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.

  • King_Simp@lemmygrad.ml
    23·
    7 days ago

    Something I get bugged by is that people here act as though all artists and writers are petite bourgeois artisans. They’ll call ai “proletarian-izing.” Which ignores that art like that has been proletarian-ized for a while now. TV shows, movies, and even now video games usually have a large team working on them, with no individual person being wholly responsible for the social labor in the product (this accounts for the highest revenue accruing commodities 96% of the time). Obviously the artists youre talking about here arent that, but I’ve seen it enough that I wanted to bring it up next time the topic arose.

    The rest of the post definitely feels like “well if you hate capitalism so much why do you have an iphone” levels of argument.

    Also “most of them are not socialists.” Thats not…a qualifier of anything? Most proles in, say, Indonesia arent socialist (presumably, if there’s data against this then id be happy to change my example) but if there was something they were complaining about we’d take it just as seriously.

    Art is a…hard one. Because you only have to produce the design once (nowadays). If every artist had to manually redraw or rewrite their art multiple times over, they’d love ai (but this, of course, hasn’t been an issue since Gutenburg invented the printing press). It’s less useful to compare them to artisanal shoemakers or blacksmiths and better to compare them in the modern day to engineers.

    This doesn’t really answer anything, and honestly I think as social scientists, it’s an acceptable answer to say “we dont have enough information at this time” to make an accurate statement on the subject. However i think at least getting that information down can be helpful in at least putting us in the right direction.

    • darkernations@lemmygrad.ml
      7·
      6 days ago

      Something I get bugged by is that people here act as though all artists and writers are petite bourgeois artisans.

      Could one be proletariat and feel their path to self emancipation be petite-bourgoise ideals? If automation leads to unemployment then the only individual defense of income against the socialisation of labour (Marxists should be for the socialisation of labour but where we quarrell against the bourgoise is who should control that surplus value and the means of production) is the defense of intellectual property. Is the latter really a Marxist take because it is defended at a smaller scale to the haute bourgeoisie? How would we ward off going down that reactionary path? A potential solution/journey:

      https://redsails.org/stalins-shoemaker/

      (Honestly, these aren’t gotchas; I am trying to get you and anyone else lurking to think what it means to truly have a Marxist understanding here and this is an appropriate forum to do so as people here are generally well meaning and act in good faith here. I feel therefore it is a good opportunity for learning.)