Cross-posted from “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution” by @Db0@dbzer0.com in !dbzer0.com@dbzer0.com
I see tankies keep trying to argue with people about “Actually Existing Socialist” states like USSR and China and try to argue with me or others about how “they were good actually”. It’s bad enough when most of their arguments are whataboutism, but it grinds my gears when I hear then prattle on about all the statistically significant material improvements the life of the people received. It’s like listening to a terminally-liberal prattle on about how “statistically, the life quality actually increased under capitalism”.
Why is this bothering me so much? Because tankies completely suppress the freedom aspects of those states. Sure the improvements in life quality in those nations improved compared to the feudal/agrarian societies they had before, much like liberal capitalism also improved those same metrics.
But the freedom of the populace barely improved improved whatsoever because that freedom is anathema to authoritarian regimes. When anarchists talk about our ideal society, we mean both positive and negative freedom together together. It’s not enough if your health expectancy is increased and infant mortality is reduced, if you have to constantly fear the secret police knocking on your door. It’s not enough to have food on your plate, when the state determines what you can create and where you can work. It’s not enough to get a free car and internet, if your family member got shipped to the concentration camp for criticizing the movement leaders online.
Tankies explicitly avoid this. They are desperate to argue that “authoritarianism is not a thing actually”, hilariously and endlessly promoting the worst socialist essay ever written to justify this. But authoritarianism is very much the crux of the problem here. A society with a hierarchical structure like capitalism or marxism-leninism (i.e. state capitalism) can never be good. It might be better than other states, but it will only get worse and worse as power concentrates to fewer hands and the grip of authority tightens the more control slips through their fingers.
We keep seeing this historically both in liberal and ML states. Clearly material quality of life is not enough to justify the system, or even be stable long-term, when actual human liberty is the sacrifice for it.
The image is generated with AI (and isn’t done very well), but the blog post has nothing to do with that. Its just nice to have a pic to go with your blog post, and using AI is a quick and easy way to make sure it’s both unique and copyright-free
Edit: also, I feel it’s worth pointing out, you’re commenting on a blog post by db0, from an account made on db0’s instance, and db0 is the main developer of AIHorde, an open source genAI project
The words that go with it are fine, the AI image is a waste of energy and water, offensive to actual artists, and AI is just theft of artists work as “training” data.
It looks like it was generated with flux, and was probably generated locally, using less electricity than most modern video games (flux is very energy efficient and fast).
I’m not well equipped to discuss the theft part of it, but I don’t think it’s fair to call it theft (and I’ll say upfront I’m not prepared to defend that opinion lol)
Edit: regarding the ‘actual artists’ part- some people use generative AI to make ‘actual art’ and are themselves artists
As an artist, the training data used for most of the image generators is stolen work. As in, the original artists didn’t give permission for their work to be used that way. Some aren’t stolen, such as adobe’s ai tools, which are trained on imagery that’s licensed for it.
Piracy is a big theme in this instance
Lol at you promoting corporate Adobe and attacking those use local open source genai. You’re a goddamn tool!
Don’t get me wrong I hate adobe. But. They at least got AI right. These aren’t big corporations you’re “stealing” movies from. They’re everyday people like myself who’s art is being used by AI for training against my wishes.
I ain’t stealing shit. Nothing I do takes anything away from you. And you’re a tool because you think what adobe is doing is “right”. Because you have no understanding of capitalist power differentials. As if it wouldn’t be a massively worst world for Artists if the only owner of GenAI was adobe and everyone was paying adobe only to use GenAI.
And who is openAI compensating for their work?
At least adobe is compensating creators. No other big name AI company is doing that. Anyone who uses AI to make “art” is complicit in this theft.
The rest of your argument is putting words in my mouth. Do better. AI is hot garbage and a waste of natural resources.
That’s not what “theft” means
The imagery used for the training data isn’t licensed to be used as such. It’s stolen.
Not what “stealing” means either. Also I will point out this instance is both pro-piracy and pro-genai and we shit on copyrights
We’re democratizing the end of culture with this one
Stealing from big companies like movie studios? Whatever. Stealing from the working class? Not so great. People should 1. Have the right to not have their work used as training data and 2. If they agree to be used as training data, be compensated.
Again, not what “stealing” means. And I don’t recognize anyone’s rights to tell me what I can do with the content they’re sharing with me. Copyrights is a shitty state monopoly, not a natural law.
And so long as we exist under this shit ass system we shouldn’t be stealing from working class artists. It is theft.
It is not theft. No artist lost money because my little article had a GenAI image. Get some goddamn perspective.
Rut roh gaming piracy