Authors and artists are currently dismayed that AI is replacing them. More and more books are coming out that are AI copies of their own books and artworks on Amazon.
So what are they doing against this. Do they vow to boycott Amazon and stop selling on the retail giant known for countless labor violations?
No, instead they blame AI and “people who use AI” (whatever that means). It’s simple not to use AI, they say: learn to draw. Learn to write. Learn to code. Learn to organize your own messy thoughts. Learn to read through the lines. Learn geopolitics. Learn photography. Learn five more jobs.
And perhaps in 20 years from now you can start actually living. People were not learning to draw before AI; they gave up if what they wanted did not exist. Not everybody is going to invest their free time into your hobby.
It’s pretty blatant that this is the reckoning of a class of people, the ‘artisans’, with the reality that the skill they thought would never be automated… is getting automated. This is not speaking on quality, output volume, etc. Without any qualitative qualifiers needed, their work is objectively getting automated. And they are lashing out.
But they sold their work on Amazon for years without complaints, even as the drivers who deliver their physical copies pass out at the wheel from being overworked and not having access to A/C.
I put artisan in quotes because it reveals what they are: the petite-bourgeoisie. Most of them are not socialists in any way, they only care about their profits. The fact that they work mostly by themselves, or as freelance authors (delivering a book to a publisher who then handles the rest of the process, e.g. printing, marketing) doesn’t change their class nature.
Even as Amazon itself is investing in AI, like all tech giants, they are still selling on the platform. They will sooner abandon their values than their profits.
I could say more, but it would be a pale copy of this essay: https://polclarissou.com/boudoir/posts/2023-02-03-Artisanal-Intelligence.html, and I couldn’t do it justice. You should read it.
I will leave you with what prompted me to make this quick write-up:
Taking his own books off Amazon doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind. He sees the sales numbers on the copies and thinks, each one of those is a lost customer.
While I see some of the issues here, maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but to me this seems too broad.
Apart from the biggest artists, publisher relations are extremely exploitative. Many artists whether they’re musicians, authors, illustrators, etc. find themselves in situations or industries where they don’t have that much control over their own work through being forced to take extremely unfavourable publishing deals.
In that case, for someone who is attempting to make a living from selling their books and the publisher sells them on Amazon, why and how is this qualitatively different to being an Amazon delivery driver?
To clarify, this isn’t a rhetorical question. I’d like to understand this point.
https://redsails.org/stalins-shoemaker/
Very concise and insightful, thank you.
In modern, capitalist society, there are proletarianized writers, ie contracted writers paid piece-wages or even hourly wages, and there are the petite-bourgeois writers that generally work with a publisher, or even self-publish. These do near identical labor, but the class character is different, and it manifests in the ability for the rare petite-bourgeois writer to pull a J. K. Rowling and strike it big, to use an example.
The artisan that owns their own labor and means of production holds a precarious position, the vast majority are being proletarianized or live worse lives than the higher paid proletarian occupations. However, their class character often gives them a highly individualist outlook, believing themselves deserving of a privledged position in society next to the big names like Stephen King.
The median artist doesn’t live such a life, they struggle to live off of their skills and are forced into proletarian occupations. This tension and desparation is the basis of reaction for the artisan. It isn’t a moral judgement, artists aren’t the enemy. This is just the naked consequence of art as a commodity, and artistry typically taking a high amount of training but a low price amount of outlay in materials and tools compared to other fields to produce art.
I think that’s very well-put, thank you. The basis of this analysis is not unfamiliar to me, but the contextualisation definitely helps.
I believe I was a bit thrown off by what I understood was an expectation of a proletarianised writer to boycott Amazon, for example, but not a driver, accountant, customer support rep, etc.
If the writer’s choice to use amazon is made for them then of course they are not responsible. It’s a part of alienation they couldn’t boycott amazon if they wanted to - their publisher makes the choice for them to use the platform.
There’s a lot of self-publishing on the platform nowadays though, they make it very easy since there are digital books (although you have to send a bunch of tax documents to the US for it). Interestingly (or as expected) they don’t do anything for the small writers, you still have to market your book like the big publishing houses do. It’s a lot of George RR Martin and JK Rowling at the top of the amazon charts.
For what it’s worth, I’m not sure if it makes a difference in a case where they technically did have a choice to not publish on Amazon.
One could say that the delivery driver also wasn’t forced to work for Amazon, they could’ve worked for a different company; it depends on whether the alternatives were viable.
In any case I’m not hung-up on this point, it’s just something I thought about when I first read the post.
I agree, many are proletarianized. In the US film industry for example, directors are workers for their company: they work on a brief, with the movie having to be made a certain way in a certain deadline etc. Though they still make royalties if they’re a big enough name (and with hollywood accounting you count on the spinoff products for that, so it also means they have an incentive to make sure the movie succeeds commercially.)
But the question is what do they want to improve their conditions? Do they want to work for themselves and cut out the employer, or do they want to work socially? This is the separating line. One leads to petite bourgeoisie (whose wish is to become big bourgeoisie), the other leads to socialism.
I think this is a good question to ask. After typing a first answer, my ultimate answer is who owns the product in the end? We are alienated because we get no say in what we make and where it ends up. We own none of it. There are writers, e.g. journalists, who write on contract: they get told which story to write on, how many words it must be, etc. Then an editor takes it and decides on the headline, rewrites everything they want, and most of the time the original writer is completely removed from the process at this stage. The article then belongs to their employer, like any other proletarian work. There are also book writers working on this spec.
So the question would be, what is their answer to that? Do they want to cut out the middleman and own their product? Do they still want capitalism? Would they be open to being salaried workers in socialism? Do they recognize this for what it is? That’s the class relation.
(Edited above sentence for clarity ^)
Thanks for the clarification. I see the point that many people in creative professions have bourgeois aspirations and that their class relations are different.
I can sympathise with people wanting to be less alienated from their labour and attempting to escape (to some degree) their own exploitation. I suppose the key aspect here is whether one is attempting to serve themselves or work towards class solidarity.
This reminds me in some sense of people who advocate for cooperatives, which I see as a mostly individualist pursuit; just instead of ‘myself and my family’ (implicitly: against others) it’s expanded to ‘myself and my coworkers/local community’ (implicitly: against other workplaces/communities).