Comic Strips

I don't like ai-art, most of the time it is a pursuit of the economic value of an aesthetic without a genuine engagement with the human part.

Further, AI is part of a broad process of dehumanization that diminishes the value of humans and the human condition in favor of an imagined intelligence that all artists have always instinctually understood was a threat.

No artists with any wisdom at all thinks skill is a gatekeeper for human artists, skill is rather the inveitable result of a sustained intimacy between an artist and their art and what you mistake for a worship of skill is a love of that relationship framed in the context of skill. In so far as the obsession with artistic skill acts as a gatekeeper to anybody, it is in large part because capitalism demands things be abstracted and reduced to pure economic value. Artists rarely gatekeep art themselves, the gatekeeping has NOTHING to do with artists nor does it originate from their desire to create art it is a peripheral process imposed upon art by distorting forces attempting to control art (such as AI).

Also, people need to stop lazily using the example of Luddites without knowing their history. They aren't who you think they were, stop dropping the reference like you know what it means if you don't know what it means.

TL;DR If skill is a gatekeeper to art it is because capitalism demands scarcity be imposed upon the pursuit of making art, it has nothing to do with art itself. Hailing AI as a gift to would-be artists totally misses the point, I am not against using new tools to make art, I am against the rise in dehumanization dominating societies around the world at the moment of which AI is a central actor.