My concerns about to ai go way beyond my problems with capitalism. The environmental impact, the degradation of the creation of art for the masses of people, the ethics behind scraping images...
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
203 points (92.8% liked)
Communism
2047 readers
191 users here now
Welcome to the communist Lemmy community! This is a community for all Marxist.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
degradation of the creation of art for the masses of people
Ah yes the very same argument we heard when CGI, cameras, photography was invented. Probably also paper, canvas and clay tablets.
Also the meme also adress this, if it will go into open source and be available to masses, it will led to the proletarianisation of art, something that should not be overlooked as art was always gated by time so we historically see it being domain of owner classes not having to work for a living like priesthood, aristocracy and bourgeoisie.
Generative AI is something inherently different. It's a bias multiplication machine. Have you ever visited CivitAI?
Yes, the application is similar. GUIs like ComfyUI are sophisticated and grant a good deal of control and creative freedom, much like Photoshop, DAWs or Blender.
All these technologies you mentioned have one thing in common they do not have in common with generative AI though: you could use them to model after the real world. Photorealism (as in: an exact representation of something existing in the non-digital realm) is achievable with all of those. It is not possible to achieve it with generative AI. AI only has its own "space" where it snatches ideas from. Gen AI can never be a gateway to art by itself, but its also way too powerful to just be a new tool.
Also I don't get how open source gen AI will lead to the proletarianization of art. What people need to create art is education, pen and paper, health, and free time. Making those accessible to everyone is much easier than to make sure everybody who wants to do "art" gets their 1000$ GPU and tons of RAM.
If you think art only exists in the hands of the oligarchs you're woefully ignorant on the scope of what art is and art history.
Nice way to put words into my mouth, you should so some word art.
You literally said it was in the hands of the bourgeoisie in your last comment.
Yes, that was the case, and aristocracy and priesthood, until very recently when capitalism socialised means of production to the level of petty bourgeoise artists being able to live without patron (and note that most artists came from those three classes too, peasants and workers were way too busy working to learn art). But bourgeoisie not mean automatically "an oligarch". Ofc now there are also working artists but they mostly produce commercial slop and own nothing just like every other worker.
What a myopic view of artistic creation. You're ignoring all ancient art, anything from pre history, and only thinking of art as things that are sold, popular, or known. A kid's crayon drawing and a doodle in a notebook are also forms of art. Art isn't only digital either. Humans have a desire to create, and watering that down by saying kids can just tell a robot to draw for them is repugnant. It's the loss of a valuable skill and something intrinsically human.
And that's just the art side of ai, not even the problems with the environmental impact, misinformation, arguable theft related to it's creation, etc.
Those are literally the problems this post means. And all of what you mentioned could be described as a direct or indirect consequence/effect of capitalism as well (ravaging industrialism, culture industry, copyright for mee but not for thee). AI in this context is just a technological catalyst.
Part of my issue is a philosophical and environmental issue, which would exist regardless of the political economic system ai would exist in.
I disagree. The hunger for chips, energy and water only got so big because venture capital decided to invest big in AI corporations. If we had another approach to ressource allocation we could slow down the rapid advancement and with it the ressource consumption.
This would also mean that there would time to discuss ethical/philosophical questions of AI and AI usage.
So you're argument is that under communism we'd have less ai and it would be developed slower? Not exactly saying ai is a good thing there, and it doesn't really cover the inherent issues related to it's existence.
Yes and no. Under communism, we would be able to have less AI and it would be developed slower.
My statement was incomplete, AI is not just an economic venture, the big players (maily The US and China) catched on about its massive potential for informational warfare and control over their population.
As long as there's states fighting over resources and power, any technology that can be utilized to get an edge over you enemies, not just AI, can and will be pushed forward, damn the consequences. Plus if you see capitalism as an entity itself, you could also argue that it's doing this for its own survival.
Communism is not the only vision of a stateless society spanning the globe, but one whose thoughts and ideas have been well established.
You point is that AI has inherent issues, just by existing. You are correct. But I believe if we limit the application of AI to non-military uses, if we decouple it from power struggles, its benefits may outweigh its undeniable cost.
That's the best response and reasoning I've read in this whole conversation
More of people would actually share their training data instead of everyone needing to train the same thing in case they found some gold mine advantage over other companies so they must not share anything.
The environmental impact of AI is massively exacerbated by capitalism. We have the technology to minimize the environmental impact, namely renewable energy, but we choose not the use them because big oil bullshit and the fact that it's more expensive.
Socialism is the only hope the environment has.
Do you realize how much water gets taken out of the water cycle just to cool those things?
Do you realize we can use treated wastewater and many data centers do? Again, most don't because it's more expensive.
Do you realize that it's still contained away from the water cycle and making water shortages way worse? Waste water is still water.
These huge AI firms were operating at a loss hopped up on venture capital and speculation - it's the only way they can afford such a massive cost of training and running these huge models.
Under a Communist system such things wouldn't exist. If we wanted we could make one, but that would be a collective decision.
There is no such thing as ethics in regurgitative AI (Artificial Idiot). That has been thrown away since the very beginning since models are trained off of vast amounts of stolen works.
Intellectual property shouldn’t be a thing anyway. But that cuts both ways, companies should release their model weights freely instead of hoarding them.
If you train on public data, you should release public models. It’s that simple.
Intellectual property should exist to protect the works made but the time works are protected should be vastly reduced. From a lifetime plus 60 years to 20-30 years, still plenty of time to make money off of them but also not too long where people can’t legally tinker with the property within their lifetime.
When it comes to how intellectual property interacts with ai models it should be you pay for the right to use it unless it has already crossed into the public domain. Things like social media posts would still require permission from the creator to use. Because while it is in the public eye, it is still someone else’s work. For example just because a street mural is in the public eye, it is not mean it belongs to the public.
Why though? IP only protects those who have money to litigate, eg. big corporations, not individual artists.
Hell, most indie artists I know make their money blatantly violating copyright by selling fanart.
The world would lose nothing of value if copyright suddenly disappeared.
Just because it was stolen doesn't mean the theft should be ignored.
I whole heartedly agree that the theft of the works shouldn’t be ignored. It’s why I said there is no ethics in this field because of that. These companies should be punished massively for their theft and reparations should be paid out if we lived in a just society.
the existential risk
environmental impact
Even without AI, humans are causing this and it's getting much much worse. The far right is winning all over the globe, trump is president with his "drill baby drill" and recently opening up national forests for logging. The right is winning and gaining in numbers and they don't give a shit about the environment.
A communist takeover of AI could eventually lead to it helping with environmental problems. But we ain't getting anything commie any time soon. Everything looks like fascism is the only thing potentially on the menu.
degradation of the creation of art for the masses of people
Not sure what you mean by this. As a thought experiment, what if, decades to come, AI can produce art that is orders of magnitude better than any human being could ever create? Music, movies, sculptures, whatever... Anti-AI people will disagree, but I want to see what that would look like.
Art is more than a quality picture. It's an innate human activity and an action of self expression. It's a creation made by a living things, making choices in its creation, to express itself. Ai slop doesn't do this. It's like ordering a cheeseburger without pickles and saying that you cooked it yourself.
That's not the point at all. As I said, it's a thought experiment.
IF, a very big if, AI could create art objectively better than any human (by human standards), is that art less valuable because a human didn't do it? No. Because it's the art we're judging, not the person/process by which it was created.
Additionally, what if humans controlling AI tools lead to the creation of art that is objectively better than art created without AI tools? If it's better (judged by humans), then it's better.
I want to see all the potential of these tools used by humans, in addition to whatever else they could provide by themselves, especially if it ever leads to anything like AGI.
"Ai slop" doesn't to this yet, and maybe it never will, but maybe it will. I want to see what it might be able to do, preferably for the benefit of everyone, not just the billionaire class.
There is a big difference between the statue of David and a 3d printed figure of it. Even if it was the same size and even visually identical, the hand carved one is always more important to people, because someone put the effort and thought into it, and the other is a cheap replica.
There is no consistent definition of what art is. You are trying to force your personal definition onto everybody else.
So? That's why it's an opinion. If you want to subscribe to some postmodern definition of art and think finding a crumpled ball of paper on the street makes you an artist, go right ahead. I'll think you're wrong and foolish, but sure.
Ai slop isn't art, and you can cope with people thinking that.
Thermonuclear war could apply, too.