This machine is fascist: AI and art
Artists must resist the depredations of capitalist AI
Whether AI will replace writers, musicians, and visual artists is the topic du jour as tech companies chase the next trillion dollar trend. It stupefies and unsettles me that so many artists arrogantly argue it won’t. From where I sit, all available evidence points to the elimination of working artists as a class.
Many of those currently pondering the question from the artists' side of the aisle ask only the questions artists always ask. What drives people to make art in the first place? What fundamental aspect of the human soul is bound up in our need to create works and share them with others?
These questions have easy and familiar answers. We are driven to create by the shared wellspring of humanity, artists say, and perhaps the human soul is, in fact, the ability to create and appreciate expressions which tap into that wellspring. It is a circuitous logic that serves no purpose but reassurance and ego-fluffing. Artists insist that their work could never be replicated by a machine due to some intrinsic and innate quality inherent to human-made art—a quality always defined in nebulous, MFA circle-jerking terms. And we artists, always dogged by the forces of capitalism, cling to such vapid reassurance like a drowning man to a pool noodle. We need to believe that we are so special, so original, so irreplaceable. Our farts smell of lilacs, and we're too busy imagining ourselves embraced by the muses as we sniff them to open our eyes and see the incoming meteor.
Silicon Valley ghouls do not share our fanciful conceptions, nor do they harbor our delusion that flesh is the sole conduit to beauty. They read a novel and imagine a future where infinite novels emerge, tailored to their tastes, from the machine. They see a painting and visualize only pixels. To them, artists are just those people you can hire on the cheap when you need a new marketing campaign and then never pay.
The reality is: enough people with money believe the ghouls are right that it no longer matters whether they are.
Big tech oligarchs are all in on AI. Governments will follow close behind. And the monopolist stewards of this technology are already proving, as always, that ethics are the lip service they pay to regulators and the public while raking it in at the cost of human suffering.
Did we not learn this lesson with social media? It is not in the interests of tech companies—or any company—to be ethical. It is not in their interest to improve our lives. They profit by extracting value from regular people and passing it on to shareholders. Therefore, their calculation is simple: art is profitable, artists expensive.
On social media, our emotions and time became a new currency minted with each data point, and now those same companies wish to toxify their products even further. (There is a common refrain among artists that, for all its ills, social media made artists' lives easier. It has not, nor has it "democratized" art in any appreciable way. Platforms squeeze artists to produce more content, because the moment you stop posting, you are forgotten. What many mistake for increased visibility is in fact increased exploitation.)
I am confident that artists can be replaced in large part by AI—if not completely—because plenty of soulless art already exists and is popular. Marvel may joke about a robot named K.E.V.I.N coming up with the scripts for its movies, but the real joke is that its movies are already indistinguishable from what an AI would come up with. It is easy enough for me to imagine a world in which people seek out human-created writing, music, or visual art only as a form of novelty in the same way they seek out human-crafted jewelry and furniture on Etsy.
Put another way: if you have furniture from IKEA or Target in your home, what makes you think the crafts of writing or painting are less susceptible to the forces of mechanized production than that of woodworking?
The machines will replace us because what matters most to the corporate stewards of art is profitability. In the same way that Marvel movies are mass market affairs while indie films are upmarketed to a discerning few, books will soon be treated much the same.
In fact, that's already the case. Authors like James Patterson have, for some time, put together the strict outline of their novels and left the actual writing to more obscure names. This strategy has made Patterson fabulously wealthy. It has made him one of the most famous authors alive. Within a few technological generations, Patterson will instead be able to input those outlines into a program, which will use the many books penned in his name as a model to generate yet another. There will be no reason for him not to do this because his readership aren't the sort of people who think deeply about the soul of art, or about how it reflects the human condition. They just want something for the plane ride.
Market forces have proven innumerable times that they will dominate the human spirit and extract value from it for those who own the means of production. Artistic works are the only things which are still produced by hand and which have not been totally reduced to the extractive, mass productive assembly line. Now, the technology has arrived to do with books what happened long ago to furniture, pottery, and tailoring.
You may protest that those things—furniture, house goods, or clothes—aren't art. My point is that they were, once upon a time. Today, rich people display their wealth by getting those things made by hand, while the rest of us make do with the assembly line versions. We may feel the shadow of depredation pass across our hearts as we hit the IKEA checkout, but it won't stop us from buying the furniture. Nor will customers of the future feel more than a tinge of emptiness as they download another AI-written novel.
It is for this reason that I have offered up an AI-age Luddism as the solution to the inevitable, repressive nature of AI under capitalism. Contrary to history written by capitalist victors, The Luddites of the early 19th century were not superstitious peasants who thought technology was witchcraft. They were textile workers who knew their bosses were using automation to put them out on the street. When they revolted in protest, smashing the machines, many were shipped to the Australian penal colonies or hanged in the street.
That is why I have here drawn the comparison to mass-produced household goods. What the Luddites rightly feared was the replacement of their artisanal skills with lower-paid unskilled labor. History proved them right, and we cannot afford to ignore that history once again.
We must reject en masse the AI proposed by capitalism until such time as we can revolutionize the technology under the control of working people, where it can be rebuilt from the ground up in line with our needs rather than those of investment firms. Like the Luddites before us, who knew their ability to feed themselves was being threatened by the machines their bosses purchased to replace them, we, as artists, must smash these new machines. We must force our bodies between the gears and jam them.
There are those who have given much more thought to this than I have. Lately, I have found a deep resonance in the writings of Dan McQuillan, who outlines a strategy to fight the encroaching fascist AI and replace it with an antifascist model.
In his essay on ChatGPT, which I recommend reading in full, McQuillan writes:
Commentary that claims 'ChatGPT is here to stay and we just need to learn to live with it' are embracing the hopelessness of what I call 'AI Realism'. The compulsion to show 'balance' by always referring to AI's alleged potential for good should be dropped by acknowledging that the social benefits are still speculative while the harms have been empirically demonstrated. Saying, as the OpenAI CEO does, that we are all 'stochastic parrots' like large language models, statistical generators of learned patterns that express nothing deeper, is a form of nihilism. Of course, the elites don't apply that to themselves, just to the rest of us. The structural injustices and supremacist perspectives layered into AI put it firmly on the path of eugenicist solutions to social problems.
Instead of reactionary solutionism, let us ask where the technologies are that people really need. Let us reclaim the idea of socially useful production, of technological developments that start from community needs. The post-Covid 'new normal' has turned out to involve both the normalisation of neural networks and a rise in necropolitics. Transformer models and diffusion models are not creative but carceral - they and other forms of AI imprison our ability to imagine real alternatives. It's not so long ago that we all woke up to the identity of truly essential workers; the people carrying out the precaritised roles of nursing, teaching, caring, delivering and cleaning, the very professions who are being forced to reinvent the idea of the general strike simply to regain the conditions for survival. Instead of being complicit with expensive toys running in carbon emitting data centres, we can focus instead on centring activities of care.
What I find so exciting about McQuillan's focus here is that he has identified the capitalist version of AI as inherently carceral. It seeks not to broaden our horizons but to limit our perspectives. It seeks not freedom but further control. It seeks not progress but repression. And he points out that we cannot deploy this technology as it has been built. In the same way that prisons must be abolished since they cannot be reformed, AI must be destroyed as it exists so that we can imagine a new way of approaching it.
McQuillan uses the term, "AI realism," an extension of "capitalist realism," which is often paraphrased, "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." Indeed, the Silicon Valley ghouls are already pushing hard on the idea that Pandora's box has been opened. They would like us to accept the premise that, once unleashed, there is no rolling back the path they have set us on. They tell us that all we can do is to reform it. And they are lying, which we know because they have never once told the truth. And they are lying because they are, at their cores, nihilists who look at beautiful things and see only dollar signs.
But we cannot begin to do the work necessary to prevent AI-powered fascism until we accept that it is coming. That it is, in many ways, already here. That it is only the same old systems of oppression and exploitation repackaged in techno-babble.
As long as artists continue to mollify ourselves with the delusion that what we do transcends those forces, we are doomed to succumb to them. Only once we accept that there is a threat can we begin to resist.
—M.A.M.