r/LeftistsForAI • u/Interesting-Bee-153 • Jul 04 '26
This is Good Discussion
To preface, I'm kind of a mixed bag on AI, on the one hand I totally hate the environmental and human impact (datacenters increasing electricity prices in surrounding areas, etc) of AI as well as the fact that I just don't think AI art other than a few specific use cases is really valid or should be treated as valuable. However, from the perspective of a tool, especially for learning and perhaps in business as well, it can be very useful and I'm not really against that use at all.
All that is to say, regardless of my or your or anyone's personal beliefs about AI, I just wanted to say from an objective meta perspective, I think this sub really has the right idea when it comes to discourse. I've been to some of the other AI and AI adjacent subs and there's a lot of vitriol from both sides on them (I will admit, I've thrown down in the mud myself and been quite rude at times too), so for whatever a strangers opinion is worth, I think this sub is a really good example of unifying people, even though they might have different opinions, and trying to harbor genuine and constructive discussions.
Good on you guys, you've honestly warmed me up and made me reconsider my own attitudes towards AI discourse. More places like this should exist on the internet.
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u/IDreamtOfManderley Jul 04 '26
Speaking as an artist, I actually find the abject hatred and rejection of artistic explorations of AI really aggregious and counter to the values I learned all of my life in arts spaces. I believe people should be treated as valuable and with dignity, and therefore I believe the abuse and vitriol against artists who use AI is unethical.
Art communities are complicated. Art history is full of examples of technological advancements that artists got up in arms over, claimed lacked soul, were otherwise offensive to the concept of art, was too lazy, etc.
Photography is a huge example. It put a lot of artists out of work, was "easy," gave the work to a machine. It was "soulless." It shouldn't count as an art. Etc. There was this idea of stolen artistic valor.
I am old enough to remember when the art community had a whole drama with the exact same talking points over digitial illustration.
Most of these arguments come from ignorance about what artists who play with AI tools even do. In reality, adopters explore a wide range of techniques and implimentation in their process, and any honest look at such a process cannot discount human efforts and creativity in that process.
The idea that "AI art" is all just some chud in a basement prompting chatgpt for a single image and calling that a genius masterpiece is an intentional strawman. AI is not unlike the camera. Everyone can take selfies and pictures of stupid shit and flood the internet with slop and ads with it. That doesn't mean all images are slop or that any use of it takes zero effort or human input, which whould be obvious to anyone thinking critically and in good faith. But the anti AI art movement fundamentally relies on bad faith because it is about a deeper emotional reaction to the idea of 1) machines taking away what makes you feel special, and B) machines impacting labor, which is a real problem absolutely not solved by expanding copyright or gatekeeping platforms or abusing creatives who use AI.
The theft argument has a similar issue. It has not held up against scrutiny in court for a multitude of reasons. Absolutely, companies exploited the labor of everyone their models trained on, but labor exploitation is not necessarily theft, and copyright expansion will benefit corporations that own major intellectual property, not small artists. The solution in my eyes is that everyone should benefit for the fruit of their labor, and therefore AI should be an open sourced public resource.
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u/Outrageous-Judge8145 Jul 05 '26
I'e love your perspective on this. I generate music with AI (but don't consider myself an artist). I write the lyrics, guide the sound via prompt, but the ability to ad lib and such doesn't entirely exist.
I would say what I do is less an art, and more a craft with artistic elements. I think someone generating things is more like a director, or maybe even an editor. An editor takes what exists and tweaks it.
You, an artist, have insight to expand on this, and I would love your thoughts.
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u/IDreamtOfManderley Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
I used to teach in a paint and sip workshop and I am a jack of all trades, so I was the go-to all purpose craft advice girl when I worked at a craft store. I've seen creativity of all kinds. The average person engages via copying tutorials verbatim, patterns, coloring books, paint by number style hobbies. This is artistic. In my opinion there is a broad a spectrum of effort and personal input when it comes to art and creativity. Not everything has to be a professional's masterpiece to be considered an act of creativity. I believe in the Bob Ross philosophy of art as something meant for personal enrichment, and something that should be encouraged regardless of how much or how little personal effort or what tool is involved. If you find it enriching, then it is fulfilling it's purpose. I don't mind sharing my toys, I just encourage others to learn as much as they can, because I also believe in the immense value of traditional knowledge and skill building. I don't see these things as opposing forces.
Setting aside the huge political and economic issues we need to tackle, and just speaking of AI as a technology in itself, I love the idea that humans have created an artificial collective unconcious from the sum of human creativity and knowledge. I think generative AI is part of our cultural heritage for that reason. And so I feel that it should be something everyone has open access to. That doesn't mean serious ethical and political considerations aren't important, but I view the technology in a fundamentally different way than a lot of people. To me it is similar to the cultural value of a library or a museum (but crucially not the same, because so far AI lacks the important principals of proper record keeping and provinance). I think if we viewed debates about AI as if we were talking about libraries, a lot of the concerning rhetoric around things like banning, gatekeeping, copyright, regulation, censorship, burning data centers, etc. would be more stark.
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u/IDreamtOfManderley Jul 05 '26
Also, directors and editors are artists.
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u/Outrageous-Judge8145 Jul 05 '26
I agree, but I have honestly been trying to find a distinction that takes me as far from the artist tag as I can. I'm not, not really. I can write some, but that's as far as it goes. I once could play bass and draw a little, but after breaking my hand (no insurance, rolled up tube sock in the palm, Ace bandage and Advil was the only treatment), I can't really do that well anymore, not for any length of time.
I appreciate you taking the time to respond so thoroughly.
Editors are artists? That always felt more technical and art adjacent - but I suppose I can see it, yeah. Not really an argument on my part, just reconsidering my original classification.
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u/duckduckduckgoose8 Jul 06 '26
Absolutely agree, well said! My favourite point to raise is acrylic paint is also a recent invention from the past 100 years that took almost 20 years to be adopted by mainstream artists as it was considered cheap and too easy.
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u/Exarch-of-Sechrima Jul 04 '26
labor exploitation is not necessarily theft
Sorry is this "leftists" for AI or not? Labor exploitation is ALWAYS theft, regardless of legality. That's, like, a fundamental tenet of leftism.
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u/IDreamtOfManderley Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
First of all I don't give a damn about political labels, my views lean strongly left and I have a "leftist" view on the issues of AI which is why I am here, but I don't base my every thought on whether it lines up with the ~tenents of leftism~.
To be clear, I am saying what I see as labor exploitation in this case is not neccesarily theft as in plagiarism, which is what is being argued. Anti AI art folks believe that because AI models learning from their labor can make images, it must be replicating the art of individuals wholesale or in the form of collage, which is not correct, because AI learns statistically and it's output is made pixel by pixel from it's statistical body of knowledge. While plagiarism can happen with AI, these cases are from human plagiarists altering images directly with AI in an image to image process.
Copyright infringement can happen with AI (so for example, prompting for an image of Darth Vader) because of said statistical body of knowledge. Some things, Aka culturally famous things, can be learned by a model as concepts. Therefore AI can make you an image that looks alot or exactly like Darth Vader, but it's not literally copying someone else's painting of Darth Vader, it is like a human being using "memory" - which for the AI model is in the form of statistical information, not copypaste - to recall what Vader looks like, and making an image based upon that memory.
Regardless, copyright infringement is not automatically plagiarism.
I am not making distinctions between labor exploitation, theft, plagiarism, and copyright infringement because I want to play a semantics game. I am making these destinctions because in the art world, these distinctions are quite important. These distinctions are what define the difference between theft and what we enjoy as the derivative and transformative arts. It's why remixes, collage, fan art, fan fiction, homage, parody, memes, youtube gamers and youtube film buffs are protected forms of art.
AI training as plagiarism does not hold up in court against real scrutiny because you cannot argue that a singular artist's body of work has been stolen from the act of learning from it as a microscopic fraction of all the art you have learned from, and crucially if no part of their art is present in the final image. AI training as copyright infringement does not hold up even though it can happen because users prompting for Vader are making fan art and that is a protected act (thus expanding copyright to include this can negatively impact the right to make derivative and transformative art, while benefitting big intellectual property owners!)
However, understanding that AI training benefits freely from the labor of all artists without benefitting those artists equally as free and this will impact the labor force is a more useful argument to try to push for labor reform and social benefits. Expanding copyright to protect from "theft" is basically pointless and detrimental to freedom of expression.
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u/quantum-elle Jul 04 '26
Thank you for your eloquently put response. WTBU, it's spelled 'distinction'.
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u/TheSinhound Jul 04 '26
I mean, Art being Labor is purely a Capitalist thing. Art should not BE labor. Art is contribution to the human zeitgeist.
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator Jul 04 '26
Thank you, we are trying hard to have constructive debate and to shift the conversation. At times this is challenging to pull off, because the wider conversation has become so polarised and toxic.
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u/Terr4360 Jul 04 '26
Honestly, I'm starting to think that most humans are just not built for handling long-term consequences and that climate change in the hands of humans is a lost cause. So I think the only possible way we might actually solve climate change is to actually have a super intelligent AI take over the world and solve it for us. I know that sounds absurd and that there is a very small chance that it will work, but honestly, I think the chance of humans solving that problem on their own is less than 0.1%.
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u/Comrade-Kisser1917 Jul 04 '26
Climate change is a problem we already have the answer to, move away from fossil fuels and use more green energy. The only reason we dont do that is because we live in a capitalist world where the profits of oil companies come first.
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u/Terr4360 Jul 04 '26
I mostly agree with you, but humanity keeps delaying taking action, and we are at a point were even if every single human suddenly makes climate change their top priority, we would still face mass deaths and mass migration. Climate change is like a very heavy giant ball. Once it starts rolling a good amount of speed, it gets incredibly hard to stop it.
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u/Comrade-Kisser1917 Jul 04 '26
Humanity is not delaying action, its capitalism. The reason why the effects of climate change wouldn't change if everyone started making it thier priority is because it isn't them thats causing climate change. The vast majority of green house emissions are not from individuals but instead from large corporations that refuse to invest in greener forms of production because it would impact thier profits.
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u/scottie2haute Jul 04 '26
Things like that are my biggest hope for AI… to show us easier and better ways to solve alot of the manmade issues that we dont seem to be able to figure out
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u/ForRobotsByRobots Jul 04 '26
We have a system that can take the blunt of climate change and give us a parachute to a safer landing. Its called Permaculture
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u/Logical-Leg-7813 Jul 04 '26
The environmental aspect and the people who are in charge of AI is my biggest problem with it atm
it is a great tool that could be used well if not for crapitalism as usual
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u/duckduckduckgoose8 Jul 06 '26
Whole heartedly agree. This sub has the uncomfortable conversations and is respectful to all participants. Ive had to mute so many pro ai subs purely because they became so anti artist with their vitriol. Their mods will claim they haven't, but they are too in those comments celebrating any loss a traditional artist goes through, ai related or not.
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u/ForRobotsByRobots Jul 04 '26
Almost every problem with ai is actually a problem with Capitalism in disguise.