His argument was literally that
- artists, writers, and programmers are “labor aristocracy” and deserve no respect because they’re sitting around making art and writing code while other people are toiling and laboring,
- genAI is a “free resource” (“it’s free for me to use at work”) that “helps everyone make things” instead of having to rely on skill and expertise and therefore makes everything equal,
- it’s hypocritical of people to be worried about the environmental and societal impact of genAI because “only white people are worried about it now that their hobbies are being threatened and everyone else is catching up”.
Pointing out there there are artists and programmers from every race and economic class, as well as perfectly ordinary people in every walk of life who are all actively being harmed both by the theft of ideas and labor and by the physical effects of gigantic data centers ruining communities, was met with much hand-waving and incredibly impenetrable philosophical jargon.
I’m particularly incensed because I’m as leftist and anticapitalist as they come and this felt like the fuckery some conservative cockwomble would try to come up with to parody socialism, except this guy was completely serious.
That raises additional questions. In a post scarcity communist or socialist society, people would make things (art etc) not because they need to but because they want to. I have no doubt that they would likely continue to make things. But I don’t think that will be enough in the face of people who want to take the shortcut because it is easier.
So, then comes the problem. Why make art if the machine can just do it for you? Who makes the new art (that is labor intensive) when there is already a tool for that that doesn’t involve labor? Who trains the people to do the art? Who teaches them? Where does that skill get developed? The AI cannot continue to improve without new (untainted data and at some point that data will no longer be produced).
It’s the same with a lot of stuff throughout time. There’s a place in I think Indiana that makes tanks still not because the US needs them (there’s a significant surplus and they don’t really have anything to do with them once they are made). But they make them so that the process of making them and the ability to make them doesn’t get lost to time. That happens every time we invent a tool that does the job for us so that a layman can do it.
You can’t use what you don’t develope. How do we continue to developed things after AI is there to do it all for us?