Something something something AI, something something commodification of art.
Okay, wait, no, I actually have more coherent thoughts.
I think maybe part of what I find off-putting and annoying about the conversation around AI is that it takes the ongoing commodification of art as essentially inevitable, and so the argument narrows down to the question of how that commodity is to be produced.
I guess "commodity" has different meanings but I'm especially interested in this definition from wikipedia:
In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that specifically has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.
Near as I can tell this isn't the definition people are using when they talk about "commodification" but we will soldier on.
In particular, until roughly... uh, nowish you couldn't really produce artwork that way (Although copies of art are another story).
So, like, regarding this Chuck Tingle post I've actually seen tons of AI tools that advertise themselves as a way to essentially put less man hours per unit into art production. It used to take years to get this many pages written, now Chat GPT can pump them out in seconds?
What, precisely, is on those pages?
Doesn't fucking matter, or barely matters.
Amazon is flooded with scammy AI books put there by people who bought courses about how to get rich selling AI books, because the effort per book is so low with AI, and these are people who really do think of books like commodities. "I can put out dozens of scifi books in the time it takes you to write a short story."
Because the AI book scam sees scifi books are a commodity in that sense above; one is essentially fungible with another, so the only thing that matters is how efficiently and quickly each unit of science fiction (Or autobiography, or how to, or whatever) can be produced.
This is kind of a gross way to look at art, which was once about a sort of expression of your own unique humanity.
But I also see this lurking below the idea that AI art is some kind of awful "theft". For me, it is just too transformative, and also, frankly, not actually good enough to be theft.
If you have a specific visual aesthetic, AI cannot reproduce it very well. Occasionally, with a LOT of finagling, it can get kind of close, but it still tends to devolve into cliche in a way that even people of mediocre talent won't necessarily.
The idea that AI constitutes theft seems to me to hinge on the idea that artists are producing, essentially, fungible units of art. I produce X units of art, through personal effort; it's not fair to me as an artist that you can produce X+ units of art because of a machine that was trained partially on my images.
And the fact that the X+ units produced by the machine are not actually fungible with those produced by the artist just doesn't matter.
Even what I would call the "anti-luddite" position takes for granted the commodification of art.
I've seen multiple people say, "Even under luxury automated space communism, you'd have more people who would want to do art full time then demand for art."
Art, in this conception, is a commodity like iron, or oil, or corn, and in the planned economic paradise you'd calculate the demand for barrels of oil, and use that to calculate how many workers should be allocated to drilling it out of the ground; you'd calculate the demand for units of art, and allocate enough workers to produce that many units of art as efficiently as possible, and if we can produce enough art efficiently enough the laws of supply and demand will reduce demand for artists.
Why should you spend time doing art when Ted has produced enough arts for the whole neighborhood? You'd just end up with a lot of art sitting there and slowly going bad, like if you grow way more corn then demand.
All of this is just... Just a major bummer for me.
Even thirty years ago it was not quite so unimaginable that art could be, OUGHT to be, something other than a commodity.
