Thanks?

Agreed. The point being that people aren’t really upset about whether it’s art or not. They’re mad about money.

And that’s not exactly dumb either, making bread is important. It’d just be nice if it was admitted to.

AI being appropriated for neural nets which might even do things unrelated to what we think of as intelligence is annoying, I’ll give you that.

What art is is kind of a huge can of worms, though. In any case, it’s pretty clear they can satisfy potential clients a lot better than human digital artists, though, and that’s where at least part of the butthurt comes from.

It was, but doesn’t that seem shortsighted now? When there’s a change it’s usually bad for someone, but no change since the 1700’s would definitely be bad, even if there’s a steady two pence or whatever to be made weaving.

Sitting in 2025, we can identify a whole lot that was wrong with the world and conditions of labourers (including literal slaves) then. It seems kind of odd to blame technology for them, at least directly. But, that’s where the luddites turned their anger, and Lemmy seems to slide into doing the same thing - although there’s a lot of overlap with valid skepticism about things people claim AI do, that it actually can’t.

Since it’s my instance and you can probably click to it through my username, I felt like a link would be overkill. But: www.sdf.org.

That was honestly kind of rhetorical, too. It’s been something you could connect to since the 80’s, and it’s still an everyday part of my life, which is related enough to mention even if OP wouldn’t call that a website.

If we did what they wanted, I couldn’t afford the clothes I’m wearing. Or probably a lot of other things - shit tons has improved since the late 1700’s.

Sure, there’s less weaver jobs now, and there will be less digital artist jobs in the future. Arguably, the past few centuries have shown that if there’s other things that we can do instead, it’s still for the best. (If there’s not, a whole new conversation opens up)

Yes, it’s not a good argument totally unsupported. You can live in a society and still criticise it, if there’s no reasonable choice to do otherwise.

The thing is, I really like not having to weave my own clothes, or do whatever trade was made obsolete by all the technologies since. I’m guessing OP does too, and there’s no good reason to place a cutoff on that at 2020.

If OP thought things would genuinely be better if we went back to medieval tech, this would be a different, and actually much more interesting conversation. As it is, they just didn’t know the history.

No. The luddites were against the move away from manual weaving, and literally did break into factories to smash looms.

I like that CTV captions the random stock image they used with it’s date 5 years ago.

I’m not too surprised. We provide a wide open door into a dead end, a lot of the time.

Does SDF count? It’s been going since 1987. Obviously the Lemmy instance is newer, and it’s stretching the definition of website a bit.

Which is kind of the general vibe of BH. They’ve never bought the hype, and have kept going with boring but practical.

Uh-huh. What a sacrifice. /s

This person on the internet in hemp rags they grew themselves.

Well then you’d probably be fine all the way back to premodern times, assuming you can convince clients to trust you with their mine water pump or whatever. As long as you could get along without devoted replacement parts.

Once you reach that point, the modern lathe thing becomes an issue, a commercial foundry might not be around for cast parts, and the technology to cast ferrous metals at all isn’t guarenteed. The ability to perfectly eyeball things and use relatively primitive materials becomes a major constraint. If you master that, you can probably hack it all the way back to early civilisation building crossbows or animal-powered pumps.

Because Lemmy is full smash-the-looms luddite about AI art.

Hmm. What point are you making? Should they stay out of towns or not?

So are you an art fan who thinks 4’33" is a work of genius? Or one of the ones who thinks it’s garbage? I’m almost tempted to go for visual art where these controversies are more common; musicians are actually pretty chill about it most of the time. (And I’ll avoid the derogatory term if we’re discussing whether it’s good, as opposed to just if someone in particular is doing it)

Scientists come to consensus, and update that consensus in sync as new discoveries are made. Art fans do not. There’s also anthropology showing the existence of non-Western systems of music completely different from and alien to our own, divergences between systems within Western music history, and a long history of new kinds of music associated with minorities being deemed “wrong”. Meanwhile, other people have known beauty is subjective continuously since Plato.

All that adds up to gatekeeping art being done for essentially the same reasons people gatekeep anything.

What’s the point? OP mentioned that there’s still ways around an IP ban in theory. They’re still widely used to great effect in practice.

Wait? Do you ever eat food? I’m guessing you do. That comes from the middle of nowhere for the most part. Certain other products too.

If you open a history book, it’s cities that are optional. Yes, people who choose to be farmers or otherwise live outside of cities have to deal with long commutes to a city when they need something. If they were banned from even doing that, there’d just be starvation.

Oh? What else have they said? I didn’t know there was a reputation for fibbing.