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.
Artisans that claim they are for marxist proletariat emancipation but fear the socialisation of their own labour will need to explain why their take is not Proudhonist.
That post really is an excellent article in truly understanding the Marxist critique of reaction and bourgeoisie mindsets. Another one that people here should read along with it is Stalin’s Shoemaker; it highlights the dialectical materialist journey of a worker developing revolutionary potential:
https://redsails.org/stalins-shoemaker/
Class consciousness means understanding where one is in the cog of the machine and not being upset because one wasn’t proletariat enough. This is meant to be Marxism not vibes-based virtue signaling.
Meanwhile in a socialist country: China’s AI industry thrives with over 5,300 enterprises https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9357646
Marxism is a science. People should treat it is as such and take the opportunity to study and learn, to develop their human potential beyond what our societies consider is acceptable.
another good essay here as well https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/you-dont-hate-ai-you-hate-capitalism-1234717804/
Also, a long dive into how a lot of the anti-AI hatred is funded by right wing corps that are unhappy that it’s infringing on their IP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRq0pESKJgg
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
some of the comments i think they’re not getting in account that the issue is that most of those writers and artists tied to amazon and stuff (more like amazon rentists, similar to “youtubers” that mostly are youtube rentists) are getting a reckoning of their habit of being used as part of a capitalist machine for the treats of having some “tributes” for enforcing the authority of their lord, but they ignore that the techno feudal lord is replacing them with a new cyber-aristocrat who doesn’t want tribute, but works for the machine anyways, and that offends them because they’re expendable now…it’s my guess
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.
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.)
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.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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
Sorry comrade, while I agree that artists are pushed into rent seeking (through the IP regime), the huge majority is proletarian, hell even lumpen proletarian.
The idea that a skill needs to be developed is also absolutely and undeniably correct.
I do however agree with your conclusion that artists and everyone else needs to boycott amazon et al. But using the “dont ask people to learn” approach imo doesnt lend itself to materialist analysis as it is a fact that any skill needs to be developed and just because someone wants to draw doesnt mean they have to be able push out lazy copies of world class art. Then again it is clear that “world class” actually again means successful in capitalism.
I think in the end, it boils down to nothing right in the wrong. But criticizing artists for their choices in a capitalist system is kinda chauvinist so I would probably keep calm and remind them of their class.
I hope that was an understandable analysis. Feel free to point out holes.
I’m really talking about people like in the screenshot, who make their living trying to work “by themselves” as if it was purer than working in a group, or being a writer on contract (i.e. alienated from their labor) - while it’s not directly said in the screen tweet, it’s deducible that this is how this person makes a living.
My topic is really about those who make a living off this type of labor and then bemoan that they can’t make a living anymore. But instead of turning towards capitalism, they turn towards how capitalism expresses itself as a mode of production - there’s been the mechanical loom, the steam machine, computers, and now AI.
But criticizing artists for their choices in a capitalist system is kinda chauvinist so I would probably keep calm and remind them of their class
So with all that, regarding the class lines, there are proletarian artists (of all sorts, not just illustrators - but it often gets reduced to that). They work for a company and are alienated from their labor because they get told what to draw, write, or produce. Yet there is also a belief that art can be extirpated from society and somehow exist outside of it, as if it was neither labor nor work.
What AI has done is not introduce the notion that art is actually part of society and subject to its ebb and flow, because it’s always been the case, but revive the topic, because now things that were once thought to be ‘creative’ and only possible by a human can be done by a machine. Before that time it was only a thought experiment. Again, it doesn’t matter what quality the output from the machine is - it exists. It’s already being used and we can’t even tell, because using the output as the machine gives it is a terrible idea. Instead it’s reworked as part of a workflow.
just because someone wants to draw doesnt mean they have to be able push out lazy copies of world class art
I don’t disagree that people should learn skills. However like I said, before AI people who wanted an illustration but couldn’t do it themselves, so they just gave up.
Like I like writing, I am a designer by trade (not particularly visual design), and I don’t necessarily tell people to learn design or to take courses on writing because I know not everyone is interested enough to do it. This is more personal but a lot of the “do it yourself” AI discourse I see revolves entirely around illustrating work and how everyone should somehow learn to draw. Since we made our first tools there has been division of labor, not everyone is going to be employed as an artist. There is also an implication that AI prevents learning, but the user decides if they want to shut their brain off or not.
The essay I linked makes a point on this:
Against the idea that artists were just “born with it”, many took much pain to explain that all art forms involve a lot of specialized training, that you get good at drawing not through natural luck but through hard work. This reaction responded to an anxiety about being seen as a legitimate field of industry, to be on an equal basis as specialized workers such as engineers, doctors, etc. - and deserve the same compensation.
Since AI art came in to displace artists, the tune has suddenly completely reversed. Art is now an inherent capacity of the soul, and anyone can do it. Why use these AI image generators when “anyone can pick up a pencil and draw”? Doesn’t even a bad drawing “have more Soul and Meaning” than a result generated from the recombination of other art pieces? Suddenly the notion of arts as a skill with technical components flies out of the window. Both attitudes reflect anxieties about seeing your work respected as such, while also refusing the industrial implications of art being a form of work, and subject to the same market forces as all other fields.
Telling people “just learn to draw it’s gonna be better” when my drawing is a shitty stickman figure exposes internalized hypocrisy that we all share in to an extent. For example you said the AI copy is ‘lazy’, which is a qualitative adjective. I’m not criticizing the choice of word, I find it interesting. What makes an AI output lazier than three lines I draw hastily on a piece of paper? Is it the human component? I think what AI has forced us to contend with is that what was traditionally made by humans is actually not so unique. A lot of artists say AI art is “soulless”, but as materialists we don’t believe in the soul, so clearly they mean something else - they just don’t seem to have a clear idea of it.
Can someone really look me in the eye and say this is ‘better’ than anything AI makes because it was made by a person?
Or is it rather a way to prevent putting art back into its social character, subject to capitalism? Nobody would hire me to draw this figurine over and over again. I can still make it for myself, sure, just like I could also prompt AI art for my own enjoyment (if I enjoyed it).
Again my problem is with petit-bourgeois artists who see themselves closer to art than to the class struggle, like anyone who sees themselves closer to their job interests than the class struggle. But my question to them I guess would be, how would they like to see their artwork handled in socialism and communism? In the USSR artists were employed by the state on salary to produce artworks, when it came to specific exhibitions or government campaigns. Would they be opposed to that? Art they produced through the artists’ union was typically bought by the state for a fixed one-time payment. Would they be opposed to that? The petit-bourgeois artists would.
About this:
But my question to them I guess would be, how would they like to see their artwork handled in socialism and communism? In the USSR artists were employed by the state on salary to produce artworks, when it came to specific exhibitions or government campaigns. Would they be opposed to that? Art they produced through the artists’ union was typically bought by the state for a fixed one-time payment. Would they be opposed to that? The petit-bourgeois artists would.
I’m curious if you have more info on how people have implemented art/writing in AES states, is it only through like government programs that artists get salaries? Can you work on those without explicitly being on the state’s salary? I’d love to know.
I’m terrible at recommending books but I can point you to potentially this paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1573832 (it might be available elsewhere or it’s possible some AI parsers can access it and summarize it). Kim Jong Il On The Art Of The Cinema, but it’s a beast of over 500 pages. I have a PDF that I can make available here:https://gofile.io/d/P9snOT
I think Kim Il Sung also wrote about art, and otherwise we may have something on prolewiki but I can’t say for sure… you’d have to hunt for it in this category: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Category:Library_works_about_the_Soviet_Union
Also saw this on marxists.org: https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/law/1961/civil-legislation/ch04.htm
Thank you for putting this much effort into your comment.
In the end I think it boils down to the electrician who learned to beat a slot into a wall with hammer and chisel vs the one who uses a slot milling machine.
If they use the machine (which is AI in our example), they are much faster, straighter, more perfect.
This leads to them outpacing “classical” electricians by a wide margin, yet the classical skill (as we see on rednote every day) needs to be preserved.
What people who dump on AI do is actually typical reactionary behavior. But same as with the traditional ways of handywork, the question isnt which one is better but which one is preferred for a particular task.
Same as with the slots, AI produces a finite amount of combinations and by definition stagnating quality, afaik. The slots by the slot machine will be much smoother, much straighter, but they wont help you if you need a particular shape due to your material situation. Having lost the skill of manual labour means you will fail to achieve the goal or at least struggle immensely, which leads to nowadays capitalist crisis as the actual work is being degraded and recycled. AI just accellerates the process and promotes the contradictions inherent in the capitalist system.
The fundamental problem henceforth is the human supremacy argument. Humans are able to learn and build incredible things, computers are able to obey orders. They are fundamentally, good slaves, much better than humans. Which I think is a positive, but needs eradication of capitalism as the current AI is capitalist in nature.
And to top it all off, apart from image creation, AI is shown to have detrimental effects on the human brain which is a killer argument against AI on its own. People use AI to think, draining their ability to do the most basic critical thinking which is basically just the way into barbarism.
Having lost the skill of manual labour means you will fail to achieve the goal or at least struggle immensely, which leads to nowadays capitalist crisis as the actual work is being degraded and recycled. AI just accellerates the process and promotes the contradictions inherent in the capitalist system.
I agree, I couldn’t find it anymore because it got limited release but I read an article several years ago (before LLMs even came out) that explained basically the more capitalism progresses, the less we teach students. They also used the electrician example, apprentices used to have to learn how a multimeter actually worked, what it measured, how it did, etc. Nowadays, according to the author, it’s sufficient that they know how to read the output. Stick the prongs in the outlet and then you should see X or Y number, that’s all you need to know.
So AI is just one more thing in the long line of such advancements that make earlier methods trend towards obsolescence. I wouldn’t say some work is being made obsolete right now, it’s not there yet, but it’s trending towards it. It’s like the steam machine; the steam machine proletarianized a lot of people and made commodity production possible on a scale never seen before, but if we’d said “let’s destroy the steam machine” then we would still be living in feudalism. I mention artists in the OP because it’s the one group I see most opposed to AI (to the point that in some circles it completely silences other legitimate criticism of AI because it’s all about the illustrators - in the essay I linked, the author also talks about the people who initially categorized and organized images on archives and repos that were used as a basis for AI models to learn how to describe image content), but it’s not unique to that group. Their problem is with capitalism, not that their job is getting proletarianized… or at least they should see it that way. A lot don’t.
On the topic of what to know vs not to know, I don’t know if we can really stop or slow down that trend either. What I mean is there are lots of skills we’ve lost, such as making a fire in the wild, building a timber house, or printing on a Gutenberg press. Some people try to revive these skills and good for them, but they’re also not doing it professionally or in any meaningful capacity beyond providing side income for themselves on the novelty of it or as a hobby. Nowadays books are printed on rolling printers, not on a Gutenberg press. I don’t think it’s unique to capitalism but certainly due to profit motives capitalism accelerates it. So it’s not really a thing AI did, it just made it more apparent. Personally when I use LLMs I still use my brain, it helps me get an idea off the ground or get me started in the parts I’m worse at, and then I handle the rest. It lets me get stuff out the door quickly and focus on the actually interesting parts.
Speaking of art since we’re on it… if we wanted to be ‘purists’, then painters should be mixing their own colors, crafting their own canvas and making their own brushes. A lot do because they want something that’s not commercially available, but a lot are also digital artists where the color mixing is done in software for them without actual pigments. It’s this kind of trend that I’m talking about, it’s not just AI - if we say “this is going too far I don’t like it” then we’re advocating for reactionary socialism (the one described in the manifesto). Even I as a designer wouldn’t know how to use the tools of old, before Photoshop and Adobe.
I could name a ton of stuff I’ve done with AI, but for example we designed the new ProleWiki homepage with AI help in the thinking process. It helped us clarify our audiences, what we needed to have on the homepage, and make sure that we were on the right track with our assumptions.
Using the output of an LLM raw is what tech companies say to do because they want to hype up their product and make it seem like it’s as easy as typing words, but it’s a terrible idea. They say it does everything, but it doesn’t. I doubt their developers are using AI to do “everything”. I usually go in with an idea of what I want and I put the parameters in the prompt. It’s a long prompt, it takes time, but it helps me think about my project too. Then I pick the good from what the LLM generates and discard the nonsense.
And most of the essays/articles I wrote I did with AI help. Not to do the actual writing, because it doesn’t capture my voice, but for the research. I was able to get Perplexity to find more socialist sources (and even vietnamese sources that it translated for me for an essay) and then pick from that. It helped me learn things myself, I know a lot about Vietnam’s independence struggle now and still do.
That was quite awesome to read. I agree and am happy we had this discussion. It definitely shaped my opinion some more. Thanks a lot! :)
I’d say, “lazy” people deserve to be able to create good stuff too. Especially as putting one’s thoughts into images is probably important to most people’s mental health.
Lets dive into this then.
Who is really “creating” things here?
It is only the people who take a pen or whatever else to shape reality to match their mental image while that image is.being impressed by the outside world.
“Deserve” imo is moralistic and therefore not marxist. Also, before AI, people were doing things for their mental health all the same. There is no meat on the argument here.
As I said, it is the system that is the problem. Depriving people from getting their material needs met is a stupid idea. “Fixing” that by selling your work (ie “art”) is just a bandate.
Because ideas are cheap. They are one thing that is wrong with intellectual property.
When a photographer clicks a photo, is it credited to the photographer of to the camera? It’s a mix of both
The camera is not a person, so its the photographer
You’re leaving out an important part. If a person paints a picture or makes a sculpture and a person takes a picture, who is considered the artist here? First, the original artist, then by much lesser degree the fotographer. Because the camera and the fotographer dont have art if the original artist didnt create it in the first place. Thats the whole problem with ai. Its not your art. Its someone elses. You’re just remixing it. The reason why it is hyped is because it is novel and because it keeps the empire going. Its colonialism turned inward, again.
The photographer can just go somewhere else too. They don’t have to take all their photos inside the museum.
Its the same with diffusion. Theoretically, one could remake the mona lisa over and over and be very uncreative. But most people won’t do that, as the whole idea behind diffusion was to create images that never existed before. To let creativity go wild.
I’m not saying it doesnt have a place. It still wrecks the world and i will always be an avid critic. Discussions about AI are the same as AI itself, never ending, barely changing repetitions of the same things, wasting resources in the process.
When I put clothes into the washing machine, press the buttons, and take them out later, who washed the clothes? I did. I used the machine.
I wrote the prompt. I chose the model. I chose the size, stepcount, LoRA. I adapted the prompt. I put the image in again. The image is my creation.
Before AI, people were doing the things they could for their mental health too, yes. But those who couldn’t, were left in the dust. There are still many people left who can’t do enough for their mental health, but for some, their life got slightly better.
Edit: opsec
Removed by mod
Eww. What the fuck?
It was funny watching all the rich Hollywood actors up in arms when that AI “actress” was announced. They were never part of the capitalist class and are closer to being proletariat “pets” the oligarchy likes to parade around. If capitalism can replace them all, they will.
This is the content slop era that has overtaken the postmodern era of art. Rather than a postmodern artist borrowing from the past, questioning their own artistic identity, critiquing traditional art etc. , the content slop machine just cranks the handle for itself.
The artists are gone or decentered, and the audience is left to consume the slop and be unmoved or be just mildly occupied for a few moments by this imitation of life.
And the now disenfranchised artists/training-data-donors are left asking where can they get their cut. Like a blood donor, your bag just goes into the system - they don’t write your name on it.
All I am thinking is when this bubble will pop…
I don’t think you know any artists or creators at all
I wrote 4 cyoa short stories, drew ~50 pictures, diffused ~100 pictures, raymarched ~10 pictures, built 3 minecraft maps, programmed ~15 unfinished video games. I uploaded none of those to the internet.
Am I a creator, or not?
I think everyone is a creator. Some have the privilege to share their creations with the world, but most do not.
deleted by creator
Artisans that own their own means of production and produce at their own behest, but must perform this labor themselves, are petite-bourgeoisie. They are not bourgeoisie proper, but they live by their own labor and means of production. They are constantly at risk of proletarianization, because they generally can’t compete with the bourgeoisie proper, but they as a class are generally more assured than the proletariat. Obviously edge-cases exist, but as a class this is generally true.
This petite-bourgeois relation is why as a profession it is more common to become mega-wealthy than, say, the upper-paid skilled proletarians like doctors or engineers, even if those skilled proletarians have it better on average. Sanderson, George R. R. Martin, J. K. Rowling, etc. all made their vast wealth from royalties, because they own the IP they created. It isn’t a proletarian wage that they recieve, they have a different class character than proletarians.
Now, the merits/demerits of AI is a different question, but if your only objection is to the correct identification of artisans as petite-bourgeoisie then that should settle that critique.
It’s no secret that people get into writing to get rich and unalienated. It’s the dream of every writer to live in a secluded mansion just writing books all day ala Stephen King and sending that off to a publisher who just says “yessir we’re sending it to print right now”. I doubt many would ever accept salary work for it even if it was in socialism.
That tension between proletarianization and the dreams of being one of the “greats” is the basis of the modern desparation of the artisinal worker. I do think that in socialism, at least higher stages of socislism, artists would return to being “happy” as a subsection of the proletariat. George Lucas expressed jealousy over soviet filmmakers and their freedom from the profit motive, after all.
Yeah, as a hobbyist writer I’ve heard that a lot, and like… for me, it is way more ‘complete’ in terms of the creative work on my works if I’m out and about with the proletariat, working the salary, experiencing the same they do, even if it’s like fantasy fiction, I can’t explain why I feel this way but if I ever get ‘serious’ I wouldn’t want more than getting my needs met and maybe some repairs/cleaning in my home and stuff I own once in a while.
Do you sell your art? Commissions? Do you know what the bourgeoisie is?
