this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025
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Because Lemmy is full smash-the-looms luddite about AI art.
Good
This person on the internet in hemp rags they grew themselves.
Posted from your iPhone. Heh! Gotcha.
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.
Is this an assumption that my problem with AI art is its environmental impact followed by an insistence that I can’t be upset about that because the clothing industry is also bad for the environment and I wear clothes? Because if so that’s hilarious
No. The luddites were against the move away from manual weaving, and literally did break into factories to smash looms.
Ah, okay. I mean, they weren’t doing that for its own sake. It was about the impact the looms were having on workers. I’m not just a loom hater
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.
I can’t speak for everyone, only for myself. My opposition to AI isn’t an opposition to the disembodied, out-of-context concept of AI. It’s an opposition to the context in which AI exists and of which it’s emblematic. The form that LLMs take in our society exists because of a prioritization of profit and ownership over workers. I can go more in depth about the specifics of that that if you’d like.
We can have a discussion about the efficacy of luddites and their strategies in working class liberation. I don’t disagree that they achieved little. I just don’t think that their methods failing means we should dismiss the anger they felt or similarly the anger people feel about AI. That’s the truly analogous part. When I rail against AI on Lemmy, I’m not advocating for individuals to start breaking into a smashing up data centers. That would be just as ineffective. But that expression of anger is still valid.
So you don't want to go against the jerk, okay.
"AI" "art" which is neither
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, and that's where at least part of the butthurt comes from.
that's true but i'm passing positive that if you asked a hundred thousand people to define art not a single one would say something like
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.
We have harnessed the power of intelligence in our own machines by replicating a part of the brain. The intelligence is artificial, making it "Artificial Intelligence". The name is exactly what it does.
You claim to know that it can never be art? If art had limits, it wouldn't be art.
I'm pretty sure most people would agree that art is the product of an artist, not just 'thing that looks nice'
God damn you're salty and it's awesome.
Thanks?
lol seems like it
Do you think the Luddites were wrong?
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)