Some thoughts on "AI art"
There have been more and more accounts online talking about how “AI art” democratizes art, because it allows people without talent to create art. And I suppose it does, in the same way that Twitter allows random amoral assholes to create political policy. The tech lords that rule the world keep injecting AI into all their products, even though most people don’t want it, don’t need it and hate the results.
Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that some of our greatest art, both online and in the real world, throughout history, has been created by artists lacking in technical skills. It’s the effort to create beauty without the proper tools that produces art that we recognize as “human.” As David Byrne said, the better a singer’s voice, the less we believe what they have to say. “AI art” is universally terrible because it’s impossible to trust anything it has to say.
The tech lords are pushing AI so hard because it’s another way for them to remove humans from the process of making money. The goals of the tech lords, by sheer coincidence, mesh with the goals of MAGA: use computers to create the illusion of a real movement. I’m willing to bet that most of the “AI accounts” on social media are either bots or people paid by whoever pays people to do this sort of thing deliberately flooding the zone with bullshit, exactly the way that MAGA uses bots and foreign accounts to push their wildly unpopular bullshit because they actually know that, in the marketplace of ideas they claim to cherish, the fruit they’re selling is rotten.
Both the “AI artist” and the MAGAt want the same thing: instant gratification at the expense of anything resembling truth or humanity. The “AI artist” who says “I want to see a girl with three boobs and the head of a dog, drawn in the style of Michelangelo” without thinking about what that does to the culture, and to the environment, has the exact same impulse as the Defense Secretary who says “Kill them all” without any sense of what those words mean or the legal and international repercussions of them. Everything in MAGA is image first, aforethought never. As Trump said lo these many years ago, “You don’t have to do an investigation, you just have to announce it.” Announce a plan, never follow up, announce another plan tomorrow. Put a plan into action, have nothing to back it up with, waste billions of dollars pretending you meant to do it that way the whole time. Present plans for a ballroom, tear down the White House, oops, turns out that was all illegal, welp, it’s gone now, lol.
AI has come for us, and the tech lords will spend billions convincing us that we need it. We have to resist it at every turn.