“Woke” was originally a word in the US black community to refer to people who were class conscious. Specifically to be aware of cooptation and trickery by the bourgeoisie and police. Ironically, like a lot of black slang, it was coopted by whites and its meaning was changed to suit their interests.

Due to the association with activists, it came to mean progressivism, then liberalism, and by that point had fallen out of favor by its original users. Now it just means “thing me no like” for conservatives.

Dang Yogthos, the libs roll in and you immediately get ratio’d. 🙃

If anything the amount of “gruntwork” will increase.

Why would capitalists pay 5 people $35000 per year ($175k total) to produce a couple dozen sketches per day at best, when they can pay one person $60k-$80k per year to make hundreds of finished works. AI works have the speed of being a punch-press operator with the fine-tuning of a CNC-miller. We haven’t really seen custom work of this scale before. I think it will be a preview into what physical labor will look like with cheap modular robotics vs current methods based on machine operation and support crews.

Your argumentation is silly because it is exactly what happened with all other automatized trades: it eventually gets concentrated.

I agree with this. I think there will be fewer professionals who get paid more while simultaneously producing more, which will cut out a lot of the skilled workers the same way the first wave of industrialization replaced blacksmiths with metal workers and engineers. But I think in this case the people doing the cheap dataset training won’t necessarily need to be artists and they’ll probably be outsourced to third parties. So the only artists necessary are the ones telling the AI “create x images based on this drawing I uploaded”. And since most companies want a uniform style across their product line, they won’t want multiple artists messing with that data, they’ll want one person whose style is recognizeable. Similar to how big name soundtrack musicians currently get all the brand recognition despite having numerous supporting technicians, but with AI performing the role of the technicians. Another example is voice artists and actors. Anyone can have Tara Strong in their work of all they need to do is pay for a few voice samples. Or how in the new star wars movies, they found a Mark Hamill lookalike but still CG’d Hamill’s face over the actor, making the actual actor himself just a host for someone with brand recognition.

How is that different from the current state?

Small-time artists don’t make money on IP. A lot of them are IP thieves in their own right, and get popular by remixing the works of others. Their own characters and stories usually don’t get as much attention and they make most of their money on commissions (ie. a person with no skill needs their skill to make an image). Getting your own characters or story to blow up is seen as “making it” and is extremely rare if they don’t already have connections with powerful figures. Most pop culture figures have rich parents when you look into it, including animators that a lot of poor artists look up to. The reason smalltime artists get upset about AI art is because it takes away the only thing they can offer, which is the skill to create something a buyer wants. I would imagine more prolific artists are upset about it because AI will increase competition until only the most recognized brands survive, so a lot can see themselves being cut out of the equation and having all their customers go to people who are already millionaires.

to corral the AI art for the sole exploitation tool for the bourgeoisie massive legislation will be requires

I think this goes along with the myth about github’s AI program writer making it easier for newbies to get into programming. All it really does it make Github the keyholder. If you take away the necessity of learning a skill, then the person who owns the tool has all the power. Because you won’t know how to produce it yourself and will instead rely on the keyholder to give you the answer. Another example is facebook giving people pre-formatted user pages vs people doing their own html. When a tool does the work for you, you give all the power to that tool and its owner. Sure more people than ever have internet profiles, but at the cost of the real owners selling user data and manipulating their psychology. Rather than democratizing the internet by making it accessible to newbies, it instead promoted walled gardens and placed the control in the hands of big business.

They don’t give a shit for the real art workers producing content already owned by their bosses, they are only interested in their own class interests

I agree with you on this one.

I agree art needs more workers who are paid fairly and don’t need to be so competitive to get a decent wage. The gig economy is toxic and offers people less for their work than its true value. A lot of young artists will spend 6-8hrs on a work and charge $30 for it. That’s $5/hr! Far lower than minimum wage.

Due to this demand for cheap art, AI turns people who don’t do any labor into salesmen who “sample” the labor inputs of others so that they have a product to sell. In this case I side with the artists, and not the wannabe capitalists trying to use technology to wrench the means of production away from the productive forces.

Yeah, most artists are poor as fuck or use it as a second form of income to some shittier job. Calling it “petite bourgeois” to make like $500/yr on commisions is a bit disingenuous. Plus tons of formal artistic work is just making corrections, doing draftwork, or the repetitive gruntwork of someone who has a bigger name than you.

What AI replaces are the above. The people it will elevate are the big-name artists with brand recognition. They’ll use AI to do the gruntwork. Instead of teams of concept artists you just get one highly paid person to draft inputs for the computer to interpret and then have it auto-generate hundreds of lookalikes. Architects can use AI to work out the fine details while they just focus on “the vision”. Animators won’t need tweeners or posers or texture artists or modelers, just someone with a recognizeable art style to feed data.

What AI creates is petit bourgeois content creators. You can already see this on sites that allow AI submissions, where hundreds of copy-paste grifters cheaply produce multiple AI generated images per day, based on someone else’s art style, with no skill or talent of their own, and charge people for the copyright. It’s taking the ownership of the means of production from laborers and giving it to hacks who would’ve never put in the effort to learn to do it themselves.

Contrary to popular opinion, copyright and IP make AI image generation more lucrative, because skill is no longer a barrier to entry. What makes an AI work valuable is the “ownership” rights to the image itself, because that’s what’s being traded in a transaction. In this way it’s quite similar to NFTs and draws the same crowd of supporters.

And this is why I don’t go in public very often.
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