Sucks if you’re an artist but the automobile and steam engine sucked for those whose profession was stabling and shoeing horses too, yet we can’t hold back progress. People will still commission artistic works, it’ll just revert to being very skilled artists and very wealthy people.

Can’t believe I’m reading this take on a communist website. If you’re arguing from a capitalists’ standpoint, then there’s the counterpoint that the existing art generators are full of copyrighted artwork taken without the authors’ permission, and so they should be deemed illegal (this would be true under socialism as well tbf). Then further generators would only be allowed to use either public domain or properly licensed artwork as its training set, which will inevitably lower the variety and quality of the outputs (sorry programmers).

From a communist standpoint we should stand in solidarity with the artists whose livelihoods are being put in risk and oppose unethical AI art.

Capitalists are not about to allow banning of a cost-cutting measure any more than they would have allowed banning the steam engine or mechanical factories to save the jobs of workers. They’re just not.

This is fundamentally different because the generators were fed basically every artwork on the internet, no matter if they were copyrighted or not, in order to make the thing work. They should have never been able to become public services, much less PAID services, and should have been restricted to academic circles as proofs-of-concept, due to the blatant and massive copyright infringement taking place. This is allowed to go on because artists are usually poor and have no individual leverage, but say, if tomorrow an AI movie generator was released that was fed every Hollywood movie ever and could output a Marvel-quality blockbuster with just a prompt and enough time, believe me, shit would be sued to destruction in days.

Artists should be collectivizing right now and preparing a lawsuit against those operating AI art generators fed on their copyrighted artwork. So yes, the proverbial machine can be smashed in this case, if only because it infringes copyright law in such a massive way.

Could have been worded “Canadian pop singer Kris Wu sentenced to 13 years in China for over 30 instances of rape including minors” but they chose to make China the active subject because that’s more important than the actual crime, apparently.

This is what I was gonna say. What the fuck

Lol I love this interview. Basically told them to cope and seethe lmao