Comment on Pika Labs new generative AI video tool unveiled — and it looks like a big deal
archomrade@midwest.social 10 months agoTheft of work value from the working class has existed since kings and queens have married their cousins.
Anger at AI for theft is just plainly misdirected. I count your condemnation of theft sufficiently signaled, though.
LWD@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Okay, so you acknowledge it’s theft, you’re just offended by the fact that people dislike that kind of theft.
It’s mighty convenient for large corporations that are engaging in the theft that you lick their boots.
archomrade@midwest.social 10 months ago
I completely get the confusion, I don’t hold it against you. I never denied that AI models involved theft, i asserted that the problem with AI isn’t about theft.
A luddite in today’s terminology is someone who opposes new technologies, but The Luddites weren’t opposed to the mechanization of their labor per say, they took issue with the commodification of their labor and the private ownership of the machines that aided and sometimes supplanted it. They didn’t go destroying the textile mills because of some principled stance against progress, they were going to war against the capital owners who suppressed them and forced them to compete against the machines that were made by their own hands.
The Luddites (rightly) identified the issue with the ownership of the machines, not the machines themselves. You only have half the picture; yes, they’ve stolen from you (not just your data, but your labor) - but they’ve also withheld from you the value of that product. It’s not the existence of AI that created that relationship, it’s capital.
LWD@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I’m glad you don’t hold your confusion against me. Can you escape it for a moment to say whether you actually condemn theft or not?
You’re also using a false dichotomy, whether you mean to or not. Textile machines can create more textiles, generative AI can’t create more art, because they can’t create any art to begin with. And, of course, in the real world that you live in, art is something most people do when they finish the labor that pays the bills.
You also fail to mention the Luddites engaged with reality too, and didn’t just talk about ideology all day, like the average Twitter communist is wont to do.
archomrade@midwest.social 10 months ago
Again, no worries for any misgivings or misunderstandings.
True, AI can’t produce art (at least, we can agree that there will always be some absent quality from the product of a generative model that makes human art art), but it can produce many other things of value that does supplant a real person’s product. Likewise, there are qualities of art that make it a commodity that can be sold - to pay the bills - that lessen and sometimes corrupts art. Some may even argue that Art can only be something that is done for the sake of itself and for no other purpose; it is good-in-itself. And funnily enough, craftsmen have been saying for literal centuries that machines can’t reproduce that particular quality innate in hand-made crafts.
I do remember mentioning, and possibly even advocating, for the Luddite course of action though. You’re right, we shouldn’t only sit around and talk shit about theft, we should also be doing the thieving ourselves and raiding of the textile mills.
On theft; would I condemn theft if I didn’t recognize private ownership to begin with? You’re twisting yourself in knots; I can’t help but think it’s because you’re trying so hard to ‘getch’ me.