AI art is the least scary AI
One of the most common discussions about AI that has dominated the supposed worker institutions is an extreme reaction to AI art. On many parts of social media, the posting of ai art is seen as right wing. The statements they make are often extreme suggesting that AI art is the biggest attack on workers in decades.
But the focus on AI art shows a willingness of consumers to react to only the most public facing and consumer facing use of this new technology. The most dangerous AI are not making art but being used as a targeting system in wars or being used to serve internal roles on websites and actively malfunctioning in these capacities. The most dangerous ai include tracking systems, surveillance systems, targeting mechanisms and numerous population management agents.
The reaction of creative workers and artists to regard ai as an unprecedented attack is overwrought. The automation of art got going with the computerization of graphic design and the end of arts funding formerly provided by the federal government. AI is just the latest development in the computerization of graphics that has been happening at an increased pace since the 1990s. Yet artists today are most upset because they hang their hat on the individualist metaphysic of authorship and intellectual property. They take pride in individual production without realizing that individualist ideology serves the same capitalist apparatus that stopped funding art in public in the US in the 70s.
Artists have steadily lost power since they became separated from the guild system in the Middle Ages that offered some artists moderate protection. For artists to forget the history of these attacks is revealing of their inability to place their current struggles as creatives placed outside of standard credential systems in a state of exception. Defending intellectual property will not help either because corporations will always be more powerful in legal battles than even wealthy individual artists, nonprofits or liberal trade unions.
Art is a valuable activity for the people who make it, for the people observing it being made and for people who get to enjoy the final product. Art is an end in itself. Any non capitalist world that might exist in the future should support human made arts expertise, not because of individual artistic labor, but because human art is a good for all. If the world did this already, AI art would disrupt nothing. AI art only seems bad because capitalism makes many artists starve.