Even their website mentions that Lemmy devs are “controversial” just because they are Marxists. And to add to that, their users are fucking loud about using piefed.

What is agitprop?

Ah, gotcha! The way I use them is as follows:

Lemmy.ml - Purely for agitprop. I look for opportunities to discuss Marxism-Leninism with those who seem radicalized but directionless, and I try to debunk or riposte anti-communism. I also host my introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list there so as many people can see it natively as possible, without fear of it being taken down.

Hexbear.net - Shitposting, gaming discussion, general hangout without libs or fash. The news megathread is also excellent, usually. I also host their Capital reading threads there, and participate in the imperialism reading group. Generally more active than Grad.

Lemmygrad.ml - When I want to relax, not feel so online, and generally only want to talk to Marxists. The people here seem to touch the most grass and are the most familiar with theory.

As for dbzer0 and generative AI, you’ll find that there isn’t really a line on it on any of the 3 major Marxist-aligned instances. The closest is that AI could be useful under socialism, but right now it’s used in the worst ways possible by capitalists, and that refusing to understand it will end up with us falling behind. For general commodities like stock photos it can be usefulish, but for art it gets far more touchy.

If you use it this uncreatively… its like you drew two lines on a paper.

Read some Artisanal Intelligence before you defend artists

https://polclarissou.com/boudoir/posts/2023-02-03-Artisanal-Intelligence.html

I agree with @m532 also on account that more advanced tooling is better for artistic expression. Without undermining the value or beauty of using more traditional tooling. It provides a bigger scope for artistic expression.

You can argue how automation in a socialist society can be used to better people’s lives, but you can never argue that automating such a creative process so fundamental to human expression that it has been used since we were cave men is not a bad thing, let alone a good thing to “increase creativity” no matter what economic system present.

This makes a lot of assumptions.

1. Everyone is trying to make a masterpiece. Not everyone is and some people want to just kit-bash things together. I’ve been playing VNs from my childhood that are just people stealing assets or using quickly gathered photos to put together a story that was interesting instead of obsessing over every detail. They still had some care for their craft, but didn’t care for meticulous control over every aspect. No different than making art out of hundreds of rocks you find that you leave intact otherwise. Would a real craftsman only use rocks they handcraft to suit their exact image? Maybe the creative vision of the artist requires a lack of spirit and soul in certain parts? For something so valuable and long-lasting human creativity must be a fragile thing to be extinguished by a probability machine.

2. Most people that want to put hard-work into art still will. It’s like complaining that photographers are trying to skimp on hard work since they aren’t trying to choose the right colors and brushstrokes for the project they want. The only way it undermines unappreciated artists is because it financially harms them. If there is no financial need or incentives due to a system that makes such redundant, what harm is it causing? The people that just want to look at pretty things already have chosen alternatives throughout history. There are people that stare at the stars, sky, or even just bloodstains because its visually interesting without a damned care about “human spirit.” Automating it, can be plenty good, is the photograph bad because artists no long choose every color in capturing as scene? Is the typewriter bad because you lose the complete flexibility of how your script expresses itself? If people want to and care about that aspect they will.

Hell, there are entire fields of art I have zero care for in creative aspects. Never gave a damn about sculptures outside of their technical difficult, the vision can be damned, I just like seeing a human with shitty tools accomplish it, which auto rules AI out. Some types I only care about because they look pretty, like a lot of anime-styled art, though not all. And there are plenty that only are particularly desirable for me when I’m trying to suss out the creators meaning such as horror-based work or essentially all creative writing.

For me, I’m obsessed with my own writing voice so I refuse to use LLMs for my writing in almost any capacity on that motive alone. I also prefer drawing my own art, but that’s because I like drawing, if it wasn’t for the horribleness of the AI industry in so many ways there are plenty of cases where I would find an image to be “good enough” for whatever I want it for, like a tabletop character design, Hell, even since I started playing I only rarely drew or commissioned them and instead just found a picture I liked that looked, “close enough.”

This is either Luddism cosplaying as something else, or your argument implies a doubt about the inherent meaning of art itself as if it has meaning, people will seek that meaning either way. The main issues I find with generative AI are economic, environmental and honor-based with how it is working out. IDK though, when I have an inability to understand where a large percent of people are coming from on things like this I just blame the neurodivergence, so maybe I’m just missing something.

So basically the Lemmy instance was inaccessible because or it, even if it was still running?

And I’m assuming that the users were also unable to log into Lemmy as a whole using their account, but for other fedefated instances you could still access posts from hexbear?