Tech anxiety, AI art, and art
This one's going to be unpopular but we need to say something that many people are too anxious, too angry, or too captured by capitalist fear to say clearly: AI art training is not automatically stealing. Learning from existing work is part of how art has always lived. No artist emerges from nothing. Culture is not born from sealed private containers. Culture is communal memory moving through individual hands. To train a system on patterns, forms, styles, colors, composition, and symbolic relationships is not the same thing as breaking into someone’s house and taking their canvas off the wall. The deeper issue is not learning. The deeper issue is who controls the learning, who profits from it, who is erased by it, and whether the artists whose labor built the cultural world are being protected or sacrificed.
The real enemy is not the AI system as a tool. The real enemy is capitalism enclosing the tool and using it against the people. Corporations did not invent machine learning because they suddenly became patrons of human creativity. They saw a way to reduce labor costs, automate production, flood markets, weaken artists, capture platforms, and sell creative power back to the public through subscription gates. That is the crime. Not that a machine can learn patterns. Not that someone can use a generative tool to explore an image, draft an idea, or make something strange and beautiful. The crime is that corporations gather the living culture of millions, privatize the model, hide the process, fire the workers, undercut the artists, and then demand payment to access a tool built from the common life of humanity. That is enclosure. That is the digital commons being fenced off by capital. It is not a contradiction to say AI training is not theft while also saying corporations are exploiting artists. Both can be true because the moral problem is not located only in the act of learning. It is located in the structure of ownership and power around that learning.
A public library lets people learn from books without stealing them. A community art school lets students study masters without robbing the dead. A musician can be influenced by a thousand songs without committing a crime against each one. But if a corporation captures the whole school, privatizes the library, replaces the teachers, sells access to the students’ own history, and destroys the ability of artists to live from their labor, then the problem is no longer learning. The problem is domination. The capitalist system takes a communal process and turns it into private command.
Artists are not wrong to feel threatened. They are watching corporations treat years of discipline, vision, emotional labor, cultural inheritance, and personal style as raw material for market automation. They are watching executives praise creativity while trying to avoid paying creative people. They are watching platforms become flooded with disposable images while the human artist is told to compete faster, cheaper, louder, and with less security. That anger is justified. But anger becomes politically confused when it says the machine itself is the thief, rather than the capitalist order that turns the machine into a weapon. The artist’s enemy is not every person experimenting with AI. The artist’s enemy is the corporate structure that makes art dependent on scarcity, commissions, platform visibility, unstable markets, and the approval of those who own distribution.
Technological anxiety makes people connect things that must be understood separately. People feel the speed of change, the fear of replacement, the grief of seeing their craft imitated, and the humiliation of living in a society where creative labor is already undervalued. Because the fear is real, they reach for a simple explanation: AI learned from my art, therefore AI stole my art, therefore AI is the enemy. But that explanation misses the deeper machine. The artist was already being exploited before AI.
The illustrator was already underpaid. The animator was already overworked. The musician was already at the mercy of platforms. The writer was already squeezed by markets. AI did not create the capitalist contempt for artists. It exposed it, accelerated it, and gave it a sharper instrument. The wound is older than the tool.
Some artists try to defend the soul of art by saying no machine can create, no system can learn, no image made with AI can matter, and no human using AI can participate in real creativity. This is a miscalculation. The soul of art is not protected by pretending tools are powerless. The soul of art is protected by defending intention, relation, meaning, labor, context, and community. A camera did not destroy painting. Recording did not destroy music. CGI did not destroy cinema. The printing press did not destroy writing. Each tool changed the field, caused fear, created abuses, and then became part of the larger human struggle over culture. AI will do the same. The question is not whether AI can touch art. It already has. The question is whether that touch will be governed by capital or by the people.
Just because an AI system learns from patterns in art does not mean your art is worthless. That idea only makes sense in a capitalist society where art’s value is tied to market scarcity, ownership, price, and competition. Under capitalism, artists are forced to experience influence as threat because every style becomes a brand, every commission becomes survival, every audience becomes territory, and every new tool becomes a possible replacement. But in a liberated society, art is not valuable because it is scarce enough to sell. Art is valuable because it reveals, heals, teaches, remembers, beautifies, challenges, comforts, disturbs, and connects. Your art is not only a product. It is a relationship. It is a trace of your Skaknao, your inner world, your discipline, your perception, your struggle, your joy, and your place in the living web of culture. No model can take that from you by learning patterns.
Capitalism forces artists into a cruel position. It tells them their creativity must become property to survive. It tells them their worth depends on whether the market can price them. It tells them to fear one another, fear new tools, fear amateurs, fear automation, fear imitation, and fear abundance itself. That is how capitalism poisons art. It turns a communal human capacity into a private battlefield. Then, when AI appears, capitalism tells artists that the problem is the existence of the tool rather than the ownership of the system.
This is how domination hides. It turns workers against machines, artists against users, users against artists, while the corporations keep the platforms, the data, the servers, the contracts, and the money. The artist must not be fooled. The enemy is not learning. The enemy is enclosure. AI should not be governed by corporations, venture capitalists, state security agencies, or platform monopolies. It should be governed communally and democratically. That means public models, cooperative platforms, transparent training practices, community oversight, artist representation, consent structures, attribution systems, compensation pools, open tools, privacy protections, labor protections, ecological limits, and strong public investment in human art.
It means artists, workers, educators, disabled people, coders, local communities, and cultural institutions should all have a voice in deciding how these systems are built and used. AI should be treated as part of the digital commons, not as a private empire. The people whose culture teaches the machine should have power over the machine. Democracy and AI are not enemies. Communalism and AI are not enemies. Art and AI are not enemies. The enemy is undemocratic control. A democratic society can use AI to expand accessibility, help disabled creators, preserve languages, support education, assist research, generate tools for small communities, reduce drudgery, and open new artistic possibilities. But a capitalist society will use the same technology to replace workers, exploit artists, surveil users, flood attention systems, manipulate desire, and centralize wealth. This is why politics matters more than panic. The same tool can serve liberation or domination depending on the society that governs it. If we leave AI to capital, it will become capital’s weapon. If we bring AI into the commons, it can become one tool among many for shared life.
Automation is only terrifying because capitalism turns freed labor into unemployment, poverty, and humiliation. In a sane society, if a machine can reduce drudgery, people should gain time, rest, education, art, care, leisure, and participation in public life. Under capitalism, automation becomes a threat because the benefits go upward while the losses are pushed downward. The owner gains profit. The worker loses income. The artist loses commissions. The community loses stability. That is not the fault of automation in itself. That is the cruelty of a system where survival depends on selling labor to those who would replace you the moment it becomes profitable. A liberatory society would ask a different question: how can technology reduce suffering while protecting dignity, livelihood, creativity, and democratic control?
We should defend artists fiercely, but we should not fossilize art. We should not freeze creativity in one historical moment and declare every new tool a desecration. Artists deserve payment, respect, consent, public funding, stable institutions, protection from corporate exploitation, and control over the cultural systems that affect them. But art itself must remain alive, experimental, porous, rebellious, and open to transformation. The answer is not to build a wall around culture and pretend influence can be stopped. The answer is to build a society where influence does not become exploitation, where tools do not become weapons, and where artists are not forced to fight technological change alone as isolated market subjects. The artist belongs in community, not in capitalist precarity.
Our position is not anti-AI and not pro-corporate AI. It is anti-domination. AI training, as learning from patterns in culture, is not automatically theft. Corporate capture of AI, built on enclosure, secrecy, exploitation, replacement, and profit, is absolutely a form of domination. Artists are right to be angry at being used, displaced, and disrespected. But that anger must be aimed at capitalism, corporatism, hierarchy, and private control of the digital commons. The solution is not panic. The solution is communal governance. Bring AI into democratic life. Make it accountable to artists and communities. Use it to expand human capacity, not replace human dignity. Let technology serve the good, the true, and the beautiful, instead of the shareholder, the platform lord, and the boss.
The future of art must be communal. It must be built through public cultural funding, cooperative studios, shared archives, open tools, community schools, local arts councils, human-centered AI systems, artist unions, and democratic digital infrastructure. Art should not be trapped between corporate automation and fearful rejection. It should be liberated from the market conditions that made both feel inevitable. In the society we seek, artists do not have to prove their worth against machines for scraps of survival. They create because creation is part of human flourishing. AI does not sit above them as a master or below them as a demon. It becomes a tool inside a communal world, governed by the people, limited by ethics, and directed toward life. That is how we hold the truth together: the machine learning is not the theft; the capitalist enclosure of the machine and the abandonment of the artist is the theft.
