This is an interesting take on right's love of generative AI, but I think it's ultimately misleading. The main problem is that it compares AI slop to the work of artists. But the use of generative AI has little to do with art, and much more with stock photos and other already generic imagery 1/ - ThreadSky

bildoperationen.bsky.social • 12 days ago

This is an interesting take on right's love of generative AI, but I think it's ultimately misleading. The main problem is that it compares AI slop to the work of artists. But the use of generative AI has little to do with art, and much more with stock photos and other already generic imagery
1/

Reposted from Hypervisible

“No amount of normalisation and ‘validation’, however, can alter the fact that AI imagery looks like shit. But that, I want to argue, is its main draw to the right. If AI was capable of producing art that was formally competent, surprising, soulful, then they wouldn’t want it.”

Comments

theclimateofart.bsky.social•11 days ago

But isn‘t exactly the plausible, evidentiary character of art that the far-right is applying? At least functionally I see little difference to modernism & US cold war foreign policy, abstract expressionism & CIA, socialist realism, etc.

fotografie.bsky.social•11 days ago

Da gäbe es viel zu widersprechen. Es ist fatal, KI-Bilder einzig auf einen Faschismus rechter Prägung hin zu fokussieren. Die Ästhetik des Sozialismus (Stalin, PolPot, DDR, Nordkorea) unterscheidet sich nur in ihrer Ideologie von aktueller KI-Ästhetik. Spannender finde ich den Gedanken: 1

fotografie.bsky.social•11 days ago

"every prompt is an executive order." An diesem Punkt treffen sich die alten Ideologien mit den neuen Autokraten (egal ob von rechts/links kommend), um die Welt nach ihrer Vorstellung zu formen. KI ist nur der Hammer, mit dem sich die mühsam gewonnene Freiheit der Demokratie wieder einfalten lässt.

ludgerschwarte.bsky.social•12 days ago

Exactly. It is statistics, not creativity.

starlightwishes.bsky.social•10 days ago

I use Firefly, Photoshop's version of AI, only for notes to remind me of human looking characters in stories. I find AI isn't ready for prime-time. It lacks imagination, it struggles with prompts that don't fit magazine models, & often takes hours of fixing in PS. Maybe it's fine for stock stuff.

neilturkewitz.bsky.social•11 days ago

Thanks for posting. I agree with both of you, & don’t really see much space between your positions. AI generated images indeed have little to do with art, but rather with a misunderstanding of art, & people. The AI world is entwined with crypto, blockchain etc in a libertarian fever dream.
@posth.me

bildoperationen.bsky.social•12 days ago

Of course, these are soulless images devoid of human creativity, but how much soul would you expect from social media sharepics? The love of the far-right may have to do with how generative AI devalues the work of individual creators, but much more with what these tools offer instead
2/

bildoperationen.bsky.social•12 days ago

AI image generators promise to turn every political slogan and stupid meme into a plausible image – plausible in the sense that it reflects the sexist clichés and racist stereotypes of our digital visual culture. It's a perfect encapsulation of meme fascism, every prompt is an executive order.
3/

bildoperationen.bsky.social•12 days ago

In its totality, AI slop becomes a means of world making: It produces a world optimized for legibility and pattern recognition, a world in which everything and everyone matches a a pre-applied label, a predictable world in which nothing ever escapes the already established cliché
4/

bildoperationen.bsky.social•12 days ago

(I've written on this before, e.g. in this thread ...) https://bsky.app/profile/bildoperationen.bsky.social/post/3kikzfdvfvf2m

karantripathi.bsky.social•12 days ago

Reminds me of what Louie Amoore called the foreclosure of politics

masswerk.at•11 days ago

I've been thinking about LLMs a bit, lately, regarding what the greater framework actually is. For sure, it departs from the linguistic turn, since it requires some realist notion. It requires the idea that language, somewhere isn't just a shifting texture, but is somehow anchored to
1/4

masswerk.at•11 days ago

world-objects, that somehow the corpus is an anagram of the world that could be brute-forced, if just broken up, purified, rearranged and finally projected in the right way.
In other words, the framework is really Alchemy. Somewhat along the lines of John Dee's approach of applying Alchemy to
2/4

masswerk.at•11 days ago

Kabbalah by means of neo-pythagorean geometry (AKA curve fitting). With the major difference that the Mona Hyroglyphica won't be revealed. It will be eternally enclosed, but it may be still decomposed and rearranged into new compositions, doing the work of the world.
3/4

masswerk.at•11 days ago

It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that this aligns pretty well with fascism, which we may describe as a program of an essentially spiritual struggle settled in the material world.

jametc.bsky.social•11 days ago

No, it has a lot to do with art.

The first people using it and pioneering it's usage made extremely clear that the point of it was to harm the artists who they stole from- now they could essentially make artists draw whatever they pleased, without payment or respect. Artists were too "entitled"

jametc.bsky.social•11 days ago

Artists who first discovered their works were being aped by AI were attacked and harassed with taunts and jeering, the overwhelming narrative was that they had the only thing they could do "stolen" from them.
Users often replied with AI versions of their art to point out they were irrelevant now

bildoperationen.bsky.social•11 days ago

Absolutely. Still, when Trump shares picsof Kamela Harris in Soviet uniform, I don‘t see how comparing that to Warhol helps in understanding what‘s going on

jametc.bsky.social•11 days ago

He'd otherwise have to find an artist to create that to the standard other fascists would respect. Few artists would and those who did usually aren't very good because to become proficient you need to respect the artistic process

Why not just effectively steal it/force artists to make it for you?

bildoperationen.bsky.social•11 days ago

Yes, artists and creatives are being exploited, but most of the stuff these models are trained with has little to do with art, at least as I'd understand the term: it's stock images, commercials, memes, social media content. And its output is customized stock, automated propaganda, and instant memes

bildoperationen.bsky.social•11 days ago

But I think we agree: Part of this a general hatred of expertise, craftmanship, and everything beyond mere technocratic efficiency

jametc.bsky.social•11 days ago

And all of those things would have to be gotten from actual artists before.

When I see AI art, sometimes it's by the uninitiated and unaware, but for most of its life and the early days of it, it was very clear what was going on, and by its nature, it exists to undermine the artists it steals from

jametc.bsky.social•11 days ago

They believed paying for art, from talent they thought came to artists naturally regardless, was unfair and needed to be disrupted

All of this exists to get around paying and respecting them as people and to disrupt the creatives these AI enthusiasts were and are clearly bitterly jealous of

etveland.bsky.social•11 days ago

Ai or not, the "🧠" behind the work chooses the finished image.

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply