So....Vaush decided to double down on his terrible take on AI art, and this new one is a doozy. I mean, we've reached peak delusion with this one. Basically, he linked AI art to fascists and nazis. I mean....what?! Is this some sort of joke?! No. Watch the video, he literally does it. Well, what drugs is he on? None, ironically enough, just too much leftist ideology.
So what the heck is this guy on about? Well his argument is that fascists dont like artists. Artists end up being unconventional, free thinking and hard to control by authoritarian regime. Fascist art is often plain, like old greek and roman art but more "minecrafty" and completely lacking originality. Basically he sees Nazi art as soulless, and thinks that AI art is the same way. He thinks if old school nazis were still around, that they would LOVE AI art because they could just generate tons of soulless stuff for their own ends without having artists do it for them.
I mean from that perspective I understand why dictators would like AI art but doesnt that apply to all dictators? Communists arent any better, they have the same soulless apartment blocks, and their "art" is basically just propaganda praising dear leader. Yes, even soviet art, which has good aesthetics. The only reason we westerners kinda like it is because it comes off as bad### because the soviets were played up to have this evil bad guy aesthetic and a lot of our own western pop culture (looking at you, goldeneye, command & conquer) hypes it up into something it's not and never was. I mean, dictators dont like creativity or novelty, that's not necessarily a strike against all AI art or its supporters or even tech bros.
Heck I describe most tech bros who hype that stuff to be lib right silicon valley types. Those guys are cringe since they play up every fad (hence the comparisons to cryptocurrency and NFTs), and even I've kinda dunked on them over portraying AI as "t3h f00tur3!" and cringey "this stuff is inevitable" mentalities like that. But at the same time, I love AI. And here's why. Because if we ever wanna be liberated from work, we need technological advances in automation, which requires technological advances in things like AI and robotics. Which....is why I have to push back on Vaush.
Here's the thing about Vaush. He has leftist brainworms. On the topic of fascism, he's deranged. You know how mccarthyists are obsessed with and paranoid about communism? Vaush is that about fascism. Just as a mccarthyist sees communism in LITERALLY EVERYTHING, so does he with fascism. Every election is, in his eyes, an eternal struggle against fascism in which we are simply to vote for the lesser evil so the fascists don't win. That's it. That's his whole perspective on voting. He's an SJW, and he just sees everything through this eternal struggle against fascism. Even if there is no clear fascist threat and a psychologist is asking him if the fascists he fears are in the room with him right now, he'll be screaming and warning people of them. He's deranged. And this comes from a social justice obsessed view of the world.
And Vaush...is also a leftist. He's also some sort of like anarcho communist or something, and let's face it. Leftists, valorize, human labor. As I said in my last post on Pakman's discussion on the conflict between SJWs and marxists, leftists can't get away from the eternal struggle of the working class against the boourgeoisie. More liberal types, ie, labor democrats actually hate automation, because automation means no jobs. No jobs means no leverage against the ruling class, since to them, their power comes from their labor. They withhold their labor as a means to force concessions out of the ruling class, and if the ruling class automates their jobs, they see themselves as screwed. They view AI as associated with tech bros, and tech bro mindsets with the ruling class. THis is why, for example, they hated Andrew Yang. Because despite believing the same thing I do more or less, because he came from a more upper class perspective based on entrepreneurship and startups and stuff, they're automatically skeptical of that. They HATE that. And Vaush has had deranged takes on Yang and UBI in the past too, because again, leftie brainworms.
Marxist types also have a similar perspective. Their ideology is tied inexorably to the so called "labor theory of value." The value of work inevitably belongs to the worker, and employers steal surplus value. When Vaush hates AI, it's because we're replacing artists, who typically arent as alienated from their work as other workers as art requires creativity, and replacing it with a machine that devalues it and produces stuff at near zero marginal cost, that simply doesnt have creativity to it. Of course, to me, this isn't always bad. And given the limitations of AI and AI art at this time, I dont think actual artists have to fear their jobs being taken just yet. Like, as someone who WANTS this massive automation wave to throw everyone out of work all at once forcing us to have a reckoning with the concept, I dont think this is actually gonna happen. Jobism is just too entrenched and the ruling class would rather make up new BS jobs out of thin air keeping us all working rather than having the conversation I want us to have as a society. But yeah, leftists are jobists, and they see inherent value in people working and producing things with labor. They just dislike how capitalists and capitalism "alienate" workers in this process by forcing them to work for them, and if only we had socialism where workers owned the means of production, everything would be fine.
So...that's how I view Vaush's takes here. Vaush hates generative AI because he believes in solidarity with workers. He inherently believes in the gospel of work in some form, he just tends to take a leftist aesthetic with it and hates that something not human and potentially owned by capitalists could potentially displace unalienated workers in artistic fields from their art.
Again, maybe this is my own bias betraying me and my own ideological brainworms, but I see vaush's perspective as very flawed, ignorant, and ideologically tainted. There's nothing inherently fascist about AI art, although there is a lot to say about this guy's opposition of it.
And keep in mind, I dont actually like tech bros either. It is possible to be too bullish on tech trends to the point of being cringey, and acting like AI art is some end all be all is a form of that cringe. It's interesting, but it isnt perfect, and it's going to take years, if not decades, to actually be to a point of fully replacing human artists, if it ever will reach that state. Like honestly? here's the thing with AI. Like, I'm autistic. And I dont always grasp things intuitively. I'm overly logical, I take things too literally, and things get lost in translation. AI is like that, but on steroids. It's ALL logic. It's trained via algorithms to do things, and sometimes it doesnt work. Sometimes it doesnt know how to translate things into practice, like it might give hands more fingers,or humans extra limbs. Because the algorithms say yes, humans have limbs but then it tends to struggle to produce the right number, especially when humans are in complex poses where the whole thing isn't visible. And in my limited experience with AI, like, I was gonna have an AI do a blog post about taking all our jobs and then it wasnt even competent enough to do that and just gave me a bullet list about workplace retraining. Like, AI is terrible that stuff. It has ZERO sense of intuition. It has zero sense of creativity. It's a perfectly logical thinking machine, and sometimes that has flaws. It cant relate to the human experience like a human can. Things that we grasp, it doesnt. Like as I said, sometimes we autistic people have relatively minor deficits in this stuff. We take things too literally, we tend not to grasp certain nuance, but autistic people are still human, and we still kinda get it. AI doesn't. AT ALL. It's just garbage in, garbage out. It's not even real intelligence, it's just simulated intelligence.
So....as long as this is the state of AI, we have nothing to worry about. And yeah techbros are overselling this stuff hard. our robot overlords arent coming to free us from work any time soon, unfortunately. We'll see it replacing tasks more and more in coming decades, but will we see some job apocalypse? probably not. It will still be painful for the displaced without a change to our social institutions, but the world will go on. And that's my honest take.
As such, I like AI, I dont have a fixation on it, I would like to see this developed, and I dont see this as a threat to anything at all. And leftist brainworms just lead to weird and outlandish takes on things. Like an AI artist painting a picture of a woman with 3 hands and 6 fingers on each hand. Leftism: not even once.
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