Fifteen: something something AI creeping towards subjugation of the working class something something
This is almost certainly hot and mostly incoherent, poorly organized thoughtvomit.
The phrase "democratization of art" is a smokescreen. Not a like lie exactly. It points us at the wrong orifice while the actual problem frolics out the back: AI companies, and Capitalism wearing its Sunday best, commoditizing art as one more assault on the value of effort. Devalue time. Devalue labor. You end up with a populace that's easier to control
Sam Altman has argued AI opens creative expression to people the art world's "gatekeepers" shut out.
Sam Altman / democratize art discussion — Prindle Institute for Ethics
Adobe's CTO said the same thing, more or less verbatim, back in 2020.
Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis — TechCrunch, 2020
YouTube's CEO called it a "revolution" that would "democratize" the creative process. Different mouth. Same idea.
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan — World Economic Forum
Walter Benjamin wrote almost a century ago that mechanical reproduction strips artwork of its "aura" — that unrepeatable presence tied to the time and labor that made it real. He was talking about the print eating the painting. What's happening now is colder and stranger: origination with no labor in the room to begin with. There's no aura to steal, because there was never a body sitting there burning its one non-renewable resource — time — to make the thing exist in the first place.
Harry Braverman, writing about deskilling in the 1970s, called it: break a skilled task into its component motions, mechanize the components, and the worker's leverage evaporates. Nobody needs the whole craftsman anymore. They need somebody to mind the machine that ate the craftsman. Read that back against "you don't need training to make art now" and tell me that isn't the same sheep-skinned wolf?
Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century
THE PART WHERE IT GETS UNDER THE SKIN
This is an attempt to sever the felt connection between time spent and worth produced. You put hours into it, so the hours weren't nothing. They wrap it in warm enough language, democratize, empower, unlock your creativity, and people don't notice it's gone until they're already in the fall. That's the smokescreen's real job.
It was a choice. Several companies made it, on purpose, in rooms with good lighting, with the word "democratize" workshopped in beforehand until it stopped sounding like what it is.