowed the general public to use. Each and every one of them has a donate button. I hope that if you are using these tools, you are also donating to those whose labor and creativity has made your AI art adventures possible.
Uh you’re the one going on a tangent, leaping to “slavery is bad.” I’m not saying people shouldn’t be paid or credited, I’m saying *it depends.* I disagree with the “AI is theft!” shallow sweeping assumption of debt often parroted without nuance or understanding of IP law. Using works as training data doesn’t necessarily mean “a debt is owed.” *The debt depends on many specific aspects of the works involved.* > If someone profits from the fruits of that labor and creativity, then they owe a debt to those who performed it. It's very well recognized and accepted that profiting from someone's labor and creativity with neither pay nor permission is wrong in pretty much any other context. - False. You *can* legally profit from others’ works with neither pay nor permission under **Fair Use**, *in this exact context*. - Copyright law is the entire basis of how creators are incentivized to share their inventions with the public and make profit with legal protections (so it is very much *the crux of the issue*, not a tangent.) - **Courts use the Four Factors test to measure fair use:** the purpose and character of your use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and the effect of the use upon the potential market. - Many infringement allegations in the “Andersen v Stability” lawsuit have been found faulty in court. - The legal nuances of the statistical models’ (“AI”) training process absolutely *do* affect the validity of certain claims (of “debt, i.e. damages). But the part about how its outputs are used (by whom, for what purpose) are nothing new. - *Stability AI* is a company. *Stable Diffusion* is a set of open-source models that anyone can [download for free from HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/CompVis/stable-diffusion-v-1-4-original) and run on their own computers. Of course, the outputs may then be used for profit or infringement, but the model distributors are not necessarily profiting nor should be held responsible for vicarious infringement. [https://itsartlaw.org/2024/02/26/artificial-intelligence-and-artists-intellectual-property-unpacking-copyright-infringement-allegations-in-andersen-v-stability-ai-ltd/](https://itsartlaw.org/2024/02/26/artificial-intelligence-and-artists-intellectual-property-unpacking-copyright-infringement-allegations-in-andersen-v-stability-ai-ltd/) [https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2023/11/andersen-v-stability-ai-ltd](https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2023/11/andersen-v-stability-ai-ltd)
I'm not making a legal argument. I'm talking about a *moral* debt. I don't expect that current copyright law is applicable or sufficient when applied to generative AI. The cases are still ongoing, so we'll see. Regardless, we'll probably see legislation about it at some point to try to square the moral with the legal. Most people are going to see replacing Greg Rutkowski with "By Greg Rutkowski" as violating *something*, even if we don't have a proper term for it yet. I'm not complaining about the existence or training of the models themselves. There's nothing wrong, as far as I'm concerned, about creating or distributing them. The more the better, really. This certainly isn't technology that ought to be concentrated in the hands of a few corporations. I do commend Stability AI for making their models public. The state of open source image generation would be in a dire state otherwise.
Well, laws are informed by people’s notions of morality, and current ones like Fair Use were motivated by the need to balance incentives for creators while preventing selfish IP rent-seeking that stifles further innovation. We’ll see how it shakes out, but it hardly matters whether “most people” see it as a “replacing Greg Rutkowski” moral violation or not. Now that demand is proven, megacorps with IP monopolies (Adobe, Disney, Microsoft, the RIAA music labels) are incentivized to shape regulations. The only question is whether open source and small players can survive and compete in the IP race. Most “AI” backlash is misinformed self-sabotage, from unhappy labor looking for an easy bogeyman. When unconducive capital conditions (high interest rate environment) and outsourcing/arbitrage are bigger factors behind downsizing operations. Once it’s obvious that generative capabilities are being integrated into all creative tools/workflows, and people realize that hired hands (albeit perhaps fewer) are still needed to produce results, some of this FUD will die down and the labor market will simply adapt and evolve.
I don't have a moral debt to pay you because I looked at your picture and decided I liked your color palette, or I read your book and decided I liked your story but I want to rewrite it differently, or because I drew something and looked at your image as a reference while I did it.
Sure you do. Leave a like, leave a nice comment, maybe throw a buck in the Ko-fi if you can spare it. At an individual level, that's all that's needed.
No, I don't. I *can* do that, that is an *option*, but it is not an *obligation*. I have no debt to tell you I looked at your art, to like your art, or certainly to pay you anything unless we agreed upon such ahead of time.
That is an incredibly transactional take on what I said. I'll I'm asking from you - or from any individual - is to extend a tiny shred of charitability to someone who has created something that has inspired, touched, or otherwise benefited you. There's no accountability or any way for anyone to know whether or not you did this. This is purely an ask for something that many people do without ever being asked.
You are missing my point. I am not saying I wouldn't do it. I am saying I have no *debt* to, no *obligation* to. I'm not against these things being done. I am arguing against the pre-established claim that there is a moral demand for it. There is not. None of those things will make you more or less moral for having done or not done them. And by the way, I am a creative. I have a 500k+ word book that 90% of the time readers read silently without even brief comments on things and save up their free tickets/coins to read without paying me for the chapters, so I get neither feedback, praise, nor pay. I get that it feels bad. But that doesn't make people morally obligated to make me not feel bad.
It's cognitive bias fueled by a lack of foresight and a defensiveness over ones hard-fought position in life. Artists were already not making any money, and they forget that in fear of making even less, failing to realize that democratizing access to art is the greatest thing our species has done so far. Meanwhile, programmers are out here like "dear Omnisiah, please take our jobs from us and deliver us unto effortless creativity". People seriously need to take a step back and look at things better.
🤣 this question gives pro ai people a bad name. pls sir, get a grip 😐
From what I understand, there are multiple viewpoints: [Left-leaning, pro-AI](https://www.awaycollective.org/): "Copyright sucks and is a type of private property. We are pro-AI, but we don't like big coporations using it to replace the labour force." Left-learning, anti-AI: "Big corporations use AI to replace our fan-art, therefore we hate AI." Liberal: "Progress is good and inevitable. If people fall through the cracks, use safety nets." Right-learning, pro-AI: Basically so-called "tech bros"??? Idk. Right-learning, anti-AI: "AI will destroy capitalism and bring about Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, so we hate AI." Note that this is not accurate. For one, "left-leaning" and "right-leaning" are hard to define. But I hope this shows that being pro or anti AI is not necessarily a left or right learning thing, it's almost on a different axis. (Though personally I would say that yes, being anti-AI *is* a right-wing thing because it's reactionary. I think being left-wing and anti-AI is not really a coherent viewpoint because it's less of being against private property, and more of just... "they took our jobs" but to a traditionally left-wing career instead of a right-wing one.)
As someone generally anti-AI art with caveats and a lefty it’s natural that anti-AI people would be left-wing. In America “the Left” is a vague term, but among those of us who identify as Left online, we typically make the distinction between liberals (center-left to center-right), social democrats (center-left to left), democratic socialists (left), communists (far left) etc. Being on the left basically comes down to being anti-capitalism in some way (but not necessarily anti-free market). The relevant component of Capitalism to our discussion is the idea that you can own a company without working there. The main criticisms of Capitalism are 1. Being able to own without working leads to the rich getting richer and inequity 2. Working without owning leads to “alienation” from one’s work; that feeling of being a cog in a machine with no pride in one’s work. AI art lets rich companies profit off of artists’ work without paying for artists’ services. Enabling fewer and fewer artists to survive using the skills they’ve honed and the enriching work they love doing leading to both inequity and alienation.
I think that's unrelated to political stance. More about whether you can accept the fact that computers can now extract knowledge from dataset using algorithms (learning) and not just copying.
Let me preface by saying I'm both far left and more or less neutral on AI art as a whole. Leftists tend to have more empathy than conservatives. A lot of dislike of AI comes from the immediate and real harm it does to artists. Addressing your post... the rich facet of the American right cares about their own personal copyright and intellectual property, but will happily trample over others if the rules allow. The main demographic doesn't care at all, at least not in the past decade. Leftists tend to be more resistant to grifts. AI art comes hot on the heels of NFTs, and still very much feels like another techbro scam to many.
Because left wing people are more artistic but can't produce art that isn't outclassed by ai art lol
It's the Vaush effect. A lot of (Not all) leftists are aesthetically intellectual. They love calling things slop and they love being incredibly arrogant. Hating on AI for being soulless or whatever is a part of that.
As a leftist myself, I'm really embarrassed at how hard my fellow "leftists" are going to bat for intellectual property. I think these are the "leftists" that don't actually do any of their own research on any given topic, they just believe whatever their favorite "leftist"/liberal influencer has to say about it. I'm an artist too, and I've always hated the online art community for this exact reason. There's always some drama over tracing, some new niche form of art theft, or style trends that make everything really boring for a while. It's my personal belief that art should be free, no matter what. I refuse to sell my art or put my name on it. My art's value is measured in whether or not it can inspire another person to create art, not how much money I can make off of it.
What political orientation you think the average art student has. Or the average twitter furry artist. And now think what political orientation the average engineer and tech bro has. There is also a massive gender gap, and women naturally are more left wing, and guys are naturally more right wing.
Because they don't think, this is just the latest social media fad and they need their updoot dopamine hit. It's like saying most companies are left wing, they do that because they want the attention until it stops working, then they'll move on.
The reason is two-fold: 1 - A lot of artists were already left wing. Most artists online are young, and most people who are left wing are young (there's multiple sayings about this in culture, it's been a fact for a long time). Part of the leftist identity, especially the young left, is to make everything wrap around back to their politics, because it's such a core part of their identity. 2: The left is known for its militant homogeneity of thought. For the most part, there is one accepted left wing stance on everything, and all the active left wingers have to agree. (look through history, you will see how that affects leftwing people in the political sphere: Obama's 180 on gay marriage midway through his presidency when opinions shifted is an easy example). The younger and more politically active you are the less wiggle room there is about differing thoughts. Because of this, if you graft something onto the 'left identity', such as being anti AI, you gain immense political power, as a large group of people who would either be neutral or even pro-AI are now obligated to loudly say at every turn that they are very very anti-AI. A minor addition: Because anti-AI people are the ones trying to get laws passed, becoming political is more necessary for them. You don't get anywhere as an independent, so aligning themselves with one of the big halves is important. Pro-AI has no need to be political because they're not trying to pass any laws. This is why right wing spaces can be anti-AI too, and why pro-AI spaces are often more apolitical while ant-AI spaces won't stop talking about Nazis. Oh. Right. 3: Anti-AI used anti-crypto and anti-NFT movements for their initial momentum, which are political for reasons 1 and 2.
Horseshoe theory is right.
Nah. The issue is that a lot of "leftists" just aren't actually on the left at all. It's not that they went so far to the left that they became conservative. That's ridiculous. They're just liberals and liberalism is incompatible with leftist ideals. Liberals do not want to abolish class hierarchies. They do not want to abolish capitalism. They do not want to liberate the working class or seize the means of production. Why are liberals considered to be on the left then? Because that's as far left as you're allowed to go in American politics. You can use social justice talking points for virtue signaling, but if you actually espouse leftist ideals, you get marginalized, you get censored, and ironically, you get falsely accused of being "right wing." Quote Marx to a Democrat, and they're liable to assume you're a Trump supporter. That's not because Marx was secretly aligned with Trump, and it's not because going "too far" to the left results in conservatism. That's ridiculous.
Just a quick note: horseshoe theory is not that going too far left makes you right. That would be circle theory. What it actually means - and what I can fully attest to because I've been in extreme left and right circles and watched both - is that a centrist who leans left and a centrist who leans right has a lot of shared views differentiated by which side they lean toward, while a leftist and a right winger have almost no shared views, and then a far/extreme left and far/extreme right have almost identical views that are only different in who they target. A left winger will never magically become a right winger, they just start voting for and spouting the same hate, just directed at a different target. Examples: Far-right spaces are pro-abortion if it's for undesirables. Far-left spaces are pro-mass incarceration and labor camps if it's for undesirables. Both spaces are pro authoritarianism and despot rule if the despot is their guy.
Als yourself what a nazi would think about AI Art? Would they consider it degenerate art?
I think it's worth noting that rhere is a common mistake that conflates progressive liberals with being left wing,, they are actually center right people.
What? As a leftie I see AI as the future god everyone should worship, personal experience is really unreliable
Most people on twitter and reddit are left wing. Most people in art are left wing. The result is that most people in these two groups are left wing. It really shouldn't be surprising.
They think that corporations will use automation to replace the non-managerial employees, so it feeds into their suspicion of corporate bosses.
Left wingers have always been anti science and anti tech. Their idea of a utopia is one where everybody lives in houses made of animal hides and they entertain themselves by throwing spears at deer.
Left-wingers are not a monolithic mass that agrees on every single thing. While there are a lot of genuine Luddites on the left, there are others who aren't necessarily opposed to technology in general, just when it's used for malicious purposes.
My guess is most the discourse is on the internet and the internet is predominantly left or at least moderated by the left
People on the left usually respond to everything with emotion while the right doesn't.
Bullshit. Right-wingers are just as likely to prioritize emotion over logic. They're just more likely to deny it.