Demonbutt

AI Art

2022-12-04

It just feels like more of the same, but new and cutting edge. Another instance of our predilection for technological novelty and all the hopeful future-seeking that comes with it. Meanwhile, it primarily serves our myopic neoliberal paradigm. If it's potentially a vehicle for affirmation and aspiration, it's one that exists on a succor of labor made even more invisible. AI art, Spotify, Amazon Books, streaming services, franchise bloat. These are all just expressions of a rabid hunger for content promoted by those who would profit most. The mere presence of something that calls itself art feels like a body's been snatched by a thing called a product.

It's more and more difficult to untangle class, work, and profit from any creative activity. It takes dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people to make a video game that's buggy on launch. But the game still makes a killing. The self-publishing industry emerged as a necessary rebuttal to the monopolization of publishing, but now it's a get rich quick scheme sold by hacks who gamed the algorithm and decided they should be gatekeepers, too. It goes on in every corner of art from the glaring privilege of those who've made it to the grueling conditions of those who use their skills and talent to make ends barely meet. Find something you love and you'll work everyday for the rest of your life.

Perhaps I've been too cynical for too long and I can't recognize the utopia some folks are describing. And it's not their fault that what's probably great about it isn't lost on those who will make a lot of money. They will wring that for all it's worth. I want to believe in the future in this way, but there hasn't been a breakthrough, yet. I feel like my own future-seeking is exclusive to that rupture and what we need to do to get there. And the impulse to smash the textile mills is just too strong.