this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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It's interesting when asked to explain the sentiment of denigrating the technology of AI rather than just attacking the capitalism (which we should clarify is always a relationship not technology itself) people often end up having to resort to Nietchzean takes; the exaltation of the artist, preferred artistry, and those with discerning tastes against the unwashed masses; and then claim that is pro--worker - the tastes of the non-artisanal worker is immaterial compared to the ubermensch artiste.
We, as marxists, when doing the above should educate ourselves why the above is reactionary, and really double down on truly learning dialectical materialism.
There are too many in the western marxist tradition who are marxist because its like the "hidden gem" corner coffeshop of "ideologies" or because its "provocative" - so it becomes abstracted as a matter of social prestige capital ("I am the most morally forthright" "I believe in the secret little thing which makes me smarter than those hillbillies")
I found this article an excellent attack on the above sentiment:
https://redsails.org/the-problem-of-recognition-in-transitional-states/
What a stretch. Incedible how the moment it's artists under the bus y'all suddenly don't care about them, even infering they somehow are not workers.
Did you throw the weaver under the bus when the loom was invented when you explained we aren't getting rid of the loom? Did you burn the loom instead? Is the marxist solution to unemployment due to technologial advancement to resort to ludditism? Is that your idea of worker solidarity? Or should the marxist conception of worker solidarity sublimate that?
You're going to have to explain how your take is not Proudhonism.
I'm not making any of those claims, miss me with that. I'm pointing out how absurd it is that you don't even see artists as workers and feels the need to make less of them.
Funny that just saying that is enough to start claiming I'm somehow a Proudhonist.
Then make a claim instead of crocodile-tears-workerism.
For anyone actually interested in learning and developing their understanding of artisanal reaction:
https://redsails.org/artisanal-intelligence/
And this is Marx attacking Proudhon more than a century ago:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/
Too many of us have Proudhonist takes; please learn from those mistakes.
I am taking my time reading the first article you have sent. First even before anything else needs to be said i do not see how other MLs can engage with LLM generated images and videos and do not see how this is going to worsen AI induced psychosis that is already bad and how them openly embracing it and trying to normalize it doesn't worsen the situation, if not i do not see how any of you can explain some other solution than rejecting Generative models for shit it has no practical purpose in like writing or any other art. And regarding everything else, i do not see the cost of developing LLMs worth it almost every scenario but well, what do i know.
I do not understand what the author even implies by the first argument, the one about hating the work done by the machine equals hating the work done by the lowly peasant, what work dude, what is the artist even expressing here/ its the machine expressing and the artist giving guidelines, outsourcing the expression onto it, it isn't procreate or something that makes the process easier or more efficient it removes the entire expression itself. I do not understand the multiple analogies you and others have given regarding how it is the lack of effort that makes something by AI deemed less, no, its the fact its not an expression or human expression, this is more akin to buying an IKEA bed stand and claiming it is the same as something sculpted by the wood worker. If your ideas of human expression and art are so bleak that you think a machine does the same thing as a human, what sort of people am i calling comrades?
The thing the artist is actually expressing is the fucking prompt and nothing else. God, the entire thing pisses me off so much, you are outsourcing your ability to express? what's the point of even living at that point. If you think the most any human can express is by writing a bunch of prompts, whats even the point of living?
How would GenAI stop you from creating your own art?
Fuck off. I'm not entering this whole shitshow of a discussion again, already have experienced this more than enough on this site. It's absolutely baffling that you can just claim "the exaltation of the artist, preferred artistry, and those with discerning tastes against the unwashed masses" like anyone is saying that artists are superior, when in fact they are just workers like everyone else.
I'm guessing you would have liked me to respond to the above with:
You have reactionary sensibilities and are upset being called out on your underlying sentiment, for which you had several oppurtunities to clarify but you refuse to explain yourself.
No one asked you to respond and since you did you could have asked to clarify if you didn't understand what is going on.
Like, for example, why would I hate artists? I could make another educated guess why you think so here but then you will use the same excuse again that you have so far - you didn't say the reason explicitly and then will refuse to stake a claim.
The above was a literally a response to someone claiming commerical mass market movies are not art despite someone else explaining they are for masses of folks, in the context of everything that was claimed elsewhere here by others too about the "specialness" of art. What is that but gatekeeping? What about the gatekeeping to keep art to those who only have the means or time to do so? What about allusions to the metaphysical quality of creativity? Oh right, you refuse to make a claim.
Not once have you explained why the socialised automation of every other labour is acceptable but not the artisan, and how that exception would not be reactionary. Your silence is deafening. That's not solidarity.
Marxism ain't a club you try to prove how proleteriat you are.
And we have not even taken historical materialism into account. Because ultimately this is not amount just making art. This about making art and being paid to do so.
Art which has been paid for, since classes have been a thing (ie most of human civilisation), have overwhelmingly represented the various culture milieu of those who have extracted value from others' labour. The history of paid art has overwhelmingly been the sensibilities of the upper classes - even if the actual work was done by the working classes. And now to allude to the idea that AI under captialism changes that overall relationship is disingenious at best: making the anti-AI art generation argument = "pro-worker" the real absurdity.
And to make an exception for automation of the artisanal worker at the expense of every other worker is the "superiority" you yourself have refused to explain.
Rich coming from the person claiming artists are not workers and doubling down on name calling by accusing me of "Proudhonism" and "crocodile-tears-workerism" for pointing out how fucked up it is to have the position your holding in regards to artists. But I guess I can't expect much from the same person that last time we argued just shifted the blame of China not doing enough for Palestine into third world Marxists because apparently they aren't organizing to make China do something, somehow. Essentially excusing the Palestinian genocide.
This is my last response, I'm not engaging further. Like I said, I'm not discussing this again on this site. If you want to know what my claims and opinions on this are you're free to search on my profile.
When?
I asked you to explain why what you said wasn't Proudhonism. You refused. And then interpreted it as "name calling". All right, what's a better term than Proudhonism I should have used there that doesn't offend your sensibilities?
No, you decided to repurpose the idea - if someone feels so strongly about china in that way then they should attempt to organise around it to help affect change (ie to have praxis around theory) to especially highlight the idea that people make strategic concessions on what they will or will not do due to material conditions/constraints, similar to what China has done - to make the above disingenious claim.
At what point should I swear at you too for each of the things you said? Especially that last line.
Unless you are a child then it is absolutely pathetic you do not have the mental maturity to not consider everything as a personal attack and double down on what you just did here. Hope you grow out of it.
When retail was being moved online artists were happy to order paint or "self publish" through amazon destroying the art supply and book stores, but when artists jobs are threatened by automation they expect everyone else to rally around them.
You can't actually be serious. Artists destroyed art supply and bookstores, not amazon that entered the market aggressively undercutting and buying and doing everything they could to destroy these? This can't actually be a serious take being upvoted in this site, I refuse to believe this shit.
Apparently we only care about the right proletariats, the wrong ones we don't care about. It's incredible the amount of hate some marxists have for artists.
Artists didn't destroy the art and book stores capitalism did. The point is that artists didn't make posters to decry the loss of retail workers.
We see videos of farms in China where 2 men do the job that 50 used to do because they use drones and we celebrate it. How is it any different than AI making one graphic designer able to pump out 20 rough drafts in 10 minutes instead of 2 days?
Its not that we hate artists, it is that artists are not special. We hate the idea that some workers deserve to have their jobs protected from automation and others do not. Do you not see how arrogant and supremacist it is to think the entire working class should stand up against the automation of image generation when they have given up on fighting automation in every other field?
I can't speak for them, but I didn't take that from darkernations' post at all. As far as I can tell, the general point here is that when arguments in defense of the status quo of what is considered "art" and "artist" start getting into elitist territory (e.g. "x is 'real' art, but y is not", "people are fine with consuming shit and can't appreciate 'real art'", "art has to pass a 'je ne sais quoi' vague bar of quality to be considered 'good'"), it starts breaking from solidarity with working class interests and becomes this thing like "I don't care if most artists never 'make it' as long as me the special artist who is a talented one and uplifted for it can be recognized for my contributions."
That might sound like a lot to extrapolate from it and it's not necessarily all explicitly voiced stuff in this particular thread, but it's the kind of stuff anti-AI gets up to. People have a status quo which they depend on for their livelihood and so they want to defend it. That's understandable. Some unions have already been fighting in this sphere to ensure they don't get sidelined by shitty AI. Unions, for all their limitations they can have under capitalism, do tend to understand one thing, which is how to negotiate with circumstances. What internet anti-AI tends to do is more like trying to shame the genie back into the bottle and going for whatever argument is convenient to do so, without proper consideration of the implications of the argument.
For example, one of the common internet arguments against generative AI is that it "looks bad". But what happens if the technology has a breakthrough that allows models to do fine details more accurately? And what about humans who make mistakes in their art? Here you get the people who say stuff like "oh well, their art is charming in spite of the mistakes because a human made it." Well were they going and seeking out and buying that person's "charming" art? Or were they spending their time liking video essays on how some piece of media has massive quality issues? Giving "sucky artists" a pat on the head for their effort doesn't pay their rent. A limited number of artists can actually "make it" pre-AI and institutions justify their positions as them being "talented" or "working super hard", whereas the ones who didn't "make it" must be missing some special quality that would allow them to get through (the "X Factor"). Post-AI, that is still true. The main difference is even the "talented" ones are feeling threatened now. When people push vaguely-defined "bad art" further down the ladder, in order to try to protect the position of the "talented", that only further splinters and confuses the issue and potential solidarity.
So it's not that artists don't matter or are not workers. It's more that common anti-AI positions don't even tend to support artists or artisanship as a whole. They instead tend to fall in line with the status quo, which is an elitist ladder of exclusivity, nepotism, and the movements of capital, and one that is largely controlled by major conglomerates, not individual artists or artist unions.