this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025
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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.