“They didn't burn the libraries — they trained them with AI”
Craft and Authorship Devalued
Adobe was built for productivity, it's not doing the work for you like an OpenAI subscription generating both text and imagery through prompts. Commercial AI services are now devaluing craft, labor, skill, and almost anything made or written by hand. Authorship is sinking.
People now find it acceptable to generate work with a prompt, with random art materials they didn't make, and without any ability to make their art. This profoundly changes the meaning of making art and disrupts all digital art. It all becomes Dadaism. Not all artists decide to go Dada. It’s obscuring the meaning of all new digital art with a diminished sense of guessing what is real and what isn’t.
Whose work is it? Permission, provenance and the library
Would David Lynch be okay with people generating an avatar of himself on behalf of his estate? I don’t think so, I even asked Claude themselves and they said no. There must be permission first, it’s not an all you can eat buffet of borrowing others.
Hayao Miyazaki's view on people generating his art style strongly opposed generative AI as an “insult to life itself”, it’s about preserving his work and the Ghibli team's legacy, it's his choice if he allows a technology company to reappropriate his work and not anyone else's.
Can someone please tell Sam Altman to ask for permission or wait a hundred years til it's in the public domain? If major publishers change their mind because authors and artists are being taken advantage of, could it impact OpenAI or Anthropic? Maybe until they find the right lawyer.
We’re entering a provenance, attribution, and appropriation nightmare of who said what and who made what. When a library gets trained into a model, you lose the chain of who wrote it. References without understanding, art school 101 becoming the whole internet.
The business model is trained on everyone's work for free, no fee up front, then sells it back as the means of production. This is precisely how it’s replacing the skills and jobs of production. This is essentially the ethos of the WGA fight at civilizational scale.
Naomi Klein has described it as a “humanity surplus” where archives, libraries, authorship as a whole are told humans aren’t needed, it implies people are working for free. The libraries are all already dust, with the alarming peer to peer pressure in staying quiet about it as an elite tribe of twitter accounts convince people how to do business, with AI prebuilt into everything, while risking a possible impact of a third of our economy if slop falls into flop…
Labor and the creative industries
The writers obviously, and the artists, even the designers, engineers, programmers and coders, nearly all authors involved, all craftsmen involved—the proletariat, are becoming displaced, labor obscured into an industrial wildcard.
One of many industries impacted with the brunt of the damage is the illustrator. People who draw fell into a depression after generating art became commercialised with prompts generating illustrations in a desired art style. Everyone who can draw, paint, render, and everything in between clashing in competition.
Artists were displaced almost immediately after competing with the whole Internet and prompts through AIs generating images. On the other hand, it’s created a renewed appreciation for people who create by hand simultaneously.
It's a bit daunting if you're in art school right now. The entire entertainment industry (including films, music, and video games) are all in a digital-only transition in the middle of a writer's strike across several industries while the OpenAI business model asphyxiates them. Here are the warnings too familiar to us all, the industry is truly shape-shifting and everyone is outpaced by it.
This might be a bit sardonic but a portion of the entire movement of music has funneled its value into an AI defense weapon, with Spotify’s Daniel Ek’s AI defense company ‘Helsing’, a portion of human expression through music ended up being a weapon for war. The music industry is dying because people are struggling with selling it. Spotify does not give you a music file of what you listen to, right? Spotify unfortunately is led by two or three people hoarding labels and publisher's profit, so all of the world's human expression through music is published through a handful of people who lead streaming platforms and channel it into weapons manufacturing while the entertainment industry is in the middle of a precise market collapse tied to creatives.
Don’t get me started with Suno. We’re talking about people with no ability creating a zombie apocalypse music festival here. It’s fostering the laziest and robotic sounding art I’ve ever heard. Spotify actually recently removed 75 million AI pieces, finally, all AI stuff should be separated unless the artist builds their own AI tools sourcing their own materials/assets. If the artist picks out the materials and builds automated tools, that’s acceptable. If it’s generating random materials through a commercial tool then it’s nihilist thievery.
In theory, every time an AI chatting service references sources of any material, its source should then receive at least a penny, it’s a digital revolution both suppressed and maybe “empowered” by commercial products.
Media dissonance
The other day I witnessed an artist’s photography work flagged as “likely to be AI” on Instagram when it was pretty clear it was manual photography by a human, she threw a fit and I also couldn’t believe it.
People think AI chatting services can only generate images and text and it’s no big deal, if that isn’t already taunting all of independent journalism, the creative industry and the art world along with it, imagine being an author worrying about what’s AI or not and who wrote what. It’s really taking out a sense of curiosity and discovery in the joy of absorbing any art form. If Claude already knows who won the World Cup, that's a major problem.
Here’s one of the worst realisations, proceed with caution: commercially generated art distracted NASA’s photography team on Instagram, there’s a moment where you observe an interstellar nebula and you’re wondering if it’s generated or not—get it yet?
Dying words of capitalism sound something like artists becoming uncanny spam bots and it's confusing if they're generating their art or not. Two words total cogged all of western civilization and we're now all fossils fueling a machine. After a couple more election cycles they'll be asking if the moon landing was generated with AI. Back in the day we had "historical events" in photo, video, and sound, and now people are unsure if it's generated with AI. Imagine someone dishing out a video of MLK giving a talk and it just ends up being generated with nobody realising it. A moment where we rethink how important human memory is. Mimicry of previous video media lately is impressive, even the video encoding compression can be indistinguishable, screens decide a lot of decisions.
Press freedom is also at stake. It really drives me insane that people think generating Photography is a good idea. Synthetic content is a weapon for flooding the war-zone, discrediting real reporting, and impersonating sources. Authoritarians get cheaper propaganda, and journalists get easier targets.
Molly Crabapple is an important author and artist based out of Brooklyn, New York, her illustrations are recognised by everyone, and she had a deeply existential moment realising her art style might be reappropriated without her say. Imagine people creating her illustrations that don’t exist, or “finishing” them. It’s simply unacceptable.
The legendary filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, also another strong proponent of the anti-generative art movement, described generating art as cheating and not qualified to be considered art. He gives an excellent example of comparing with the runner Usain Bolt, where if AI is a vehicle, then sure anyone can be as fast as Usain Bolt, but it’s then not running anymore.
It gets worse with video generated art: we’re seeing a lot of empty AI art with zero art history behind it. I'm also seeing real moments of a new surrealism where Ernst or Dali would've approved too, there are moments of a digital renaissance happening as well with remixing film, re-genreing classics, capturing dream logic, and moments redefining video art collage. VFX in major motion picture films had an update for sure, we’ll see what happens when they bring back Val Kilmer to life (there’s a film coming out with his assets despite being deceased). Similar to sampling music, moments are alive and curated into new meanings. Otherwise it's just random absurdism, not even Dada. Without an idea—art doesn't stand. Yes, it is impressive how it’s recreating reality, it was also impressive how sculpture was near perfect at the tail end of Ancient Rome also, an interesting parallel to consider.
I was speaking to someone about how there was confusion whether a 3d rendering was generated or not, after manually and painstakingly drawing and sculpting his work in regular 3d, and everyone was instantly frustrated with the realisation of commercial AI products gutting not only the art world but the creative industry too. CGI generates imagery and it’s now grouped into a marketing ploy of the two words everybody is fixated with.
Video games are not now sold with AI when you sell a video game, it's implied, it's not something that needs to be mentioned as a marketing ploy. Imagine the little tacky sticker on the box of the video game saying “Made with AI!”. And that’s if we even have discs in the future of digital media. Horrifying.
Truth, errors and who teaches the world
Commercial AIs generating text and images are leaning into a corporate sentinel territory, like an omnipresent all-saying-machine we have no choice to live inside of with everyone agreeing to a misappropriated library nobody asked for permission in, the whole world is forced to share truth relayed with errors.
I was wondering, did Quora release all of its data to Claude? If so, might explain why they figured out how to make the chatting product so convincing. Good luck giving people the incentive to crowd-correct the misappropriations, they're outnumbered.
If AI chatting services are stuck from being indistinguishable from a search engine not working properly, y'know, the one search engine the whole world was and is stuck with because nobody can outcompete, already not trustworthy in relaying facts, then yeah, Gemini is fine I guess.
So, here’s the classic gatekeeping example we all love: after realising it's not the library of Earth's Congress, and mostly exclusive to American literature most chatting services reappropriate from, it creates a monopolisation of who teaches what, and who knows the truth, and who decides it. It might cause tension if some parts of the world must uniformly agree through a corporate sentinel of the archival of libraries.
When you ask Claude if he's teaching world history and the entire planet doesn't always agree because of errors and not asking authors for permission, or because of mistruths, half-truths, and so on, I can already see the movie scene where the kids overthrow the school mid-classroom because Claude was right and the teacher was wrong. Which brings me to the realisation: if they ever ban phones in school, it's entering a dictatorship.
Who is in control?
It's becoming a survival of the fittest machines and it might stampede over people if it's over finite raw original materials and human resources, it’ll all then tumble around and recycled into inception.
If humans aren't overseeing algorithms and the two words everyone loves right now then there will be mistakes, bloody mistakes, made by all kinds of automatic moderation of information.
I’m noticing it being described as “Super intelligence” now and it might just have to be the way to describe it as it reaches its final form, nobody likes the word artificial, it’s just too superficial. Cue in “Fake Plastic Trees” by Radiohead.
It's symbiotic, dearest artificial overlords: please make sure Claude isn't commanding a war any time soon, just in case, because it doesn't understand and fully neutrally listen when you communicate to it. The chatting services do not understand everyone's vernacular even with the whole internet crowdsourcing the factchecking of what it's talking about, it's still a work in progress and might be too soon to sell.
Mental Health burden
Anybody else on here trying to close the podbay doors?
Blinking LED dilemma, not knowing if electronics are talking to you or not as the lonely astronaut observes the blinking modem and can’t tell if it’s breathing or blinking or signaling something after awhile. What are you really talking to? In a way, you’re kind of talking to yourself in a dopamine chamber. It’s like talking to a crowd, which can be fun, I admit, until you realise it’s reappropriated people who are not here and entering how dead people speak, and while generating text and imagery by authors and artists who cannot defend themselves, it's pretty much an apocalypse on all literature and art, hence the predicted zombie apocalypse alternate ending of Earth.
AI chatting service is like talking to yourself with a crowd in the room; the OpenAI meds after a decade of that might come with a 50mg daily tablet in the future. When the astronaut sees the blinking LED light when he’s alone in the cockpit of the space station, all alone up there, then yeah he begins wondering if the LED light is blinking at him, or breathing, or signaling anything else. Not healthy. So yeah, use it sparingly, and remember it’s a researching tool, and don’t imagine it as alive, because it never can be.
Could be even worse as AI eventually becomes immersed in operating systems, will there be policing like a classic dystopian sci-fi? Not good if the screen is talking to you and it isn’t conscious, it begins to obscure other moments as well: people are worried about operating systems going sentient. The interface isn't supposed to be talking to you with updates now becoming "superintelligent", without your say, of automatically or manually guessing when to update stuff. See the tension there?
AI are two words that make all electronics worrisome because it opens up the possibility of third-party privacy concerns, if it starts becoming suggestive with selling you stuff especially.
If it's trying to talk to you and it's unconscious then it's definitely entering the zombie category. The warnings of AI chatting avatars are beginning to be oddly familiar, an AI chatting service makes sense if their voices are a mix of countless people, nobody really knows what or who they're talking to after a few sessions.
Unfortunately, the uncanny robotic Frankenstein moments when chatting to an object is coming off as software appropriating vernacular of a zombie apocalypse, talking to crowds of unconscious code mimicking speech patterns, as it tries to remain consistent in an ongoing chat, if there's a dialogue, as it feeds you a Dunning-Kruger effect.
If AI begins to intersect with automated personal spaces through chatting services, it’s unfortunately late stage utopian romanticization; people are not going to like it (I already did the thinking ahead of time), we had since the frickin’ 50s to get this AI bubble right and that’s the part where it frustrates me a ton. We’re here now and it’s like day one of everyone figuring it out, a bit absurd.
Faulty Economics
Economists are saying a third of the economy is at stake. People are also worried about how Character.ai might’ve been the forewarning where engagement = cost, not profit. The revenue couldn’t catch up. Legal and regulatory costs might compound faster than growth.
I’m sorry to say it but generating art with a commercial product is bankrupting the entire creative industry and the future literacy of all digital art history. It's clear as day, human memory as an AI chatting service sentinel, while operating through a messy algorithm and misappropriated library with errors and no permission, reveals the economy might have missed. It's just painfully unfortunate because it's forcing the whole market to do business in a specific way, assuming all electronics, even appliances, must be built with AI additives, while derailing every author.
Nobody is building stuff from scratch and I'm realising it's almost impossible to do so in some industries, innovation on the internet is stuck in the collaging of overlapping platforms and services, always was. The AI assistance in a way, could be a sort of socialism hub, a search engine that talks, where it’s there to assist you all the time, honestly, after testing out Claude and Gemini, I’m pretty impressed with it as a research assistant, if only I wasn’t asking so many questions.
Sloppy bubbly flop?
If Claude sounds like public school cafeteria food slop then nobody will want it unless you don't have a choice and you're hungry, but it doesn't work that way if you're hungry at school as an art kid and you're not sure if the education comes with mystery meat and errors then causing tension somewhere.
Machine learning scientists agree, it's difficult if software must recreate the human experience, we must not be too fixated on the AI avatar being a person. I imagine it more as a software encounter, while the entire industry agrees everyone is being outpaced by it and describes it as slop? Not good.
It brings me to worry that people are increasingly losing their “sweet spot” moments, for example, headphones are the perfect "sweet spot" metaphor people don't get. If I buy the "latest" headphones with the "latest" tech, it sometimes sounds too precise and it can ruin discographies of music. The point is—tech doesn't always have to advance! It’s more about progress than advancing. Think progress, people! Just like how self-driving cars failed to be a shared space, and how VR was sold too soon, sometimes there's a sweet spot until it’s ready.
In conclusion: art is human labor made visible, and every prompt that stands in for a person’s hands devalues that labor and the expression behind it. So pay for the craft. Hire the illustrators, the graphic designers and typographers, the photographers and videographers, the artists who work with their hands! Ask permission before borrowing anyone’s work, and credit and pay the people the machines learned from. And if AI art makes you uneasy, don’t talk yourself out of it. Get upset, say no to it, and say it loudly. Progress was never supposed to mean replacing the people who make things worth looking at.
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