re: #242 danarchy

AI democratizes things like art and music and makes it available to everyone.

If you can only build an art AI by scraping the work of artists uncompensated, that’s not democratization.

“Democritization” of art is a shoddy concept because everyone is already free to make art, but if we engage with the idea as it’s being thrown out there then what’s being argued is less “art is now democratic” and more “I have a right to purchase a service that generates images from scraped data but be treated in that pursuit as the same as any other person creating images.”

I mean, in a Duchamp’s-urinal way it’s technically true that someone using an AI system is doing art, but that you’re borrowing a giant plagiarism-collage machine to get what you want does beg some question about how much an artist you are if you want to create something but not put in time or effort.

As someone who writes a great deal, uncompensated, I find it interesting to look at LLM outputs being sold as compositions, fiction or nonfiction, because they do possess an uncanny quality of flatness regardless of what task you set them to. All creativity has some element of derivation to it—in writing you’re channeling the writers you find inspiring, but also the language of the people you’re around—but using a giant spreadsheet to hammer out a sentence that is the mathematical mean of pertinent sentences does not create a distinctive voice. In a gnat-fucking technicality way, you’ve authored something using an LLM, but the work that creates distinctiveness, and thus perspective, and thus “art,” is absent.

It’s like arguing that microwaving frozen food democratizes fine cuisine.