Sure but I’ve read the original post and it you don’t make a Marxist case for it. Here’s what I take as the core of your case for AI:
Open-source AI models, when decoupled from profit motives, democratize creativity in unprecedented ways. They enable a nurse to visualize a protest poster, a factory worker to draft a union newsletter, or a tenant to simulate rent-strike scenarios.
The real anxiety over AI art is about the balance of power. When institutions equate skill with specific tools such as oil paint, Python, DSLR cameras, they privilege those with the time and resources to master them. Generative AI, for all its flaws, democratizes access. A factory worker can now illustrate their memoir and a teenager in Lagos can prototype a comic. Does this mean every output is “art”? No more than every Instagram snapshot is a Cartier-Bresson. But gatekeepers have always weaponized “authenticity” to exclude newcomers. The camera did not kill art. Assembly lines did not kill craftsmanship. And AI will not kill creativity. What it exposes is that much of what we associate with production of art is rooted in specific technical skills.
Part of creativity is what you don’t put on the canvas or write in the final draft. It’s a skill you refine through mistakes, self-reflection, and thinking really hard about the thing you’re making over the course of however many hours. The novella I’m writing now is nothing like its first draft because I’ve had to painstakingly go through it considering everything from the flow of the language to the nuances of the messaging to all the sources of that message. There’s a dialectic of hand and eye to it which has always and will always be centrally important. If you don’t want to judge art’s value by a monetary standard, that’s absolutely fine but whether you’re describing cave art or Star Trek replicator tech the art they value is based on humanistic craftsmanship.
That nurse makes a protest poster based on a prompt. They aren’t happy with its composition or imagery. They feed ten more prompts into the plagiarism machine until one looks right. That’s still a time investment of an hour at most even if they manually edit the 6th finger out of the raised fist. You can’t spend an hour on an idea in any medium and make something worthwhile. That’s your short-term impression of your own work in the same headspace, offloading all of the mental effort of really critiquing what you’re making. The factory worker who drafts their union newsletter with an LLM might be able to do so faster, but even CommunismGPT is going to regurgitate a database of averaged opinions it doesn’t actually understand. Theory is based on observation and AI doesn’t observe. The factory worker who illustrates their memoir is someone who is already capable of creative expression but who can’t afford an art class or nice paint. They won’t learn illustration from using AI for the same reason I haven’t learned physics from cheating with it, and their memoir is cheapened by weird hallucinations of what a machine looks like rather than their impression of it or a photo. The teenager in Lagos could be provided paper or image editing software to do the necessary work of thinking about each element of every frame. None of them are better off for using it.
If any of these use-cases were actually valid, they’d be observable in already communistic spaces like the fediverse. Hexbear doesn’t even give you karma points for posting so the only incentive is creative expression for its own sake and sociocultural roles. Most of us are stressed for time and would benefit from saving it. You should see our organisers, agitators, and creators celebrating deepseek and the other opensource models at least. You should see us using it in our posts and agitating for it in our subcommunities, but there isn’t a post in /c/labour calling for union stewards to download an LLM. There isn’t an AI-generated image being celebrated in reddit’s /r/nursing despite every other post being those same nurses organising while working 12 hour shifts. Our /c/art bans all AI images outright even from the most defensible models because that comic wouldn’t be worth reading and I don’t think you would read it either. Can you actually point to one AI-generated book you’d recommend? That music video would certainly distract my dog but one single creative product of length worth putting on your wall or spending time reading. It can be fiction, non-fiction, an article or a scientific study or political theory or an image of any kind. If the thing that separates theory from utopianism is observation, which of those use cases have you actually observed and would unironically recommend?
https://archive.is/29uTN
This would make for such a pleasant city. My downtown core is purely car-centric and it’s terrible to visit. Everything smells like exhaust, people are honking and yelling at each other, it’s tedious and dangerous to cross the congested streets, and our air quality is terrible to the point of being unsafe for pets and vulnerable groups. Even the plants look like shit because they’re so polluted.