this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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A few of those answers need to be reevaluated for "AI"...
Yeah, the problem with this comic is that it somewhat minimizes how
<technology>can exacerbate the ongoing problems.Yep, this comic did not age well. This technology literally targets artists. That's pretty new.
But it will not destroy art or music.
Often times I see people discuss art and music, and I wonder if they see creative literature as art, or if it's forgotten.
I mention this because AI has been devastating on the literature world.
Man I really hope so. But the vast majority of people consume mass produced formulaic media already, I don't see AI helping that trend.
Isn't that literally the last line, but for art? The average person gave very little fucks about "art" before AI, and most art happened for purely base reasons, like marketing or porn. Fancy shmancy art will continue to exist.
No amount of people doing that will ever destroy art or music, the only thing that can is reducing artists living conditions enough to where they can't make art.
commercial incentives already ruined art if you're worried about this ruining art.
But now Spotify and co have a financial incentive to generate as much slop as possible and to push it to their users aggressively. Why? Well cause if their users only listen to slop, they won't have to pay any actual artists anymore. So you know it's guaranteed to happen. This is capitalism after all.
Spotify makes more money from artists trying to promote their work than they do from people paying to stream music.
That will mean people make music for the love of the craft again, music has sucked because of commercial incentive, maybe this will revive the craft.
I know artists who use AI to help them design something, but then they go out and actually manifest the physical thing…be it a mural or a sculpture or a tattoo. So no, it likely won’t harm the artists who can use it to their advantage, not for a long time.
Art is a fundamental human drive. In fact, not even human - neanderthals also made art. The fact that we can make cool looking pictures really easily with a computer will no more destroy art than photography did.
It will (and already has) HURT them, certainly. But that's still a far cry from "destroy".
i still think it holds up tbqh, ai exacerbates and concentrates many problems but it doesn't really create new ones. content farm slop existed before ai, it's just easier to make now. people who use ai for everything already didn't give a shit about most things. people are still making awesome music and art. there are still many smart, talented people and there still will be. and we were already alienated.
as always, the problem is capitalism
Blaming capitalism is a cop out at this point. You can't just ignore some very specific problems about a very specific technology then gesture wildly at the world and be like, "if only we didn't have the entire system set up the way we do, if only we had a perfect economy".
Good and bad things can still happen in capitalism. You can't just throw up your hands and say "capitalism" when rat poison ends up in baby food. Regulation can still exist in capitalism and has a proven track record to work. You don't have to replace the entirety of your economic system to prevent AI data centers from being built.
obviously not, and i support people who stop them. but even there, ai isn't exceptional. streaming services like youtube or netflix, or massive online games, also consume a ton of electricity and have polluting datacenters, datacenters used for ai aren't fundamentally different from datacenters used for something else, and yet people only build movements against them when it's ai. don't get me wrong it's good that we're educating people on the harms caused by datacenters. and it's good that many of these projects are being canceled. but datacenters are a problem exacerbated by ai, not created by it.
and you're right that a communist economy would not inherently fix this. maybe there would be less datacenters overall because people (and their governments) would prioritize the health of communities over chatbots, netflix and fortnite. but datacenters are not inherent to any economic model.
for everything else tho?
AI is a huge umbrella term, not a very specific technology at all.
Well, the new problems are the scale of things. For example if humanity had only burned a small amount of oil each year, earth would have been pretty alright, at least until the heat death of the sun. But we started burning way too much and fucked. Same here, a few people being able to create slop kinda just self regulated, but now all of humanity can do it for free and it’s incredibly destructive.
Which? They all seem accurate
There is already science that shows that people using llms makes them measurably worse, in an incredibly short amount of time, at tasks than they were before using llms.
So, "will x make us all morons? No" actually has some peer reviewed work that seems to imply "possibly NOT 'no' "
Google Maps also makes us bad at finding our way manually. Are we therefore a moron?
If you've offloaded your capacity to navigate, and are worse at navigating, then you're objectively worse at navigating, that's the reality.
What are you offloading to ai? Are you worse at it now? Is it critical thinking? Then yes.
Said "science" is a handful of cherrypicked studies that cannot reliably say such things. The US has been in a downward spiral of ignorance for a little while now. And if it is caused by anything, it's a combination of poor schooling, poor parenting, and social media.
Getting worse at tasks doesn't make you a moron. Are you a moron because you aren't as good at mental arithmetic as you were when you practiced it for school? No.
"What should I do" and "what is 17+19" are fundamentally different questions.
What cognitive deficiency makes one a moron? This is the question.
If you believe there is nothing one could be deficient at that makes one a moron, then yes: no technology would make you a moron. You're starting from a position where there is no prerequisite to not be a moron. It's a tautology.
If there is a nugget... some bare minimum of performance required to not be a moron... then you must consider if a technology is driving people to that state.
I know morons.
I know they exist. I know what they lack.
I know why AI excites them. It provides a leveling mechanic that allows them to put up a facade of competence. I have no frame of reference to viscerally comprehend the excitement of being able to cosplay as a competent person. It must be the most exciting thing in the world.
For everyone else who alreadyhad two brain cells to rub together, it's a Tuesday.
Synthesizing direction from inputs is intelligence. Deriving future inputs from observed data is a calculator. They couldn't be more different. It's obscene delusion to suggest they're the same let alone similar
AI making you a moron requires not only that using AI degrades your faculties to such an extent that you become one, but that "all of us" (let's say, the majority of people in rich countries) use it so much it has that effect.
I'm sure it will have some effect on the unexpected portions of one's brain, but still doubt the first part is true, as do I doubt the second.