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.
Well, I suppose if we collectively owned together the means and access to said AI, and nobody would own or be able to claim ownership over it beyond the public domain, I could see this argument perhaps work.
As it is, it’s just another theft by the capitalists aimed to oppress us all, cheat us out of our collective knowledge and published works. The technology is useful and could be made sustainably, but the drive of profit over sense and reason fucks us all equally in this one shared planet.
I hate that it has come to this, when just a little bit of more sense and taste, responsibility, we could have made this a public domain good equally available to all, via public libraries or such offering compute or whatever. And ran responsibly and sustainably with realistic limits and scale.
It didn’t need to be this big of a pig dick in our asses. It was a deliberate choice by those that have the power and the means to make those choices over everyone else.
So in the real world, that’s bullshit.
In an ideal world, it may have been even good.